Guild Hunter 04 - Archangel's Blade

“Raphael will take the memory from her mind.”
    Honor shivered at the idea of such a violation. “How do you stand it?” she asked, aware it was an intimate question, but compelled to ask. “Knowing he could do the same to you?”
    “Trust.” He gave her an unreadable look over his shoulder, his eyes as dark as his wings. “The kind of trust that allows you to take Dmitri to your bed even knowing what he’s capable of doing to women who edge his temper.”
    Startled by the response, and by the fact that he’d picked up that piece of information though it appeared he’d just returned to the city, she looked with more care at that face marked by the swirling lines of a tattoo that should’ve made him stand out no matter his surroundings. And yet . . . Shadows, she thought, clung to Jason.
    “Whatever it is you are to Dmitri, Honor,” he said in that voice as deep and quiet as the heart of night, “it’s not like Carmen or the others.” Lush black lashes came down over near-black eyes, then rose again.
    Fascinated by this angel who she knew instinctively rarely spoke to those he didn’t know, she touched her hand to a shattered figurine and waited, knowing he had more to say.
    “He won’t brush you off like an annoyance or let you walk away.” Spreading his wings to block the rest of the room from her view, he held her gaze. “It’s too late. Do you understand that?”

32
     
    With her gaze Honor traced the lines of the incredible tattoo that covered theleft side of his face, the ink ebony against warm brown skin. Hair pulled off his face into a neat queue, he was both sexy and remote. “Are you trying to warn me or protect him?”
    “It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
    “I don’t need to be warned off Dmitri, Jason,” she said, wondering if this dark angel lowered his guard with anyone. “I see him as he is. As for the other . . . it’s not necessary.” The truth was, Dmitri owned her heart.
    Jason’s eyes seemed, like his wings, to reflect nothing though he looked straight at her. “Many would’ve curled up and died after what you expenced.”
    An intimate observation, but then, he’d answered her question. “I almost did,” she said, wondering why her answer would matter to an angel, yet she knew in her gut it did to Jason. “But turns out, spite is a damn good motivator—I didn’t want the bastards to win.”
    Jason’s expression didn’t move off her, and she had the powerful sense he wanted to pursue the topic, but his next words were pragmatic. “Things are as expected in this home.”
    “Yes—no, wait.” Turning, she went back to a painting she’d righted on the way in. It was the nude of Jiana in bed, her slumberous eyes looking at the artist as a woman looks at a lover. “This was what I saw,” she whispered, tracing the A in the bottom right-hand corner, nausea churning inside her at the implications. “Amos painted this.”
    “Perhaps.”
    Nodding, she glanced up. “You’re right. It’s not conclusive. Let’s keep looking.”
    The black-winged angel was a silent presence by her side as she explored hallways covered by a rich, cream-colored carpet, thick and lush where it wasn’t crushed by broken and overturned furniture or matted with blood. The farther they got into the house, the less aggressive the carnage, until at last they were at the very end of the second floor, where nothing had been disturbed.
    It was there they discovered evidence Honor would’ve been happier never to find. The fine sheets on the large bed were tumbled, a bottle of sensual massage oil on the bedside table. On the floor lay not only a robe of bronze satin and lace that Honor recognized immediately, but a man’s jacket and gleaming leather shoes. “Amos wasn’t wearing shoes.” His bloody footprints had made that clear.
    One of Jason’s wings brushed her back as he spread them behind her, a warm, startling weight. “Some things should simply not be.”
    “Yes.” Amos, she thought, had never had a chance. Then again, so many in the world had overcome the terrible crimes done against them without needing to torture others. Still, she couldn’t help but imagine the man who was her nightmare as a scared, defenseless child. “Do you have any idea of when this may have begun?”
    “Amos and Jiana were always close, to a degree that was noticed.” A pause. “We did a quiet investigation, found nothing amiss.”
    “They were clever.” Honor thought of