Guild Hunter 04 - Archangel's Blade

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 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.”
    “Dmitri?”
    Lashes lowering, he fought to hang on to a memory that held nothing of the pain or horror that was to follow, only to have it flitting out of reach. “I’m listening,” he said, eyes on Honor.
    Her gaze lingered on him and, for an instant, he felt the most disconcerting sensation—as if he had been in this moment before—but then she blinked and looked down and it passed. “The tattoo isn’t in our database. However, I’ve sent out some discreet feelers along the international hunter network.”
    Dmitri had also put out the word amongst the network of high-level vampires who either worked in or with powerful courts. The cooperation at that level was much more prevalent than believed by most people. It was only when issues of territory and power became involved that things got problematic. “Have you had any success deciphering the lines of