Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(36)
Author: Nalini Singh

Venom pushed himself upright, though he continued to favor one leg. “You sure you want to invest the time? Sorrow here might have a very short life span.”

Dumping the broken shards she’d collected into the trash, Sorrow gave Venom a look that was eerie in its own way, a thin line of green glowing around the dark brown of her irises. “Someday,” she said in a voice as serene as a high mountain lake, “I’m going to break your neck. Then I’m going to saw it off with a hacksaw so I can take my time.”

Venom’s grin creased his cheeks. “I knew you had it in you, kitty.”

Dmitri had dealt with the Hernandez situation and was in his office by the time Honor drove the Ferrari into the Tower garage. Watching her enter the room, all feminine power and intriguing strength, he couldn’t imagine the terror-crippled woman he’d first met. Yet that terror lived inside of her—he’d tasted the ugliness of it in the air as he stroked his thumb over her skin that morning. “Sorrow?”

“Doing better than I expected.” An incisive look. “Venom is highly intelligent.”

“He’s one of the Seven for a reason.” Spreading a number of colored printouts on his desk, he motioned her over. “I just received an e-mail from the man I sent to investigate Tommy’s cabin.” The images were self-explanatory.

Honor’s body brushed against his own as she came to stand beside him. He wondered if she would dare remain so close if she knew how much control it was taking for him not to bend his head and kiss the delicate skin of her nape. She’d taste of salt and wildflowers, intermingled with an earthy femininity that sang a siren song to the man beneath the civilized surface.

“His attacker,” she said, her attention on the photo of Tommy’s head nailed up like a hunting trophy on his front door, “really wanted to shut him up.”

“Literally.” Satisfying himself with the thought that he would have her, he moved his gaze off the vulnerable skin so close and tapped the image. “They cut out his tongue.”

Her body pressed a fraction into him as she leaned over to pick up another photograph. “The place is a bloodbath.”

Weaving a curl of sin, rich as brandy and just as heady, around her was as natural to him as breathing. “I’ve got a team examining it.”

“Dmitri.” Husky censure, but no anger. “I’ll get ready to head—”

“You’re exhausted.” He took in the black circles under her eyes, the pallor, felt the ice of ruthless anger. “If you came up against one of them today you’d end up their blood pet all over again.”

Streaks of color high on her cheekbones. “You might order your people around, but don’t even try it with me.”

Some men liked women who knew how to submit; others, women who fought back. Dmitri didn’t have a preference either way. To do so would be to care for a female beyond a fleeting sexual connection. Yet when it came to Honor, he wanted to strip her bare in more ways than one, unravel the mystery of who she was to him. “A single phone call,” he murmured, gaze lingering on the full curves of her mouth in conscious provocation, “and Sara will deem you unfit for duty.”

That mouth flattened. “You think that’ll stop me?”

“No. But the fact that you have no idea of the location of Tommy’s cabin will.” His lips curved when he caught the calculation in her. Such an expressive face, had Honor, one that would never be able to hide anything from a man who knew how to read her. “Don’t bother to ask Vivek to dig it out for you unless you want him to become a permanent guest of the Tower.”

“Threats now, Dmitri?” It was somehow an intimate question, his name pronounced with an accent so perfect, it was a caress.

“You always knew I wasn’t a nice man,” he said, wanting to hear that voice in bed, in the warm hush of a pleasure-drenched night. “Go home. Sleep. Be a good girl”—he leaned close enough that their breath mingled, close enough that kissing her would take only the dip of his head—“and I’ll let you come on the chopper tomorrow morning.”

“If what you told me about Isis wasn’t bullshit,” Honor said, her voice vibrating with the force of her emotions, “then you know exactly how I feel right now. You know.”

Dmitri’s response was pitiless. “I also know that if the bastards slip through your grasp because you’re too weak, the regret will make you bleed worse than any wound.”

Folding her arms, Honor stalked to the window. “Could you have slept?” It wasn’t about reason, about anything so sane.

“I didn’t,” he said, walking to stand behind her, dangerous, muscled, immovable. “But I wasn’t mortal.” No emotion in his voice.

Isis, she thought, had done far worse to Dmitri than a forced Making and bedding. “I came to tell you,” she said, feeling a deep, inexorable anger that had nothing to do with their fight and everything to do with a long-dead angel, “that I figured out the tattoo on the way back from Sorrow’s home.”

Turning, she looked into that sensual face that had haunted her since the first time she’d seen it and knew there was no way to protect him from this. Why she felt a desperate need to try, until it was a tearing agony within her, she didn’t know. “It says, ‘To remember Isis. A gift of grace. To avenge Isis. A rage of blood.’ Someone’s out to take vengeance for the death of a monster.”

Honor didn’t go up to her own apartment when she arrived at her building. Her emotions were a kaleidoscope of shattered pieces—anger, pain, aggravation, that strange, piercing desolation . . . and a need that seemed to be growing ever stronger. Realizing Ashwini might still be in the city, she knocked on the other hunter’s door and found herself invited in for ice cream and a movie.

“Hepburn,” Ashwini said, digging into the quart of mint chocolate chip she’d threatened to defend to the death with her spoon if Honor so much as looked in its direction. “Classic.”

Frustration churned within her at being forced to wait to continue the hunt, but though it galled, Dmitri was right. Her bones were tired, her mind fuzzy after days of nightmare-ridden sleep. So she dug around in Ash’s fridge for the butter pecan that was her personal favorite, and, boots abandoned by the door, sprawled on the ridiculously comfortable armchair her friend had had for as long as Honor had known her. “We’ve seen this one before.”