“We did interrupt her during a feed,” Dmitri drawled as they walked up the steps.
Jiana blanched at their approach, but she wasn’t staring at Dmitri . . . and the knowledge in her eyes was damning. “I didn’t know.” A whisper, her hand clenching on the doorjamb. “When I accepted the invitation, I didn’t know. And when I saw you there, I didn’t hurt you. Please, you have to remember.”
Honor put a hand on Dmitri’s forearm, stilling his forward motion. “That scent.” Rich and sweet and speaking of wealth. “Yes, I remember.”
“I’m sorry. Here, would you like some water?”
Drinking because her captor, the one who controlled the others, hadn’t bothered to give her any water or food that day, she took in as much as she could. “Thank you.”
“No, it’s nothing.” Muted sobs. “I can’t help you. Please don’t ask me to.”
Honor heard the panicked tremor of fear in that voice, knew there would be no deliverance at those slender hands. “Who are you afraid of?”
“Who are you afraid of?” she asked again, meeting eyes dark as onyx.
Jiana seemed to collapse in on herself. Hugging her arms around her trembling body, she stepped back in silent invitation. Inside, the house was as elegant as the grounds were harmonious, the décor relatively modern—light dominated, the walls painted a lush cream.
A skillful portrait of Jiana hung on one wall. It was a nude, beautifully done in its languid eroticism and framed with a simplicity that drew the eye to the art, not the surroundings. The décor flowed flawlessly from the hallway to the room into which Jiana led them, bright splashes of color provided by the furniture.
Collapsing on one of those jewel-toned sofas, Jiana braced her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. “I haven’t slept since the day I left you there.”
Honor experienced the same strange mix of anger and pity she’d felt in that basement. “I was the one who was tied up, but you were weaker.” Even now, it seemed impossible. Then, it had made her laugh in near-hysterical amusement.
Dmitri leaned against the armchair on which Honor took a seat, a tiger on no leash but his own. He said nothing, but from the expression on Jiana’s face, the female vampire knew exactly what she faced.
“Always so weak when it comes to him,” she whispered, tears rolling down the sublime perfection of her features. Her despair made her appear even more vulnerably feminine.
The hairs rose on the back of Honor’s neck. Was she being expertly played? Or was Jiana’s startling attractiveness nothing but a distraction to the grief that seemed to be tearing her apart?
“Even when I saw what he’d done,” the woman continued, “I couldn’t betray him.”
“Who?” Honor asked. “You can’t keep his secret any longer, Jiana. He’s planning to do it again.”
A sob rocked through the vampire’s thin frame. “I know.” Wiping her tears, she reached into the drawer of a little end table to pull out the by-now-familiar textured envelope. “He sent me this.”
Honor knew what she’d find, but she took it and slid out the enclosed card anyway.
Perhaps this one will be more to your liking. I haven’t told the others, but it is to be a pair, a man and a woman. You will enjoy that, will you not, Mother?
26
Honor’s voice came out a whisper. “Mother?” Vampires were fertile until about two hundred years of age, and the children they sired or bore to that point, mortal. But Jiana was at least four hundred.
It was Dmitri who solved the question of how a child of Jiana’s could have survived to perpetrate such atrocities. “Jiana was a young vampire, still under Contract, when she gave birth to Amos. Her son was Made on his own merits. He’s highly intelligent, was meant for the Tower.”
Her blood ran ice-cold, even as her earlier suspicion that Jiana was a gifted actress died a quick death—a mother’s love was nothing rational. “Please tell me he’s not there.”
Dmitri touched her hair, the caress unexpectedly tender. “No.”
“Was he always so—” She swallowed the term she wanted to use at the hollow blankness of Jiana’s eyes.
“Amos was . . . changed in ways he shouldn’t have been when he was Made.”
Jiana gave a cracked laugh. “He went insane, Dmitri. Like some do, the ones we never talk about.” Pushing back thick black hair streaked with fine threads of brown and red, the motion jerky, she locked gazes with Honor, her own holding a sudden, violent anger. “Did you know that, hunter? A small minority of the Made go mad during the transformation.”
Like every hunter, Honor had heard the rumors, but this was the first time it had been confirmed. “If that’s true, I’d have assumed the angels would have eliminated the problem.” The angelic race didn’t hold power because they played nice.
Jiana’s anger faded as fast as it had awakened, a poignant pain carving deep grooves around those lush lips. “Amos’s madness was not a bold thing. It was a quiet, creeping taint. He was a hundred years old before he began to show the first signs, two hundred before I could no longer deny them.” She wiped her cheeks for the second time, seemingly unaware that her robe was gaping open at the top to expose the inner curves of her breasts, high and taut. “By the time he reached three hundred, I knew nothing could be done. I dedicated myself to curbing his excesses so they wouldn’t lead to execution.”
To Honor’s surprise, Dmitri walked across to hunker down in front of Jiana, taking the woman’s long, fine-boned hands in his. “He is your son. You protected him. But he knows what he’s doing is wrong and he’s choosing to continue to do it.”
A true psychopath, Honor thought, remembering how Amos had crooned to her after punching her in the stomach.
“You shouldn’t have made me angry.” A hand stroking down her back in a mockery of care. “I didn’t bring you here to hurt you.” His lips along her jaw, over her throat. “So be an obedient pet and do as you’re told.”
She’d bitten his ear instead, hard enough to almost tear off a chunk. He’d punched her so violently for that, she’d blacked out . . . and woken to find herself bleeding.
“It’s the madness.” Jiana’s tremulous voice cut through the horrific memory, her tone a plea. “That’s what drives him.”
Honor wasn’t so sure. Amos had struck her as coldly intelligent, a man who—as Dmitri had said—had chosen to revel in his sadistic urges rather than attempting to fight them. Not only that, but he’d consciously nurtured the sickness in others.
“He was spoken to when his leanings became clear”—Dmitri’s voice was gentler than Honor had ever heard it— “given both warning and an offer of assistance. He chose to walk away.”
Jiana’s lower lip trembled, and then she was falling into Dmitri’s arms, her cries so primal her entire frame shook as if her bones would fall to pieces. Honor’s own heart ached, her eyes burning in maternal sympathy.
She was a mother, she understood what it was to need to do everything in her power to protect her child.
Honor blinked, physically shaking that eerily familiar voice out of her head. Familiar, but not her own—she had never borne a child, never nurtured a life within her womb. Yet her emotional response to Jiana’s pain was so deep that she couldn’t not be torn by it, even knowing that the depth of her understanding was an impossible thing.