Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(68)
Author: Nalini Singh

It broke her a little.

Sliding down to her knees, she wrapped her arms tight around his neck and buried her face against the heated warmth of his skin. His own arms came around her an instant later. Fear, that insidious intruder, that silent shadow, she waited for it . . . but it didn’t come, as if the raw brutality of their fight had purged it out of her system, leaving her bruised and battered but whole.

“Never again,” Dmitri whispered into her hair, his voice naked, his shields stripped to nothing. “I swear to you.”

Cupping his neck at the nape, she caressed him with tender strokes, and it was an act of gentling for both of them. For this harsh, dangerous man who was her own, and for the ragged, lonely girl within her. “Tell me why.” She needed to understand, to see into the shadows of his heart.

One of his hands fisted in her hair. “It’s a memorial,” he said, his voice so rough, it was difficult to understand. “No one other than Raphael knows of its existence.”

Her heart thudded, a huge wave of knowing pushing at her mind, but it slithered out of her grasp to fade away like so much mist when she tried to reach for it, to hold it. Letting it go for the moment, she thought of the wildflowers, so many colors, so many shades, all of them bobbing their heads in welcome as she parked her vehicle far off in the distance to avoid crushing them. She’d walked, slow but certain, through the riot of color, drawn to the invisible ruin—as if her body were a compass and the ruin true north.

The melancholy of the place had weighed down her limbs, but she’d been certain she heard the echo of laughter, too . . . of a child’s delight. “It’s a place with memory,” she whispered. “There isn’t only sadness, Dmitri. You must remember.” The words weren’t her own, and yet they were. “You must.”

“I remember everything.” A laugh created of jagged metal and broken glass. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t. But those memories, they’re set in stone, never to be forgotten.”

Honor thought of what it must be like to carry such sorrow through the ages, to mourn for nearly a thousand years, and felt an ache so vast it had no end. “She wouldn’t have wanted this for you,” she said, so certain that she didn’t stop to question it. “You know that.”

Honor was right, Dmitri thought. Ingrede would have been horrified to see who—what—he had become, how he’d let the loss of her and the children twist him. But he also knew another thing. “Some things, no man can resist. Some losses, no husband”—no father—“can ever forget.”

“Dmitri—”

“I don’t know what I can give you, Honor,” he said because she deserved honesty, “but I know I’ve felt nothing like this since the moment she died.”

Honor cupped his face. “It’s all right.” The gentlest of kisses.

He didn’t know how she’d become the one to offer comfort when he’d caused the harm, but his soul, cold for so long, basked in the warmth of her.

“I once fed Elena,” he told her a long time later, as her lips closed over the forkful of rice he’d lifted to her mouth, as she allowed him to take care of her in a way he hadn’t earlier.

Curiosity turned the deep green of her gaze to sparkling gemstones. “Were there knives involved?”

“No, but she was tied up at the time.” It seemed an eon ago that he’d taunted Elena while she remained restrained for her own safety. “She’d shot Raphael.” The others in the Seven had been ready for blood, Dmitri bound by a vow to keep her safe.

Honor leaned forward, brows lowering. “I heard rumors . . . she really did?”

So he told her the story, and managed to get most of the food into her at the same time, wondering if she’d noticed the fruit and honey he’d added to the table.

“I do have hands, husband.”

Lifting a slice of fruit up to those beautiful lips as she sat on his lap, one arm around his neck. “You can use those hands to thank me for taking such good care of you.”

Small white teeth biting into the fruit, slender throat swallowing the juicy flesh. “Dmitri?”

“Yes?” He ran the fruit down that throat, licked up the juice.

She shivered. “I hope I’m sitting in your lap when I’m a toothless crone and you a wrinkled old man.”

Putting down her wineglass, Honor rose to slide into his lap and memory and reality collided in a kaleidoscope that made his head spin. Her lips touching his only escalated the fracture of time, the taste of her hot and sweet and painfully familiar even as it was not. Stroking his hand up to the back of her neck, he forced himself to hold her with conscious gentleness as she opened her mouth over his and explored him with slow, sinful decadence.

The tenderness of the moment destroyed him, singing to parts of him he’d thought long dead. The scent of her, wildflowers in bloom, the feel of her under his hands, the way she laughed, it all fit him like a key into a lock. Ingrede had been so very different on the surface—a woman who loved home and hearth, who wouldn’t know how to use a blade except in the kitchen, but she’d had the heart of a lion, his wife.

So did Honor.

“Yes,” he said to her when she broke the kiss on a soft suck of sound.

Honor angled her head in a silent question.

Locking his eyes with those the shade of mist-laden forests, he very deliberately ran his hand down to close it over her breast. “Now, Honor.”

Her heartbeat thudded against his hand, her voice raspy with the storm that had just passed . . . and with a passion that flushed her full lips until he wanted to use his teeth on her. “The windows,” she whispered.

This high up, there was no chance of being overlooked . . . except, of course, by immortals with wings. “Close the blinds.” The quiet command slipped out.

Honor’s lips tugged upward at the corners. “As you wish.”

Knowing he was being teased and quite content with the state of affairs, he watched her rise and walk to shut the blinds, enclosing them in the soft intimacy created by the quiet shield of rain beyond the glass. “What do you need?” he asked when she turned back to face him.

It was the first time in centuries upon centuries that he’d put a lover’s needs above his own. Oh, he’d never left a bedmate unsatisfied, even if the pleasure he’d been inclined to give had been a razor-edged thing almost brutal in its intensity, but care . . . no, he hadn’t taken care of a lover since the day he left his wife with a promise to return.