And work she did, until the city began to pulse with a quieter beat, the sky that impenetrable opaque shade between midnight and dawn. She shouldn’t have given in to sleep but she was tired, her eyes gritty from the parade of sleepless nights, and oblivion hit before she knew it.
It was the sound of a woman’s endless, ragged screams that jerked her awake. Her body was curled up into a tight ball on the sofa, wracked by dry sobs, the lingering echo of the woman’s torment ripping holes in her soul. Unable to bear it, she stumbled to the bathroom and threw ice-cold water on a face ravaged by an anguish so deep, she’d never felt its like. How could that be? She’d been tortured and broken . . . but this desolation, it came from another place, so very, very deep that it had no name.
Swallowing the burn in her throat before the sadness could recapture her in its aching grip, she stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. It was barely five a.m. but the three hours of sleep she’d gotten tonight were better than the hour the previous night. Washing off the sweat, she pressed her head against the tile and simply let the water roll over and off her.
She’d always loved water. Part of the reason she’d ended up in Manhattan was because it was surrounded by water. It had been a considered decision to apply to the Academy. She’d wanted to study ancient languages and knew that the Guild would cover her fees if she signed a contract to remain active on the roster for at least four years after graduation.
The four-year mark had come and gone, but she’d never even considered leaving. Not only had the other hunters become her family, but her expertise in ancient cultures and languages was a skill in constant demand, given the fact that theirs was a world ruled by immortals. The thought circled her mind back to the Tower and to the vampire who had always been her darkest, most secret weakness.
Switching off the shower, she stepped out to dry herself off, forcing her brain to focus on the task that had left her with a splitting headache the previous night. Whatever it was that had been tattooed on the vampire’s face—and on the back of his right shoulder, according to the photos she’d received from the pathologist—was so idiosyncratic as to defy logical explanation. And yet she knew there had to be one. Because regardless of how the head had come into Dmitri’s hands, the body had been an unmistakable message.
Dressing in jeans and a plain white tee, she headed out into the kitchen area, which flowed off the lounge, to prepare some tea. The view from the entire front section of the apartment was the same—the Tower. Brilliant with light against the dark early morning skies, it drew the eye like a lodestar.
Walking to the glass wall, tea in hand, she watched a solitary angel come in to land. He was only a silhouette from this far out, but even then, his grace was extraordinary. Not one of the “normal” angels, she thought. This was someone akin to the black-winged angel Dmitri had spoken with on the balcony outside his office.
The knock on her door was so unexpected that she didn’t startle, just stared. When it came again, she put down the tea, pulled her gun, and walked on silent feet to the peephole. The vampire on the other side was a sleek predator she should’ve shot at first glance. Instead, she opened the door. “Dmitri.”
Dressed in black jeans, a T-shirt of the same color, and a butter-soft leather coat that reached his ankles, he looked like the most sinful fantasy she’d ever had, the kind that left a woman damp and slick and ready. Drawing in a deep, shuddering breath, she caught the tendrils of sumptuous pleasure and blade-sharp sex in his scent.
Not the reason for her response, but the lush addiction of it certainly didn’t help. It was a good thing she wasn’t a true hunter-born—because he was potent. “You usually visit around this time?”
“I was passing.” He leaned against the doorjamb, lifting the large manila envelope in his hand.
The blades in his scent grew razored, cutting across her senses with deadly eroticism. Suddenly all she saw in his eyes was a menace as sensual as a caress in the dark and as lethal as a stiletto. “What have you done?” The question escaped every filter of social nicety and convention.
“Nothing that didn’t need to be done.” Pushing off the doorjamb when she released her death grip on the edge of the door and stepped back, he walked into her apartment.
She tugged the envelope from him the instant the door was closed, sliding away her gun even as she allowed herself to indulge in the wicked, beautiful scent of him. “Further photos of the victim’s tats?”
“No.”
Opening it, she pulled out several sheets of paper, along with a number of blown-up photographs. At first, she didn’t understand what it was she was seeing, and then she did and her blood boiled. “This is my medical report.” Specifically, from the humiliating examination after her rescue. The doctor and nurse had both been gentle, kind, but there in that examination room, there had no longer been any way to pretend that it hadn’t happened, that she hadn’t been turned into—
Choking the river of memory, she focused on the here and now, on the anger so incandescent in her vision. “Where did you get this?” Her hands trembled with the need to hurt him, this vampire who played with her as if she was an amusing toy.
Stalking to the window where she’d stood only moments before, he said, “That’s not really a question.”
No, it wasn’t. “You bastard,” she said, throwing everything onto the coffee table, the edge of pleasure she’d taken in his presence eradicated by the ice of his voice, an unforgiving reminder that he was not human, that he had no conscience as she knew it. “What right do you have to invade my privacy?”
“I wanted the images they took,” he said without turning.
Her stomach roiled. “I knew you liked pain, but I didn’t realize you got off on torture.”
A glance over his shoulder. “Of the bite marks, Honor.” Her name sounded like the most decadent of temptations, touched by a sensuality that was as natural to the male in her apartment as breathing . . . even when he was coated in the ice of what she belatedly recognized was rage, tempered and deadly.
Bite marks.
Her own anger chilled by the cold of his, she picked up the stack of paper and photos, flipped until she came to the pages that listed the bites on her body, with associated images. “There’s nothing you can learn from this.” At the end, they’d torn at her as if she was a hunk of meat, shredding and ripping.
“You’d be surprised.” Shifting on his heel, he shrugged out of the coat, throwing it over the back of one of her sofas to reveal muscled arms free of weapons . . . but for the long, thin blade angled in a sheath across his back. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that he was a blade man, though from the gun she was certain he had in an ankle sheath, she knew he didn’t have a problem with modern weaponry either.
She stood her ground when he came to stand next to her, though the force of her clenched jaw sent pain shooting down the bone. No more fear, she vowed, even knowing it couldn’t be as simple as that, the primal core of her brain scrabbling at her to run—or to fight, shooting and cutting and kicking.
The heat of his body insistent against her skin, Dmitri pointed out a set of three bites that were small and evenly spaced. They’d survived the violence later because of their location—the only mercy was that they had healed without leaving scars, so she wasn’t constantly reminded of how they’d come to be. “Back of my left thigh—”
“—a few inches up from the knee,” Dmitri completed.
Small, fine-boned hands on her body, delicate fangs sinking again and again into that one area. “Blood Ruby,” she whispered. “The vampire always smelled of Blood Ruby.” The fashionable perfume had been an opulent cage around her senses, and it brought up her gorge still—a stranger on the street, in a store, it didn’t matter. She caught a whiff of it and bile coated her throat as a cold sweat broke out over her body. “I used to dream of slitting her throat and watching her flop about at my feet while I drowned her in that stuff.”
Dmitri’s eyes—dark, so, so dark—met hers. “Would you like to pay her a visit?”
9
Silence. In her mind. In her soul. An endless stillness. “You’ve seen her feed before.” The words shattered the quiet, had her dropping the papers in her hand. They floated to the carpet with a strange, serene grace.
“She’s five hundred years old—peculiar habits tend to get around. Feeding from the femoral artery in the thigh isn’t unusual.” A dangerous pause. “Not between lovers,” he corrected, and it made her wonder if that was how he preferred to drink. “But from the back? It’s muscle.”
“It hurts,” Honor said, not knowing why she admitted that. “That’s why she does it. It always hurts.” Looking down at the gun somehow in her hand again, she said, “Will you stop me if I shoot her?”
“No.” Not even the slightest hesitation. “But you might want to wait until after I finish questioning her—it’d be a bitch to wait for the bullet wound to heal.”
Part of her wasn’t sure if he was joking, but she read the cutting anger in his eyes well enough. She knew it had nothing to do with her. No, what had him ready to mete out the most brutal punishment was the fact that an old vampire he likely trusted to maintain order had been playing some very nasty games. Honor didn’t much care about his motivations if it got her to within killing distance of one of the creatures who had turned her into their own personal “blood pet” for two interminable months.
They pulled up to the gates of an estate in Englewood Cliffs just as dawn was streaking the sky in watercolors of peach, pink, and golden blue. Dmitri had stored her laptop in the trunk of his Ferrari and put down the top. She found a welcome freedom in the crisp whip of the wind, using the time to gather her defenses, to ready herself for the thick, nauseating scent of Blood Ruby.
The gates, tall and ornate and covered with dark green ivy, swung open with stately grace the instant the guard saw the car. The drive was dappled in sun and shadow from the oak trees that lined it, and the house, when it came into view, spoke of another century—a heavy and ostentatious one. “Not a vampire who believes in moving with the times.”