Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(51)

Her vampires had taken him as he returned home after a trip to the markets, a sweet for Misha tucked safely in one pocket, a pretty ribbon for his wife in the other. For the baby, such a small thing she was, he had bought a piece of scented wood with which to make a rattle. He’d seen Isis’s creatures coming, had had time to give Misha his sweet, caress his sleeping daughter’s cheek, and kiss his beautiful, strong wife good-bye.

He would never forget the words she’d said to him that day, the love she had wrapped around him—though she had known he would soon be in another woman’s bed, committing a terrible betrayal of the vows he’d made to her one bright spring morning a turn of the seasons before Misha’s birth.

“Will you forgive me, Ingrede? For what I must do?”

“You fight a battle.” Her hand touching his cheek. “You do this to protect us. There is nothing to forgive.”

“If I’d said yes at the very start,” he said now, swallowing the rage and anguish that had never died, “I think Isis would’ve used, then discarded me. I could’ve gone home.” To the only woman he had ever loved, to his son, his daughter. “But because I’d made it clear that I didn’t want her, she played with me as a cat does with a mouse.” First she’d taken him to her bed, viciously pleased by the knowledge that he couldn’t say no.

“Such beautiful children you have, Dmitri. So young . . . so easily broken.”

Later, after she’d had her fill, he’d been dragged to the cold, mold-lined bowels of her great castle, where she Made him with methodical care. Only after the conversion was complete, his body stronger and more able to bear damage, had he been stripped naked and chained in a spread-eagle position, every part of him exposed. “She started with a whip tipped with razor-sharp metal.”

“Stop, Dmitri.” A hand clenching in his hair. “I can’t bear it.”

He heard the tears, was astonished by them. Honor had almost shattered in that hellhole she’d been held in for two interminable months, but according to her psych records, she’d never once cried during her months in the hospital. Not once. Her doctors had been highly concerned, worried she was internalizing her emotions, would implode. But as she knelt down on the stones in front of him and cupped his face in a way he’d allowed no woman to do for near to a thousand years, her eyes were awash in dampness.

Reaching out, he traced the path of one tear over her cheek, down to her jaw, where he caught the droplet, brought it to his mouth. The salt of it was strange, an unfamiliar thing. Dmitri hadn’t cried either. Not after the day he broke his son’s neck. “In my time,” he said, “they believed in witches. Are you a witch, Honor, that you make me say these things to you?” Causing him to rip open wounds that had stayed safely scabbed over for so long that, most of the time, he managed to forget they existed.

Her hands, so very, very gentle, continued to hold his face as she tugged him down until their foreheads touched. “I’m no witch, Dmitri. If I was, I’d know how to fix you.”

Such a strange thing to say when she was the one who’d been fractured.

Perhaps he should’ve been angry at her arrogance, but his emotions toward this hunter were nothing so simple. “Tell me.” An order.

Dropping her hands, she got to her feet and walked to stand at the very edge of the stream, the water kissing her boots as it worked its way down the slight slope and deeper into the woods. He stood, too, taking a position beside her. It took her long moments to speak, but what she said returned him to a time in which he’d lived for the blade alone.

He’d learned to fight at Raphael’s side, a simple man of the land become one who knew only the dark caress of death. Nothing else would quench the fury within him, not for decades, not for centuries. The sole mercy was that he’d been Made in a time of blood-soaked battle between immortals, his sword never lacking for fodder—that time was long gone, but Dmitri had lost none of his deadly skills.

“There was one man,” Honor began, staring out over the water but seeing nothing of the spring green wood shot with golden light. “The one in charge.” Blindfolded, the sole thing she’d been able to sense of him had been the pine of his aftershave . . . and the ugliness of his presence. “He taunted me with the possibility that I might be able to convince him to let me go.”

Instead of shutting up, she’d made the decision to keep talking, because her voice had been the only weapon she’d had. “As he walked out the first day, he slapped me so hard my ears rang.” She’d been stunned by the unexpected blow, the inside of her cheek bleeding into her mouth. “I didn’t see him for what might’ve been an entire day.” She’d spent it naked and bound on the concrete floor, tethered to a metal ring set into the concrete.

Furious in her determination, she’d spent the entire day attempting to free just one of her hands, had even made the conscious choice to try to break her wrist. But the restraints had been too tight, too well constructed.

“The next time, he apologized, loosened the tension in the chains after he hung me up from my arms once again; and he brought me something to drink.” She’d gulped it with focused greed, aware she’d need every advantage if she was going to survive this. “He wanted to condition me to the point where I would begin to be grateful to him for allowing me to live.” But Honor had gone through the compulsory and rigorous psychological warfare course at the Academy, been prepared for the eventuality in which she might find herself a hostage.