Startled by the abrupt change of subject, she answered instinctively, “That should be easy enough to discover. The population inside the fort is tightly controlled.”
Jason spread his wings, the darkness spilling off them, and she knew it for a sign of dismissal.
“That’s it?” she asked, wanting to grab hold of him, shake him, shatter the obsidian walls that kept him remote from the world. “That’s all you have to say?” So easily, he’d destroyed then forgotten her.
“For now.” He rose into the air.
Teeth gritted, she pushed herself into a vertical takeoff, knowing the conversation was over. She could never catch him in the sky. Not only that, he was a spymaster. If he wanted to vanish, Mahiya was ill-equipped to keep track of him . . . and Neha had to know that. “A game,” she said through a throat raw with such rage that it threatened to blind. “It was a game from the start.” Neha had set Mahiya up to fail, set her up to die.
13
Dmitri braced himself on one elbow and leaned down to kiss awake the woman in his bed, her silky skin warm. The fathomless green was yet hazy with sleep when her eyes fluttered open. “Is it morning already?” Fingers threading through his hair, she claimed a deeper kiss that reminded him he belonged to her, should he have forgotten. “Good morning, husband.”
“Good morning, wife.” He would never tire of saying that. “Are you hungry?”
Honor’s response was a husky laugh that wrapped around his heart. “I do think you have an ulterior motive for that question.”
Since he’d already tugged down the sheet to display the lush mounds of her breasts, that was a moot question. He caressed her with teasing strokes, in the mood to play with his wife, and when she kicked off the sheets in unhidden frustration, he moved in to settle between her legs.
Where he teased her some more.
With his fingers.
With his body.
With his mouth.
Honor arched under him on a soft gasp, her hands clenching in his hair hard enough that it hurt a little. It was an exquisite pain that could grow into an addiction—the pain of her pleasure. Smiling, he rubbed his unshaven jaw against the soft skin of her inner thigh, alert for even the tiniest indication of distress, before prowling up a feminine form rippling with aftershocks of erotic ecstasy.
“Open your eyes.” Only when she obeyed the quiet order did he push into her. Always, always he made certain she was with him every step of the way. Because Honor had been brutalized, and those scars wouldn’t magically disappear in a week or even a year. They were an indelible part of her, but there was no need to make the damage any worse, something he’d once done and would never again so much as chance—he’d carve out his own heart first.
“Dmitri.” A throaty whisper, her lips on his neck, her fingers on his nape, caressing him, kissing him, just the way he liked.
It wasn’t the same as before, when he’d been with Ingrede, and he didn’t mourn that. No, he felt like the luckiest bastard on the planet. Because as Ingrede had loved the Dmitri he’d been, Honor loved the Dmitri he’d become. There was no horror or distaste in her at the darkness he carried within, nothing but an acceptance that told him he was home after centuries in the most barren wasteland.
“Stop,” he warned when she used her body to caress his cock, internal muscles utilized to painfully pleasurable effect. “I’m not ready to finish yet.”
“I love that tone in your voice.” Biting gently at his jaw, she fell back on the bed and interlocked her wrists above her head. “Here I am. With what new torment do you plan to torture me?”
She was teasing him, the wench, her body a molten fist that squeezed and tempted. Another day, he might have played an erotic game with her, but having kept his wife awake to near dawn, he was feeling as satisfied as a well-fed cat this morning. “A long, slow ride for you I think.” He placed a hand on her breast. “Very slow.”
“Not that.” Again, that playful light in her eyes. “Anything but.”
Kissing the smile from her lips and feeling the warmth of it travel through his own veins, he moved his body in a steady, deep rhythm that drew another shuddering wave of pleasure from Honor. Even as she cried out, her body locked possessively around him, he gave in to his own need and pierced the pulse in her neck for the merest taste.
“Dmitri.” A sigh of sensual delight, and then they were both tumbling into sensation lush and languid, limbs entangled and hearts fused.
Afterward, he soaped her body in the shower and helped her dry her hair. It wasn’t the kind of tenderness he’d have shown any other woman, had long believed he’d lost the capacity for it—but it made his bones hum in masculine satisfaction that she let him do what he would, her trust blinding. Kisses on his naked chest, her legs twining around his jean-clad ones as she sat on the counter bundled in a fluffy pink robe, she also made every attempt to distract him, and he laughed, threatened to punish her.
“Promises, promises.”
Ten minutes later, they sat across from one another at the little round breakfast table in the villa on the outskirts of Tuscany that Raphael had gifted them on their wedding. With Michaela in accord with Raphael for the moment, and no one aware of where Dmitri and Honor planned to honeymoon, it was a safe enough location.
“Dmitri?”
Catching the solemn note in her voice, he glanced up from where he was scanning through messages on his phone. “What is it?” Tower business could wait. Everything could wait. Honor came first.
She rose, walked around to lean against the table by his side, her fingers playing with strands of his damp hair. “You haven’t brought up the change . . . to becoming a vampire.”
Nudging aside the part in her robe, he placed his hand on the warmth of her thigh. “There’s no rush.” He’d once thought to do exactly that, to push her into immortality before she could change her mind, but with the dawn had come the realization he could no more force this on Honor than he could hurt her.
“I made my choice.” Her tone reminded him she was a hunter, blooded and honed.
“It was a choice made in the aftermath of glory,” he said, the emotions from that night vivid in his mind. “I won’t ever try to talk you out of it”—he wanted a thousand lifetimes with her—“but I find I have just enough of a scrap of goodness inside me to not railroad you.”
She smiled, his wife with her heart that belonged to him, a gift beyond price. “I still can’t believe you’re here, that we’re here.” Sliding into his lap, she laid her head against the bare skin of his shoulder. “I keep expecting it all to disappear.”
“It won’t.” That was a promise he’d spill blood to keep. “Eternity or a single mortal lifetime, we’ll walk the road together.”
14
Having spent the remainder of the day listening unseen to courtiers and soldiers, mortals and vampires, angels young and old, Jason used the cloak of night to conceal himself as he flew over the fort. He was near certain of the identity of the person who had murdered Eris. However, he needed two further pieces of information—Mahiya was currently attempting to gather one of those pieces in the trenches of Neha’s court.
Sweeping down to land near the exquisite courtyard garden where the beautiful had gathered tonight ostensibly to share their sorrow, he allowed the pool of darkness he’d chosen as his landing place to seep into him. Regardless of what some whispered, Jason couldn’t create shadows from thin air, but he could extend and amplify the smallest tendrils of the dark until he simply didn’t register in most people’s vision, or if he did, it was as a ghost image caught out of the corner of the eye.
He hadn’t always been so at home in the shadows.
“How can I be a night scout if I’m afraid of the dark?” His lower lip quivered as he walked beside his mother, helping her collect shellfish from the beach half a morning’s flight from their home.
“Everyone’s scared of the dark when they’re young.” Tugging him to a shallow rock pool, she showed him a hermit crab crawling around with its home on its back. “You love the dark sometimes—like on the night flight you took with your father.”
“There were stars then.” They had reminded him of the sparkly jewels his mother used to wear when the visitors came. No one had visited for a long time, probably because his father was always so angry. “It wasn’t really dark.”
His mother’s amethyst dress floated in the breeze. “You already see better in the dark than I do—you helped me find my lost earring two nights ago, remember?”
Jason nodded. “It wasn’t hard.” The black pearl with the pretty blue shimmer had kind of twinkled at him in the dark.
“Not for you, my smart boy.” Laughing in that way that made him laugh, too, she said, “One day, you’ll see so well at night, it will be as if you walk in daylight. You’ll never again be scared of the dark.”
His mother had been right. By the time he was a hundred and fifty, his night vision had developed to the point where he had the sight of a nocturnal predator. The dark was home to him, and now he wrapped it around himself as he stood watch.
The open space was lit only by the flickering light from hundreds of candles, many cradled protectively in colored glass holders that turned the marble of the buildings around the courtyard into a dreamscape. As for those who stood within—laughter was muted, the hues less vibrant than might be expected in an archangel’s court, but that was the only bow to Eris’s death.
No one would guess that his funeral pyre blazed tomorrow.
Yet regardless of the many painted butterflies who held glasses of champagne and spoke with elegant gestures while subtly jockeying for position, he had no difficulty pinpointing Mahiya. Dressed in a silk sari of blue green embellished with a thin gold border, she moved through the crowd with the ease of someone on familiar ground.
Right then, she halted, angling her head in his direction, her gaze so intent he imagined he could glimpse the brilliant tawny brown even from this distance. There was no way she could’ve sensed him, but he was certain she had. When she moved again, it was with a fine layer of tension across her shoulders. An enigma was Mahiya, with the manners of the court elite and the instincts of a hunter.
Looking away to sweep the crowd with his gaze, he confirmed that Neha remained with Eris’s body. Jason had had confirmation that she’d granted Eris’s family permission to attend the dawn funeral ceremony, but no one else. Some whispered the archangel was jealous of her consort even in death, but Jason believed Neha mourned too deeply to share her grief.
Returning his attention to Mahiya, he saw that she was drifting away from the group. He scanned the guests who remained once more before making his way to the palace he shared with Mahiya, catching a glimpse of blue green silk whispering past the doorway.
Entering behind her, he locked the main doors and made his way upstairs to find her on their shared balcony, her gaze on the courtyard lit only by four quiet lamps. She didn’t startle when he came to stand beside her. A single wide, shallow step separated his balcony area from hers, and where he had columns holding up the roof, the edge open for easy flight, she had a railing, which she now gripped.
