He turned so she could see the cheek she’d cut. The dark honey of his skin was smooth and warm with health once more, the kind of skin that invited touch . . . if you forgot the fact that he was as dangerous as a cobra watching its prey.
“The tattooed vampire,” he said, leaning lazily against the wall, his voice a languid stroke, “was barely-Made. Two months old at most. He shouldn’t have been out of containment.”
Frowning, she bit the inside of her lip. “Hunters don’t usually have anything to do with vampires that young. I’ve heard they’re relatively weak.”
“Weak is one word.” Glancing toward the doors as they opened, he nodded at her to step out.
She locked her feet into place. “After you.”
“If I wanted to go for your throat, Honor,” he said in that same deceptively lazy voice, “you’d be pinned to the wall before you saw me move.”
Yeah, she knew that. Didn’t change things. “I can stay here all day.”
Once again, Dmitri held out his arm to block the door from closing. “Who were you before they got to you?”
It ripped at the pride Honor hadn’t thought she still had that he knew how she’d been debased and degraded, how she’d been made less than an animal, but she found her voice in a rage that had grown in brittle silence since the day she stumbled out of the pit. “I have a question of my own.”
A raised eyebrow.
“Why the fuck are the worst of them still out there walking around?” While she was trapped in this body that couldn’t forget the bruises, the broken bones, but most of all, the agonizing loss of her right to make a choice, to allow or not to allow a touch.
A cold, cold something swam behind Dmitri’s dark eyes. “Because they don’t know they’re dead yet.” Icy words. “Would you like to watch when I make them scream?”
Her blood froze in her veins.
Dmitri smiled. “What fantasies have you been having, little rabbit? Stabbing out their eyes, perhaps, letting them grow back so you could do it again?” A terrible, sensual whisper. “Breaking their bones with a hammer while they’re conscious?” Not waiting for an answer, he stepped out of the elevator.
Following, she stared at the black suit jacket that sat so very perfectly over broad shoulders graceful with a liquid kind of muscle. Nothing about Dmitri was less than sophisticated. Even his violence. And yet he’d come scarily close to guessing at the vicious dreams she entertained when she thought of having her attackers at her mercy—in a cold room devoid of light as they’d had her.
“I know,” he said, as if he’d read her mind, “because I once cut out the tongue of someone who had held me prisoner.”
Something slumbering in her stretched awake, some waiting, old part that hungered for his answer to the question she was compelled to ask. “Was it enough?”
“No, but it was satisfying nonetheless.” Pushing through the door to his office, he walked over to the windows. “Those who say vengeance eats you up are wrong—it doesn’t, not if you do it right.” Glancing over his shoulder, he gave her a razored smile that both fascinated and terrified. “I’ll make sure to invite you when I track them down.”
“You sound certain you will.”
He didn’t answer—as if it was a given he’d hunt down his prey. “Come here, Honor.” A command twined with the faint taste of some exotic spice that made her breasts swell, her breath catch.
It was a good thing she appeared to have only the merest drop of the hunting bloodline. “Even before the attack,” she said, digging her nails into her palms, “I wasn’t the kind of hunter who played with vampires.” While she had nothing against those of her brethren who took vampiric lovers, she knew herself well enough to know she needed commitment of a kind the almost-immortals couldn’t give. Their lives were too long, love an amusement, fidelity to a mortal laughable. “Being food has never appealed to me.”
Dmitri turned to lean against the plate-glass wall that looked out over Manhattan, his masculine beauty starkly outlined by the piercing light of the sun at his back. “Ah, but I think you’d be a delicious snack.”
Dmitri watched the hunter across from him tug her laptop bag off her shoulder and place it on his desk before pulling out the slim computer. Her face was flushed, her breasts pushing against her sweatshirt, but there was nothing less than unyielding focus in her words. “We can play games all day, or I can show you what I’ve found.”
“Dmitri, stop playing games.”
Words spoken in a distant language, as clear to him as the sunlight. She’d been angry with him that day, his Ingrede. And yet in the end, he’d tumbled her into bed, stripped her down to her skin, and kissed every inch of her small, lush body. He’d loved sinking into her, of having his hands full of her breasts, his thighs wedged between her softer, plumper ones as he sucked and licked at her mouth, her neck. That was the day Caterina had been conceived, or so Ingrede had always maintained.
“That’s why she is such a bad-tempered child, your daughter.”