Dmitri was anything but that; a man who had been formed in rivers of blood.
Yet once he’d lived in a small village, made his living from the land. A simple life, but one for which he had turned down the offers of an angel renowned for her beauty. Most men would have accepted such an invitation, if only for the novelty of it. Perhaps he’d been too proud to be an angel’s fleeting plaything . . . or perhaps his heart had already belonged to another.
A shimmer over her skin, a sense of indisputable rightness.
However, she swallowed the question on the tip of her tongue—about the woman whose memory had brought an intimate cadence to his voice the one and only time he’d mentioned her. Not just because this wasn’t the right time or place to ask, but because whatever the answer, it could be nothing good. Not when Dmitri walked alone. “Any word on the tattoo?” she asked instead.
“The three master tattooists we consulted were of the opinion that, regardless of the surface intricacy, it was an amateur job.”
“Damn.” It would make the doer so much more difficult to identify. “And those who might be loyal to Isis?”
“Her name appears dead, forgotten.” Turning to face her, he stopped in the shade of a tree with almost dainty branches hung with shivering leaves, the area around them relatively clear. “Whoever it is that seeks to resurrect her, he’s kept his intentions secret.”
“Devotion?” Her eyes locked with his, and in them she saw a thousand secrets, potent and swathed in velvet shadows formed of violence and pain. “If he—or she—has revered Isis this long, he must consider her his goddess.” Too precious to stain with the scrutiny of those who might look on her with a more jaundiced eye.
“Perhaps.” Not breaking the intimacy of the visual connection, Dmitri touched his hand to the side of her face.
It was no longer strange, no longer jarring, the rough heat of his skin against her own. And though her heartbeat accelerated, it did so as any woman’s would at the caress of a man so sinfully compelling. The decision instinctive, she cupped his face in her hands when, an erotic rain of bitter chocolate and liquid gold cascading over her senses, he angled his head and bent to press his lips to her own.
A flicker of black, of nothingness . . . and she was on the other side of the clearing. Glancing down at the blade in her grip, then at Dmitri, she bit back a scream. “How badly did I cut you?” A harsh question, twisted through with anger and despair and a wrenching sense of failure.
He held up a hand painted red by a diagonal cut across his palm. “Nothing major.”
The same injury might well have cost a human man the use of the nerves in his hand. Shoving the knife back into her boot after wiping it on fallen leaves, she thrust her hands into her unbound hair, her chest heaving as if she’d run a mile. “Well, that answers that, doesn’t it?” The divide between dreams and reality was a gaping chasm.
A single thick drop of blood running down his fingers, to hit the ground in crimson silence, Dmitri raised an eyebrow. “It tells me only that I need to be faster.”
Her laugh was jerky, bitter. “You are fast.” A vampire of his age and strength could snap her neck before she ever saw it coming. “You’re letting me hurt you.”
“No, Honor. I don’t let anyone hurt me.” Black silk across her skin. “I was, however, looking at your lips, not your knife hand. Next time, I’ll strip you of your weapons first.”
The sheer arrogance of the statement cut through the barbed ugliness of her emotions to incite a languid heat in her veins. “Yeah? Well, maybe next time, I’ll cut off that hand,” she said, though the sight of his blood, it did something to her, birthing a visceral repudiation.
“So long as you understand”—stalking closer, his finger brushing her lower lip, smoke tangible as a lover’s touch stroking her in places that made her gasp—“that there will be a next time.”
Honor didn’t know what she would’ve said to that announcement, because a strong wind swept over them at that instant, to be followed by an angel with wings of white-gold landing a bare three feet away. Her heart stuttered—most mortals who met the Archangel of New York ended up dead.
That was when eyes of absolute, unrelenting blue fell on her, beautiful beyond bearing . . . and utterly without mercy. The moment hung suspended in time, and she knew she was being judged. Her death, she thought, would mean as little to him as that of an insect. Dear God. How could Elena call this inhuman being her mate, take him to her bed?
“Raphael.”
The archangel shifted his attention to Dmitri, his feathers sliding against one another as he folded back his wings. “There’s been a second incident.”
Honor, drawing in air to ease a painful chest, snapped up her head as Dmitri said, “Another public location?”