“She’s nonresponsive. Catatonic.”
“Prognosis?”
“No way to tell. I know I shouldn’t say this, but part of me thinks she’d be better off dead.”
Lying awake staring into the dark in a futile effort to fight the rancid horror that stalked her dreams, Honor had often thought that faceless doctor had been right, but tonight the memory incited another emotion.
Anger.
A dull throbbing thing that caught her by surprise.
I’m alive. I f**king made it. No one has the right to take that from me.
Her astonishment at her own fury was such that it carried her through the elevator ride—trapped in a small cage with a vampire who wore an Armani suit and had an aura of contained power that said he was no ordinary guard.
When the doors opened to deposit them on a floor carpeted in thick black, the gleaming walls painted the same midnight shade, she sucked in a breath. There was a sexual pulse to this place that hummed barely beneath the surface—the roses were lavish and bloodred against the midnight where they stood in their crystal vases atop small, elegant tables of lustrous black, the carpet too lush to be merely serviceable, the paint shimmering with glints of gold.
The artwork along one wall was a fury of red that drew her with its cruel ferocity.
Sensual.
Beautiful.
Lethal.
“This way.”
Blood pounding through her veins in a way she knew wasn’t safe in the company of the Made, she followed two steps behind her guide—so she’d have warning if he swiveled, went for her throat. Her gun was tucked into a shoulder holster concealed under the faded gray of her favorite sweatshirt, her knife in a sheath openly on her thigh, but she had two more hidden in sheaths strapped to her arms. It wouldn’t be enough, not against a vampire who instinct and experience told her had to be over two hundred, but at least she’d go down fighting.
Stopping in front of an open door, he waved her through before turning back toward the elevator. She took a step inside . . . and froze.
Dmitri was standing on the other side of a heavy glass desk, the Manhattan skyline glittering at his back, his head bent, strands of silken black hair caressing his forehead as he scanned the piece of paper in his hand. Her mind rolled back. Before . . . before . . . she’d been fascinated by this one vampire, though she’d only ever seen him from a distance or on the television screen. She’d even made a scrapbook of his movements—to the point that she’d started to feel like a disturbed stalker and burned the whole thing.
It hadn’t gotten rid of the strange, irrational compulsion she’d felt toward him as long as she could remember. Nothing had gotten rid of it . . . until the dank, filthy basement and the terror. That had numbed everything, but now she wondered if she hadn’t always been slightly unhinged, she’d been so obsessed by a stranger who was whispered to have a penchant for sensual cruelty, pleasure cut with pain.
Then he looked up.
And she stopped breathing.
Dmitri saw the woman in the doorway in a kaleidoscope of images. Soft ebony hair clipped at her nape, but promising a wildness of curls. Haunting—haunted—eyes of deepest green tilted up at the corners. Pale brown skin that he knew would turn to warm honey in the sun. “Born in Hawaii?” he asked, and it was a strange question to ask a hunter who’d come to do a consult.
She blinked, long lashes momentarily shielding those eyes that spoke of distant forests and hidden gemstones. “No. In a nowhere town far from the ocean.”
He found himself circling the glass and steel of his desk to head toward her. For an instant, he thought she would stumble backward and out into the corridor, but then she stiffened her spine, held her position. He was aware of the fear—sharp and acrid—skittering behind her eyes, but still he shifted around her to push the door shut.
Allowing her to leave wasn’t an option.
When he stepped back to face her once more, the ugly ripple of fear had been brought under rigid control, but her breathing was jerky, her gaze skating away from his when he tried to capture it. “What’s your name?”
“Honor.”
Honor. He tasted the name, decided it fit. “Hunter-born?”
A shake of her head.
Not surprising. Elena had likely warned the Guild Director about his ability to use tendrils of exquisite scent to seduce and lure those hunters who were born with the bloodhound capability to scent-track vampires. Sara would hardly send him fresh prey. But this woman, this Honor . . . he wanted to use luscious strokes of scent on her until she was flushed and limp, her arousal an unmistakable musk against his senses.
It was instinct to ensure she wasn’t lying to him—he swirled out a drugging whisper of champagne and desire molten as gold, orchids under moonlight, chocolate-dipped berries kissing a woman’s skin. Honor shook her head a little, a barely imperceptible movement that echoed the frown lines on her forehead.
So, not strong enough to identify herself, or be identified by the Guild as hunter-born, but enough that she had a slight susceptibility to the scent lure. He was unsurprised by the discovery, having met more than one like her in the centuries since he’d developed the talent—they seemed drawn to the Guild, regardless of the fact that they carried only the merest hint of the hunting bloodline. That, of course, meant he couldn’t seduce Honor as easily as he could a true hunter-born . . . but scent wasn’t the sole weapon in his arsenal when it came to sex.
Scanning his eyes over her again, he noted the jagged pulse in her neck, but it was the skin covering the spot that held his attention. “Whoever you allowed to feed from you,” he said in a smooth murmur he was well aware held a caressing stroke of menace, “wasn’t very tidy.” Her scars denoted a vampire who’d torn and ravaged.
Her hand clenched on the handle of the laptop bag she’d shrugged off her shoulder. “That’s none of your business.”
Surprised she’d found the guts to say that to him in spite of the terror that rippled through her, raw and bleeding, he raised an eyebrow. “Yes, it is.” He’d bedded many a beautiful woman, left some sobbing with pleasure, others from a sensual viciousness that had taught them to never again attempt to play him. Honor wasn’t beautiful. There was too much fear in her. Dmitri might like a little pain in bed, but in most cases, he preferred his partners enjoy it, too.
This broken hunter, with her terror that turned the air caustic, would quiver and shatter like fractured glass with the first touch of his mouth. And still he wanted to run his fingers over that skin meant to be gilded by the sun, to trace the lush curves of her lips, the long line of her neck, the compulsion strong enough that it was a warning. The last time he’d allowed his c*ck to overrule his head, he’d almost ended up an archangel’s pet assassin.
Turning, he walked around to behind the sleek sprawl of his desk and picked up the garbage bag sitting on the floor. “I assume you have some experience with tattoos?”
Lines on her forehead, confusion momentarily wiping out the far more distasteful dominant emotion he’d perceived thus far. “No. My specialty is in ancient languages and history.”
Clever of the Guild Director. “In that case, tell me everything you can about this ink.” Using gloves this time, he pulled out the head and set it on the bag, the stump sticking to the plastic with a sucking sound.
The hunter stumbled backward, her eyes locked on the gruesome evidence of violence. When she jerked her gaze back to him, he saw a grim fury on that face that had already shown itself to be so expressive, he wondered if she’d ever won a poker game in her life. “You think that’s funny?”
“No.” The truth. “Seemed no point in putting him in the freezer when you were on your way.”
It was such an inhuman thing to say that Honor had to take a minute, reset her mental parameters. Because the fact was, regardless of his dark masculine beauty and modern speech, she wasn’t facing a human. Not even close. “How old are you?” The media speculations ran from four to six hundred, but at that instant, she knew they were wrong. Very wrong.
A faint smile that made the hairs rise on the back of her neck. “Old enough to scare you.”
Yes. She’d been trapped with vampires who had wanted only to hurt her, bore the scars of their abuse even now, but never had she been in the presence of someone who chilled her blood with his mere presence. Yet though he was known to be a powerful son of a bitch, ruthless as a gleaming edge, Dmitri functioned fine in the human world. Which meant he could mask the lethal truth when he wanted to, but this was who he was beneath the civilized black on black of his suit—a man who looked at a severed head the same way he might a bowling ball.
Keeping that knowledge in mind, she put her laptop bag down on the glass of his desk, since there were no chairs on this side, and forced herself to lean closer to the decapitated head. “He’s been in water?” The skin was soaked and pulpy, gone a wrinkled white—an obscene reminder of happy hours spent in the bath.
“Hudson.”
“He needs to be looked at by a proper forensic team,” she muttered, trying to see the full lines of the tattoo. “I need access to lab equipment so I can—”
Gloved hands in her vision, shoving the head back into the garbage bag. “Follow me, little rabbit.”
Heat burned her gut, seared her veins to fill her face, but she grabbed her laptop and did as ordered. His back was solid and strong in front of her, his hair gleaming a rich, evocative black under the lights. When she didn’t step up beside him, he shot her an amused look over his shoulder—except the laughter didn’t reach those watchful eyes that whispered of ages long gone. “Ah, an old-fashioned woman.”
“What?” It was taking all of her concentration to breathe, her body close to adrenaline overload.
“You obviously believe in walking three steps behind a man.”
It was beyond tempting to reach for a blade. Or maybe her gun.
Smiling, as if he’d read her thoughts, he strode to an elevator different from the one she’d ridden up in and, ripping off one of the gloves, placed his palm on the scanner. The pad glowed green for a second before the doors opened and he waved her in. She refused to enter. Maybe he was so old that she didn’t have a hope in hell of ever defeating him should he come after her—but logic had no chance against the primal animal within, the one who knew the monsters could hurt you easier if you couldn’t see them coming.