Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter 4)

Dmitri went very, very quiet. “Isis.”

A skeletal hand gripped her throat, squeezed. “Tell me about her.” Dmitri’s face was all hard lines when she glanced up after making that demand, his eyes so remote that she saw nothing and forever in them. “Dmitri.” Somehow, her hand was on his forearm, his skin hot through the fine linen of the shirt, his tendons taut.

His face, however, showed nothing. “You shouldn’t be touching me right now, Honor.”

She jerked away her hand, but the fear she felt had nothing to do with him. It was in her very bones, brought to life by a name that meant nothing . . . and yet it incited not only fear but an anger beyond rage, beyond fury. “Tell me.”

Dmitri’s voice remained oddly flat as he said, “Isis was the angel who Made me. I stabbed her in the heart and cut her into pieces for it.”

Pleasure, vicious and wild, intertwined with a haunting despair, roared through her. Shocked, she dropped the pen she’d been using to explain her reasoning and stumbled backward from the table.

Dmitri’s eyes didn’t move off Honor as she shoved her hands into her hair, pulling it loose from the messy bun at her nape, and made her way to the kitchen with jerky steps. “That’s where I saw this code.” On Isis’s writing desk—at the start, when she’d taken him to her chambers. “She called it her little secret, but her courtiers and friends had to know it because she wrote notes to them using the code.” Too many immortals to single out a name, but he would set that line of investigation in progress.

Right now, it was Honor who held his attention.

As he watched, she began to make tea with the methodical motions of a woman who had often done the same task—and yet who now took care with each and every step of the process. The kind of thing Ingrede had done when she needed to calm herself.

“What,” he murmured, leaning on the bench that separated the kitchen area from the dining and living areas, “do you know of Isis?”

The space was open on both sides, so he couldn’t block her in, but Honor, skittish as she was, didn’t seem to want to run from him. At this moment, as she poured boiling water into a glass teapot, her bones pushing white against her skin, she seemed to be fighting only herself.

“Nothing,” she said, putting down the hot water jug and setting the pale red-orange tea to steep. “Yet I want to dance on her grave.”

The na**d emotion in her voice found an echo inside him. “There is no grave,” he said, looking into those deep green eyes full of secrets. “We made sure nothing of her remained.” Except it seemed something had survived, some tainted piece now attempting to take root.

“We?”

He saw no harm in sharing the truth—it had never been a secret. “Raphael was there. We killed Isis together.” The bond forged in that pain-soaked room beneath the keep, and in the blood and viscera of Isis’s death, was one nothing would ever break.

Honor braced her hand on the counter. And then she met his gaze with those eyes that belonged to an immortal, and asked a question he would’ve never expected from the scared woman who had first walked into his office. “Who were you before Isis, Dmitri?”

“I broke it.” A disconsolate whisper.

“Let me see.”

“Will you tell Mama?”

“It’ll be our secret. There, it’s fixed.”

“Dmitri, Misha, what are you up to?”

“Secret things, Mama!”

Laughter, sweet and feminine and familiar, followed by Ingrede’s quiet footsteps. Heavy with child, she kissed first her giggling son, then her smiling husband.

“I was another man,” he said, put on edge by the forceful draw he felt toward Honor. He may have led a life of debauchery after his world burned to ash, may have blackened his soul and indulged in every vice there was in an effort to numb the pain, but he had never, ever betrayed Ingrede where it mattered. His heart, it had remained untouched, encased in stone.

“I will love you even when I am dust on the wind.”

This hunter shattered on the innermost level was not likely to tempt him to break that promise . . . but there was no denying that there were hidden depths to her. Depths he was compelled to explore. “You’re an excellent shot,” he said.

A shrug. “I practice, and Valeria wasn’t exactly a moving target.” Lines marred her forehead. “I should feel bad about taking advantage when she was pinned up like a butterfly, but I don’t. What does that make me?”

“Human. Flawed.”

“Strange how that actually makes me feel better.” She reached to open an upper cupboard. The motion pulled her gray sweatshirt a fraction tighter over her full br**sts, but nowhere near enough to showcase a body that Dmitri was damn certain was meant to be showcased.

Hmm . . .

Turning on his heel, he began to prowl around her apartment. When he turned in the direction of what he guessed was her bedroom, she said, “That’s private, Dmitri.”

He ignored her.

Heard her swear a blue streak.

But he was already at her closet by the time she ran around the counter to follow. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Seeing who you were before Valeria and Tommy.” He pulled out a short scarlet dress with a plunging neckline and no back. “This, I like.”

Honor, her cheeks as red as the dress, grabbed the hanger from him. “For your information, I never wore this. It was a gift from a friend.”

His enthusiasm cooled. “That’s the kind of dress a man buys.”

“Or a girlfriend who likes to jerk my chain,” she muttered, shoving the dress back into the closet. “Now get out.”

He reached in to pull out a number of other items instead, throwing them on the bed. Shirts and simple tops, for the most part, but all of them fitted. Nothing like the shapeless tees and sweatshirts she’d taken to wearing. Throwing them on the bed, he said, “Get dressed properly and I’ll show you something you’ve never before seen.”

Glaring at him, she started to put the clothing back. “I happen to be working—the rest of the ink won’t decode itself.”

A cold burn of anger invading his veins at the reminder of Isis, he shut the closet doors with deliberate care. “From what I saw,” he said in a tempered voice, “you’ve been going around in circles.”

A blown-out breath. “I’ve almost got it. It’s there on the tip of my tongue.”