Grinning, Illium perched on the wooden table, one of his wings a bare inch from Honor. “I found this.” He passed over a textured cream-colored envelope. “It was on the nightstand, put there by the maid. Came tonight.”
Honor reached up to grab the envelope before Dmitri could, running her finger under the flap to unseal it. Inside was a single sheet of heavy paper with a very simple message.
The second hunt begins soon. I hope you will find this prey as delicious as the first—the Guild has the most appetizing personnel.
Honor put the letter on the table. Seeing its contents, Illium and Dmitri exchanged words, but their voices were drowned out by the crashing thunder inside her head. “No one else,” she whispered and it was a vow. “The bastards get no one else.”
Dmitri’s response was a simple “They won’t.” His hand curved around her nape . . . and she didn’t jerk away.
Ten minutes later, just after he’d finished speaking to one of his men in the vicinity of the Catskills, Dmitri got a call from Sorrow. “I think I did something, Dmitri.”
Long-dormant instincts struggled to wake at the fear-thinned sound of her voice. He crushed them—he couldn’t afford to think of the young woman the way he’d thought of Misha and Caterina. “Where are you?”
“The park near my house, by the big birdbath.” Shaken words, a spirit close to broken. “I’m sorry I sneaked out. I just wanted to go for a walk, that’s all.”
“Stay where you are,” he said, those old, buried instincts attempting to surface once again, harsh and ragged from centuries of disuse. “Illium’s going to fly to you—he won’t land,” he added, because he could feel her panic through the phone lines. And whatever else he might be, he wasn’t bastard enough to terrorize her in such a way. “I’ll be right behind him.”
Illium rose into the air as soon as Dmitri gave him the details. Dmitri then called Sorrow’s watch detail to tell them where to locate her. “Don’t approach.”
“Shae,” Honor said when he hung up. “She’s scared.”
He saw compassion in those midnight-forest eyes, was rocked by her ability to feel the tender emotion. But he wasn’t like her—everything good in him had burned as his son’s tiny body burned in the ruins of the cottage he’d built for his bride. So fast Misha had disappeared, so impossibly fast. The crackle of the flames, the whistle of the wind, none of it had drowned out the echo of the last words his son had ever spoken to him.
“Don’t let go, Papa.”
“Good,” he said, shoving the memories back in the steel box that could no longer contain them, “fear will keep her from being stupid.” Striding through to the living area where Shae hovered, he grabbed her chin. “Say a word about what you learned here tonight, and you’ll be joining Evert as Andreas’s guest.”
The vampire went sheet white. “I w-won’t. N-never.”
“Dmitri.”
He released Shae because she’d gotten the point, and headed out the door just as the retrieval team drove up, a furious Honor by his side. “There was no need to terrify her.” The scent of wildflowers hit him hard as he got into the driver’s seat of the Ferrari, scraping against the raw wound that was the memory of Misha’s funeral pyre.
“She’s a victim.” Honor slammed her own door shut.
Feeling vicious, he didn’t bother to sugarcoat his opinion as he guided the car away from the curb. “She’s weak, a parasite. A year, maybe not even that, and she’ll have found another Evert to bleed.”
“You’re talking about a woman with all the hallmarks of abuse,” Honor argued, stubborn in her belief, so like another woman who had once fought with him, wild passion in her voice. “It’ll take her time to break the cycle.”
He heard what she didn’t say—that it had taken her months to crawl up out of that dark pit into which she’d been thrown. “Shae,” he said, punching the car into higher gear, “has had the span of a mortal life to find her spine. She hasn’t, and she never will.”
Honor sucked in a breath. “That’s brutal.”
“It comes with the territory.” He’d stood over a dead schoolgirl’s body not long ago, tugged the sheet over her small, innocent face. “Vampires who don’t fear consequences create carnage.”
“I know—I wasn’t born yesterday.” Reaching back, she tightened her ponytail.
He wanted to fist his hand in that luxuriant ebony hair and kiss the temper right out of her. The only other woman he’d ever been tempted to do that with had bitten him hard on the lip and told him he deserved it. Later, after her anger had cooled, she’d turned to him in bed and kissed him, hesitant and sweet, his new wife who was too shy to make the first move.
A caress of wildflowers, the past and the present colliding as they were doing all too often since Honor walked into his life. But these memories . . . they were some of the good ones. “Tell me,” he said, because he heard a story in her voice, and he had the driving need to know everything he could about Honor St. Nicholas.
A long, cool silence.
Unexpectedly, he found his lips curving. “Illium did warn you I’m no gentleman.”
A feminine snort, but she began to speak. “One of my first hunts was an older vampire. He wasn’t under Contract, so it wasn’t about that.”
Intrigued because an infraction by a vampire who had served out his Contract was considered an internal matter, Dmitri said, “What did he do?”
“Stole something from his angel—an ancient artifact.” She tucked an escaped strand of hair behind her ear, the act so familiar that Dmitri felt as if he’d watched her do it a thousand times. “The angel had no one close to the small village where he knew the vamp was hiding, but I wasn’t very far away, so the Guild asked me to keep an eye on him until the angel’s people got there.”
Dmitri said nothing when she went silent, almost able to touch the heavy black that painted the tones of her voice, in stark contrast to the vibrant blues and white-gold of morning, the touch of rain having passed out into the Atlantic.
“One of his friends,” she said, “had called ahead to warn him that he was being hunted. He took out his rage on the villagers. The ground was sticky with blood when I arrived, the air so full of iron I could barely breathe. He’d butchered everyone—men, women, children, babies.” A shake of her head. “That was the first time I understood that vampires were no longer human, even if they’d started out that way.”
Dmitri remembered the case. It hadn’t been in Raphael’s territory but in Elijah’s, the archangel who ruled South America. “That vampire was found shot through the heart multiple times and staked to the ground with knives.” He’d been a power, the second in one of the courts that reported to Elijah.
“I didn’t have a control chip,” Honor said, referring to the weapon that immobilized vampires, “and he was on his way to another village when I tracked him down. Only way to stop him was to shred his heart and then, while he was down, pound so many knives into him that he couldn’t pull them all out before help arrived.” She rubbed her face. “I went through five clips—he kept reviving before I’d gotten enough knives into him, and then, afterward, when I thought he’d pull the blades out.”