Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(43)
Author: Nalini Singh

“There was one man,” Honor began, staring out over the water but seeing nothing of the spring green wood shot with golden light. “The one in charge.” Blindfolded, the sole thing she’d been able to sense of him had been the pine of his aftershave . . . and the ugliness of his presence. “He taunted me with the possibility that I might be able to convince him to let me go.”

Instead of shutting up, she’d made the decision to keep talking, because her voice had been the only weapon she’d had. “As he walked out the first day, he slapped me so hard my ears rang.” She’d been stunned by the unexpected blow, the inside of her cheek bleeding into her mouth. “I didn’t see him for what might’ve been an entire day.” She’d spent it na**d and bound on the concrete floor, tethered to a metal ring set into the concrete.

Furious in her determination, she’d spent the entire day attempting to free just one of her hands, had even made the conscious choice to try to break her wrist. But the restraints had been too tight, too well constructed.

“The next time, he apologized, loosened the tension in the chains after he hung me up from my arms once again; and he brought me something to drink.” She’d gulped it with focused greed, aware she’d need every advantage if she was going to survive this. “He wanted to condition me to the point where I would begin to be grateful to him for allowing me to live.” But Honor had gone through the compulsory and rigorous psychological warfare course at the Academy, been prepared for the eventuality in which she might find herself a hostage.

Even that might not have been enough, given the duration of her captivity, but she’d also grown up across thirty different foster homes. Some had been good; most livable; others horrors. But the experience had taught her one thing—always, always look beneath the surface for a person’s true face. “I don’t know how many days he took that tack. I lost my sense of time fairly quickly.”

Since her prison could only be reached by an internal staircase, she hadn’t even been able to count on a burst of light when the door opened, to orient herself. “I tried to play along, but he figured out I was manipulating him.” She forced herself to tell Dmitri the rest. It was the first time she’d spoken of the ordeal to anyone, and that it was Dmitri . . . but maybe it was always going to be him.

“He fed from me, from my throat. His hand . . . he touched me.” In a foul travesty of a lover’s caresses, the gentleness of his touch making it no less a violation. “Afterward, he whispered to me that he knew he’d been my first.” That, too, was true. She’d always had a revulsion against allowing anyone to feed from her. It hadn’t been a mere dislike, but a deep, nauseating abhorrence of the act, inexplicable in its intensity. “I think that’s why he chose me.”

“Planning,” Dmitri said, his voice glacial, “and the patience to carry it through. Put that together with his knowledge of the appetites of Valeria, Tommy, and the others, and it means we’re looking for a strong vampire of at least three hundred. Anyone younger would find it difficult to gain their trust.”

“Yes.” His pragmatic manner made it easier, made her feel a hunter, not a victim. “I got that impression from his speech—it was modern for the most part, but he’d occasionally use old-fashioned words or phrasing.”

“How did he dress?”

Honor’s gut clenched as her mind brought back the sensation of her attacker pressing against her, his aroused body making what little food she’d had rise into her throat. “Double-breasted suits.” She could still feel the buttons cutting into her skin.

“That would seem to eliminate several of the old ones from the equation”—no hint of emotion—“but I won’t disregard them just yet.”

“Yes, he’s clever, could’ve altered his normal style.” Seeing the banded tail of a Cooper’s hawk riding a thermal wind overhead, she followed its progress over the trees. “The house where they found me, it was in the middle of an abandoned housing project about an hour out of Stamford.”

“I read the file.”

She shifted to face him . . . and almost stumbled backward at the untrammeled rage in those dark eyes burning with black flame. “Dmitri.”

He didn’t respond, his hair lifting in the breeze that whipped through the trees, exposing the brutal lines of a face of such sensual beauty, she understood how an angel had hungered to possess him. But then, that angel had hurt him—the idea of it made an incandescent rage form in Honor’s soul, so deep it was as if it had been a part of her since the moment of her birth.

“I need to return to Manhattan,” Dmitri said at last, turning to head back in the direction of the clearing where the chopper waited. He looked beyond remote at that moment, a man who followed no rules but his own. But he waited for her at the edge of the wood, shortened his stride to match her own. She didn’t make the mistake of thinking that meant she had any kind of a claim on him. Whatever it was that drew them to one another, it was a fragile, almost brittle, construct.

Dmitri was anything but that; a man who had been formed in rivers of blood.

Yet once he’d lived in a small village, made his living from the land. A simple life, but one for which he had turned down the offers of an angel renowned for her beauty. Most men would have accepted such an invitation, if only for the novelty of it. Perhaps he’d been too proud to be an angel’s fleeting plaything . . . or perhaps his heart had already belonged to another.

A shimmer over her skin, a sense of indisputable rightness.

However, she swallowed the question on the tip of her tongue—about the woman whose memory had brought an intimate cadence to his voice the one and only time he’d mentioned her. Not just because this wasn’t the right time or place to ask, but because whatever the answer, it could be nothing good. Not when Dmitri walked alone. “Any word on the tattoo?” she asked instead.

“The three master tattooists we consulted were of the opinion that, regardless of the surface intricacy, it was an amateur job.”

“Damn.” It would make the doer so much more difficult to identify. “And those who might be loyal to Isis?”

“Her name appears dead, forgotten.” Turning to face her, he stopped in the shade of a tree with almost dainty branches hung with shivering leaves, the area around them relatively clear. “Whoever it is that seeks to resurrect her, he’s kept his intentions secret.”