Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(8)

He stared out at the jewel-bright skyline of Manhattan. “Who did that to her neck?” Cold burned through his veins, a vicious response to the scars of a woman he didn’t know and who would simply be another bedmate for so long as she amused him. Because while her resistance was intriguing, would make for an interesting diversion, he had no doubts that she would end up in his bed—and she’d crawl into it with pleasure.

Then Sara spoke, and the cold turned frigid. “The same bastards who kept her chained up in a basement for two months.” It was a brutal summary. “She was barely alive when we found her. They’d carried on with their sick games even though three of her ribs were broken and she was bleeding and feverish from wounds that—” Sara bit off her words, her rage a finely honed edge, but Dmitri didn’t need anything more.

He remembered the incident. The Guild had requested Tower assistance, been granted it at once. However, involved in the reconstruction of a Manhattan that had been badly damaged by the battle between Uram and Raphael—and, more important, focused on holding Raphael’s territory while the archangel spent the majority of his time in the Refuge, waiting for his sleeping consort to wake—Dmitri hadn’t taken personal control of the investigation. That was about to change. “Status of her attackers?”

“Ransom and Ashwini killed two of the four they found at the scene. The other two were turned over to the Tower, but they were hired muscle at best, allowed to—” A ragged breath. “The ones behind this were smarter. They left no forensic clues and Honor was always blindfolded. We’ll get them.” Icy words. “We always do.”

Ending the call on that, Dmitri looked out at a city that wouldn’t yet slumber for hours. Honor’s attackers would all die. That had never been in question. The only difference was, now that he’d felt her blade against his skin, now that he’d tasted the screaming depth of her fear, he’d take exquisite pleasure in personally cutting out vital organs from their bodies before he left them to heal in some hole . . . and then he’d do it over again.

His conscience wasn’t the least bothered by the idea of such sadistic torture.

“You shouldn’t have been so stubborn, Dmitri.” A slender female hand stroking down his naked body to close over his flaccid cock.

Rage bloomed in those eyes of a bright, mocking bronze.

Shifting her hold to his balls, she squeezed until he came close to blacking out, his muscles straining against the chains that spread-eagled his standing body in the center of the cold, dark room at the bottom of the keep. The position left every part of him exposed to her and those she commanded to do her bidding.

As dark spots lingered at the edges of his vision, she kissed him, her fingernails digging into his jaw and her wings spreading out at her back, white as snow but for the wash of shimmering crimson over her primaries. “You will love me.”

The first blow came a second later, as she continued to kiss him. His back was ground meat by the time she halted the punishment, the scent of blood ripe and thick in the air.

Lips against his ear, silk against his skin. “Do you love me now, Dmitri?”

A beep.

Turning, he shut down a memory that hadn’t come to the fore for centuries upon centuries, and answered the internal line. “Yes?”

“Sir, you asked to be notified if Holly Chang changed her pattern of behavior.”





Forty minutes later, Dmitri stood outside the small suburban home in New Jersey where Holly Chang lived with her boyfriend, David. Isolated from its neighbors by a generous yard and high fences, it was nothing she could’ve afforded if the Tower hadn’t stepped in and ordered her to relocate—from an apartment block where she’d been dangerously close to too many mortals.

The human woman had just turned twenty-three when she’d been abducted off the street by an insane archangel. She’d seen her friends butchered, their limbs amputated before the pieces were put back together in a macabre jigsaw puzzle; when Elena tracked her down she was naked and covered in the rust red of their blood.

Holly had survived the horror, but she hadn’t come out of it the same as when she went in. Quite aside from the fact that there was some question as to her sanity, Uram had either fed her his blood or deliberately injected her with some of the toxin that had fueled his murderous rampage. They didn’t know for certain, because Holly’s memories of those events were clouded to uselessness by the blinding fear that had turned her mute for days after she was found. What they did know was that the young woman was . . . changing.

“Remain by the gate,” he said to the vampire who had called him, before walking out of the shadows and up the drive to the house lit only by the flickering glow of a television in the front room.

Holly, petite and outwardly delicate, opened the door for him before he reached it. Blood stained her long-sleeved white shirt, rimmed her mouth. Raising her hand, she wiped the back of it over her lips, smearing the liquid. “Have you come to clean up the mess, Dmitri?” In those angry slanted eyes, he saw the stark knowledge that he would be the death that came for her if she lost the battle against whatever it was Uram had done to her. “It was a neighbor’s kid. Tasted sweet.”

“Careless of you to hunt so close to home.” Wrenching her forward with a hand on her left wrist, he shoved up the sleeve of her shirt before she could stop him. The bandage around her upper arm was wrapped tight. “I’m a vampire, Holly,” he murmured, reaching up to wipe away a smeared droplet of blood at the corner of her mouth with his thumb. “I know when the blood on you is your own.”