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.”
She hissed at him, pulling away her arm to stalk back into the house. Stepping inside, he closed the door at his back. He’d been here many times, knew the layout, but rather than following her to the kitchen where he could hear her washing off the blood on her mouth, he turned off the television and checked to make sure they were alone in the house.
When he did finally enter the kitchen, now lit by a bright bulb, it was to see Holly wiping her face on a dish towel, though she hadn’t changed out of the bloodstained shirt. “Death by Dmitri,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb with a laziness that would’ve fooled no one who knew him. “Is that what you were aiming for?”
A glare from eyes that had once been light brown, but were now ringed with a vivid green that was growing ever deeper into the irises. The same gleaming shade as Uram’s eyes . . . but not as dark as those of the hunter who’d used a knife on him earlier tonight. Honor’s gaze held the mystery of forbidden depths, of haunting secrets whispered deep in the night. Holly’s, by contrast, held only clawing anger and an overwhelming self-hatred.
“Isn’t that your job?” she asked. “To execute me if I prove a monster?”
“We’re all monsters, Holly.” Folding his arms, he watched as she began to pace up and down the length of the small kitchen. “It’s just a case of how far you push it.”
Back and forth. Back and forth. Hands through her hair, jagged shakes. Again. “David left me,” she blurted out at last. “Couldn’t take the fact that he found me awake and staring at him five nights in a row, my eyes glowing.” A giggling laugh that failed to hide a terrible pain that he knew had cracked her heart open. “I wasn’t looking at his face.”
“Have you been feeding?” Holly had a limited need for blood and Dmitri had made certain she’d been supplied with it.
Her response was to kick the fridge so hard she dented the polished white surface. “Dead blood! Who wants it? I think I’ll go for a nice, soft neck as soon as I can escape the fucking minders.”
Stepping into the kitchen proper, Dmitri walked around to grip her hands, still her pacing. Then he lifted his wrist to her mouth. “Feed.” His blood was potent, would fulfill any need she had.
As he’d known she would, she pulled away and slid down to sit, to hide, in a corner of the kitchen, arms locked around her knees and head lowered as she rocked her body. Because in spite of her words, Holly didn’t want to touch a human donor, didn’t want to believe she’d changed on such a fundamental level. She wanted to be the girl she’d been before Uram—the one who’d just secured a coveted position at a fashion house, who’d loved fabric and design, and who’d laughed with her girlfriends as they walked to the movies to catch the late show.
None of those friends had made it.
Turning to the fridge, he retrieved one of the bags of blood he had delivered on a regular basis and poured it into a glass before going to crouch down beside her. He pushed back a wing of glossy black hair currently streaked with cotton candy–colored highlights and said, “Drink.” Nothing else was necessary—Holly knew he wouldn’t leave until the glass was empty.
Strange, hate-filled eyes. “I want to kill you. Every time you walk through that door, I want to pick up a machete and hack your head off.” She gulped down the blood and slammed the empty glass on the floor so hard it cracked along one side.
Using a tissue to wipe her mouth, he threw it in the trash before standing up to lean against a cabinet opposite her. “A woman cut my face today,” he told her. “Not with a machete but a throwing blade.”
Holly’s eyes skimmed over his unmarked skin. “Bullshit.”
“I’m fairly certain she was going for the jugular but I was too fast.” And Honor had moved with far more grace than he’d have believed her capable of before that little demonstration. The woman was trained in some kind of martial art, trained at a level that meant she was no helpless victim. And yet she had been made one.