Guild Hunter 04 - Archangel's Blade

well-planned journey to avenge herself against Raphael.
    “Do you know my crime, Dmitri?” Raphael’s voice, echoing in the cold stone chamber beneath the keep. “I was overheard to say that I would prefer a snake in my bed to Isis.”
    Vain and cruelly intelligent, Isis hadn’t been satisfied with simply capturing and torturing Raphael for what had been nothing but a passing comment. No, she’d intended to corrupt Raphael’s mortal friends until they joined her in hurting the angel; she had chosen Dmitri because the archangel’s friendship with his family went back generations.
    Then she’d seen Dmitri.
    “At first she took my polite refusal to her offer with good humor. She thought I was playing a game, wanting a courtship.” He dropped the pebble but remained in his crouching position. “It amused and delighted her that I was so apparently proud. Gifts of exotic meats, precious spices, tapestries such as had never been seen in my small village, it all arrived day after day.”

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    Honor had covered the distance between them as he spoke, until she stood right by his side, close enough that his shoulder touched her leg. “I sent them all back, but she didn’t take offense.” Isis had believed he wanted more, considered himself worth more. “Hunks of pure gold, jeweled swords, a cascade of treasures that would’ve made a dragon proud, began to land on the simple doorstep of the home from where I farmed the land.”
    “Dmitri, I never even imagined such beautiful things.”
    He looked up, saw raw fear in those familiar eyes of darkest brown. “Ingrede, you are my wife, not Isis.” Anger that she’d doubt him made his tone harsh.
    “I know you won’t break your marriage vows, husband.” Trembling hands tucking the blanket around the baby. “But I’m afraid of what this angel will do to possess you.”
    He’d shrugged off Ingrede’s concern, because, after all, he was a farmer, no one important. “I thought she would eventually tire of my refusals and move on.” He had been a fool, an innocent in a way he couldn’t comprehend now. “But like Michaela,” he said, naming the archangel most people considered the most beautiful woman in the world today, “Isis was used to getting anything and everything she wanted.”
    Her vampire taken him as he returned home after a trip to the markets, a sweet for Misha tucked safely in one pocket, a pretty ribbon for his wife in the other. For the baby, such a small thing she was, he had bought a piece of scented wood with which to make a rattle. He’d seen Isis’s creatures coming, had had time to give Misha his sweet, caress his sleeping daughter’s cheek, and kiss his beautiful, strong wife good-bye.
    He would never forget the words she’d said to him that day, the love she had wrapped around him—though she had known he would soon be in another woman’s bed, committing a terrible betrayal of the vows he’d made to her one bright spring morning a turn of the seasons before Misha’s birth.
    “Will you forgive me, Ingrede? For what I must do?”
    “You fight a battle.” Her hand touching his cheek. “You do this to protect us. There is nothing to forgive.”
    “If I’d said yes at the very start,” he said now, swallowing the rage and anguish that had never died, “I think Isis would’ve used, then discarded me. I could’ve gone home.” To the only woman he had ever loved, to his son, his daughter. “But because I’d made it clear that I didn’t want her, she played with me as a cat does with a mouse.” First she’d taken him to her bed, viciously pleased by the knowledge that he couldn’t say no.
    “Such beautiful children you have, Dmitri. So young . . . so easily broken.”
    Later, after she’d had her fill, he’d been dragged to the cold, mold-lined bowels of her great castle, where she Made him with methodical care. Only after the conversion was complete, his body stronger and more able to bear damage, had he been stripped naked and chained in a spread-eagle position, every part of him exposed. “She started with a whip tipped with razor-sharp metal.”
    “Stop, Dmitri.” A hand clenching in his hair. “I can’t bear it.”
    He heard the tears, was astonished by them. Honor had almost shattered in that hellhole she’d been held in for two interminable months, but according to her psych records, she’d never once cried during her months in the hospital. Not once. Her doctors had been highly concerned, worried