Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter 4)

“I was,” she said, forcing herself not to act on the instinct, “driving through a fairly isolated area when I lost my way.” The truth was, she’d driven off the path and into an uncharted wilderness on purpose, unable not to follow the painful tug that drew her onward.

“I must’ve driven for hours, and this is where I stopped.” She shrugged, trying to make light of an experience that had pierced with such aching sorrow, she’d cried for hours after she finally returned to civilization. “I’d never seen a place as beautiful.” As eerie, as heartrending.

Dmitri continued to stare at her, such lethal calculation in his eyes that it took all her control to stay in position, to not lunge for the bed and the blade so close. “What do you see in the photos?” she asked instead, feeling as if she stood on a precipice, her entire life balanced on this moment. “Dmitri?”

Face stripped of all sophistication, until he was only the sleekest of predators, he reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears. “If this is a game, you won’t like the price you’ll have to pay.”

The hairs rose on the back of her neck. This time she stepped away . . . but didn’t go for a weapon. She couldn’t. She had to trust him, because if she couldn’t . . . if she couldn’t, then her world would simply shatter into a thousand fragments. “Threats aren’t sexy.” Don’t do this. Please. “Take your black mood and leave.”

He stalked her instead, trapping her against the corner, the body she’d looked forward to caressing suddenly a stifling wall. It took every ounce of her will to keep from striking out, from kicking and clawing. But when he bent his head and very deliberately put his mouth over her pulse, she couldn’t stand it anymore.

She stabbed her fingers into the exposed side of his neck.

Or would have, if he hadn’t manacled her wrist with a steel-strong grip. No, no, no! The restraint threw her back into the pit where she’d spent so many weeks, the pit she now realized she’d never escaped—but twined through with her terror was a crushing sense of betrayal.

Not my Dmitri. This isn’t him.

And then there was no more thought.

Dmitri had never been as angry as he was at that instant, riding a vicious edge where he hungered only to hurt the woman in his arms. He didn’t know what game Honor was playing, but he would get the answer out of her, even if he had to break her into a million tiny pieces. That field, what it represented, it was not to be touched, not by anyone.

Squeezing her wrist as she froze against him, he went to touch her with his fangs in an act that he knew was cruel, but then again, she’d been playing him from the start. There was no chance in hell that she’d just happened to come upon the field where his wife and baby girl had died, where he’d brought his son afterward, so that Misha wouldn’t be alone, where he’d stood vigil for an entire turn of the seasons.

“My beautiful Dmitri.” Big brown eyes filled with worry. “Don’t let her change you. Don’t let her make you cruel.”

Ingrede’s words had been unable to halt the change, not after she was gone. Nothing would reverse it. So he would make use of it.

A burst of movement from the hunter who had thought to make him a fool.

He had no trouble pinning her to the wall. But Honor didn’t stop fighting, twisting and wrenching her body with a strength that would break something soon if she didn’t stop.

When he pinioned her arms above her head with a grip on her wrists, and pressed her lower body against the wall with his own, she bit him on the neck. Hard enough to draw blood. Jerking away, he tightened the hand he had around her wrists. “Foreplay already, Honor?”

No response, only that furious twisting and pulling and fighting even though she had no hope of escaping him. She made not a sound, her breath tightly controlled.

That was when he looked into those eyes of mysterious green.

There was no one there.

No personality, no hint of the woman who had laughed and pleasured him with such sexual confidence that morning, nothing but the animal instinct to survive. And he knew she would kill herself trying to get free.

“Dmitri, I’m scared.”

“I’ll never hurt you. Trust me.”

Trembling under the whisper of memory, a memory that didn’t belong to Honor and yet spoke for her, he released her hands, lifted his body off hers. She came at him like a tempest unleashed, slamming her elbow into his face, her fisted hand into his larynx, her booted foot against his knee.

Crashing down onto the bed on his back, he blocked some of her most brutal strikes, but did nothing to halt her. Her rage rained down on him, bloodying his nose, his mouth, putting bruises on his body that healed almost as soon as they were made.

“Bastard.” It was the first thing she’d said since he’d trapped her in the corner. “You goddamn bastard.” A savage blow to his jaw that had his teeth snapping together.

Blocking her next blow, he looked into her eyes . . . and saw Honor looking back at him again. The brilliant green was washed in a sheen of wet, and her next blow when it came lacked the power of the others. She thumped both fists on his chest over and over and over again. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” It was a furious litany that turned into sobs so harsh they spoke of unimaginable anguish, her body crumpling over his own. “I hate you.” A whisper.

Right then, he hated himself.

Lying motionless until she stopped moving, those painfully raw sobs turning into heartbreakingly silent tears against his chest, he dared put a hand on her hair, stroking her now tangled curls. He didn’t know what to say to her, how to explain the rage she’d incited within him.

But there was one thing he could say, something he hadn’t said to a woman in near to a thousand years. “I’m sorry, Honor. Forgive me.”

Sitting perched up on the sink in the large bathroom off her bedroom, Honor watched in silence as Dmitri ran the disinfectant over her scraped and bruised knuckles. She bit back a hiss at the sting, her eyes lingering on the cut on his lip, the bruises on his face. Part of her, horrified by her own violence, wanted to cup that sinful masculine face in her hands, kiss each and every bruise in gentle apology. But the rest of her was curled up into a tiny ball deep within, watchful, wary.

The light glinted off the black of his hair as he ministered to her and she remembered the heavy silk of it against her palms. She remembered, too, the force of his grip as he’d pinned her arms above her head.