Beginning to sweat, she ripped off her sweatshirt and dropped it on the bed, but that did nothing to cool her down.
Water.
A few minutes after that thought passed through her head, she was dressed in a sleek black one-piece swimsuit, a toweling robe around her body. The night owls she ran into on her way to the Academy pool stopped only long enough to say hi before continuing on their way—and she was soon sliding into the pristine blue waters that promised peace.
Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.
The rhythm was better than meditating. It took ten lengths, but by the end of it, she was calm. However, the feeling of suffocation struck again the instant she returned to her room—now that she’d noticed its tiny size, she couldn’t get it out of her head. And there was no way she’d be able to sleep even if she forced herself to bed. Her nightmares—malevolent, clawing things—were bad enough without adding claustrophobic panic to the mix.
Having showered at the pool, she pulled on fresh clothes and picked up her laptop.
The library was quiet at this time of night, but not deserted. There were a couple of instructors working on research papers, and a hunter who looked like she’d come in from active duty.
A single glance at that shining dark hair, those worn boots, and her lips curved in joyful surprise. “Ashwini?”
The tall, long-legged hunter put down the book she’d been examining and swiveled on her heel. Face cracking into a smile that turned her from beautiful to breathtaking, she gave a “Whoop!” and vaulted over a library table to grab Honor in a tight hug. No sign remained of the knife fight that had left her seriously injured not long ago.
Laughing, Honor hugged her back—Ash was one of the rare few people she’d never had trouble allowing close, even directly after the assault. Perhaps it was because the other hunter was her best friend . . . and perhaps it was because Ashwini was the one who’d ripped off her blindfold and shot off the chains that had held her trapped and helpless, her body a piece of meat for her captors.
“I’ve got you, Honor—the bastards won’t touch you again.”
“What are you doing here, you lunatic?” she asked, focusing on the fact that her friends had never given up on her, rather than the putrid miasma of a far more vile memory.
A smacking kiss on her cheek before Ashwini drew back. “I came to see you—you weren’t in your quarters so I came here to wait.” Glancing around when one of the instructors said “Shh” in a loud voice, she rolled her eyes. “Funny, Demarco. Didn’t they call noise control on your last party?”
The rangy hunter, his hair the streaky blond of a man who loved the sun, grinned and pointed a finger. “I knew you were there, Ms. Flaming Lying Pants.”
“This is a library, people,” said the last man in the room, scarred boots on a reading table and a leather-bound book open in front of his face.
Ash and Demarco hooted. Because Ransom was the last person you’d expect to find in a library—except word was, he was shacked up with a librarian. That, Honor thought, she’d have to see to believe. Now he put the book down in his lap and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed behind his head. “I’ll have you know I’m teaching an advanced course in how to deal with the Wing Brotherhood when necessary.”
Ashwini sauntered over to play with Ransom’s gorgeous black hair, tugging it out of its usual queue to run it through her fingers. “What conditioner you using, Professor Ransom? I’m thinking of changing brands.”
“Fuck you.” Said without heat as he glanced at Demarco. “I’m hungry.”
The other hunter paused, nodded decisively. “Yeah, me, too.”
That was how Honor found herself sitting in an otherwise deserted dining hall with three other hunters, talking shit. It was something she hadn’t done for months, even pushing Ash away when her best friend tried to draw her out, and now she couldn’t understand why. For the first time since she’d escaped that hellhole where she’d almost died, she felt real, a person, instead of a forgotten shade, a translucent illusion.
Stop lying to yourself, Honor.
She’d felt very much real, very much alive, at the Tower. Chilled by a fear that had left her skin sticky with sweat, and by her deep-rooted compulsion toward a vampire who had looked at her with sex—the dark, screaming kind—in his eyes, but alive nonetheless.
Her hand clenched on the handle of her coffee mug. She’d already eaten a toasted cheese sandwich and a banana, truly hungry for the first time in months—though the Guild nutritionist’s stringent eating plan meant she’d slowly returned to a healthy weight over the past half year. She’d tasted none of those things, complied only because it was easier than arguing.
Dmitri’s gaze had made it clear he appreciated her curves, that he had no problem with the fact that her natural body shape was too much of an hourglass than was currently fashionable. He would, she thought, take exquisite pleasure in stroking his hands over every inch of a woman’s body . . . if he wasn’t in the mood to hurt her a little.
“Any of you met Dmitri?” she found herself asking during a lull in the conversation, disturbed by the fact that even knowing beyond any doubt that he’d be no good for her, she couldn’t stop her mind’s eye from tracing the slightly full curve of his lower lip. A dangerous indulgence, a small madness.
“Yeah.” Ransom swallowed the bite of Pop-Tart in his mouth. “When Elena went missing. Cold son of a bitch. Not someone you’d want to run into in a deserted alley.”
“A challenge. I accept.”
It would’ve been easy to tell herself that he’d been playing with her, amusing himself at her expense . . . except she was fairly certain a man didn’t look at a woman with that kind of slumberous heat in his eyes unless he was planning to have her na**d and helpless beneath him, her thighs spread wide.
“Hey.” Ashwini’s voice, pitched low to skate under Demarco and Ransom’s conversation. “I heard you were consulting for the Tower. Dmitri?”
“I cut him,” she whispered, the memory of the actual act still a black nothingness in her mind.
Ashwini’s grin was feral. “Good for you. Bastard probably deserved it.”
Staring at her best friend, Honor started to laugh and it was the first time she’d done so since Ash and Ransom carried her out of that filthy pit, bruised and violated and bleeding from so many bite marks torn into her flesh that the doctors had put her into an antiseptic bath, not wanting to miss one of the wounds.
Uninterested in sleep that night, Dmitri was standing on the railingless balcony outside his Tower suite when the nightshadow of wings swept over him and then down.
The angel who landed at his side was both familiar and unwelcome. “Favashi,” he said, having expected the visit. The archangel’s progress had been tracked since she was spotted an hour out from the Boston coast. “Have you come to lay claim to Raphael’s territory while he is in the Far East?”
Favashi’s serene face betrayed nothing as she folded back wings of a soft, exquisite cream. “We both know he’s stronger than I am, Dmitri. And even were he not, you lead his Seven. I would be a fool to stand against you in battle.”
He snorted, though she was right. His strength as a vampire, coupled with his intelligence and experience when it came to combat situations, made it certain that no city would ever fall under his watch. And this city? He’d watched over it since long before it was a jewel coveted by many, would never let it slip into enemy hands.
“So you are here to stroke my ego?” he purred, his tone as deadly as the edge of a scalpel. “Pity that I prefer the hands stroking me not belong to a cold-blooded bitch.”
Fire in her eyes, a glimpse of the vicious power that lived behind the mask of a lovely Persian princess, elegant and benevolent. “I am still an archangel, Dmitri.” A whip of arrogance in the reminder, but then her lips curved. “I was a fool and this is my reward. Will you never forgive a young woman’s ambition?”
Dmitri stared at her, this archangel who had made him believe, for one shimmering moment, that he might crawl out of the abyss and stand in the light once more. With hair of a luxuriant mink brown and eyes of the same lush shade, her skin the creamy gold of Persia, and her body that of a goddess, Favashi was a queen who looked the part.
Men had fought for her, died for her, worshipped her. Women saw in her a grace that was lacking in Michaela, the most beautiful of all the archangels, and so they served her with willing hands and loyal hearts, never understanding that Favashi was as merciless as her brethren in the Cadre. “Ambition,” he said, “has its price.”
Flaring out her wings, as if to expose them to the night’s languid caress, Favashi turned her face toward the diamondstudded nightscape that was Manhattan. “Such a stunning place, but so hard. My land is gentler.”
“A man could burn to nothing in your deserts without ever being found.” He had no doubts that Favashi had buried many a body beneath those rolling sand dunes. He didn’t have a problem with that—he’d buried a few bodies himself. What he did have a problem with was the fact that she’d not only fooled him into believing in her, but that she’d expected to lead him on a leash, her own personal guard dog cum assassin.
Once, so long ago it was another life, Dmitri had been turned into a thing to be used. Never again. “Why are you here?”
“I came to see you.” A simple answer, but her voice held a soft, exotic music that turned it into an invitation. “Let the past lie where it belongs. I would court you again.”
“No.” He captured her wrist as she raised her hand to touch his face, squeezing so hard he’d have fractured a mortal woman’s bones. “The last time an angel tried to court me,” he whispered, leaning down to speak with his lips brushing her neck, “she ended up in bite-sized pieces I then fed to her hounds.” It was he who had courted Favashi before—or at least she’d allowed him to believe he was the one leading the dance. The one good thing that had come out of the experience was that he’d never again make the mistake of believing a woman’s sweet lies.