“Hey.” Ashwini’s voice, pitched low to skate under Demarco and Ransom’s conversation. “I heard you were consulting for the Tower. Dmitri?”
“I cut him,” she whispered, the memory of the actual act still a black nothingness in her mind.
Ashwini’s grin was feral. “Good for you. Bastard probably deserved it.”
Staring at her best friend, Honor started to laugh and it was the first time she’d done so since Ash and Ransom carried her out of that filthy pit, bruised and violated and bleeding from so many bite marks torn into her flesh that the doctors had put her into an antiseptic bath, not wanting to miss one of the wounds.
Uninterested in sleep that night, Dmitri was standing on the railingless balcony outside his Tower suite when the nightshadow of wings swept over him and then down.
The angel who landed at his side was both familiar and unwelcome. “Favashi,” he said, having expected the visit. The archangel’s progress had been tracked since she was spotted an hour out from the Boston coast. “Have you come to lay claim to Raphael’s territory while he is in the Far East?”
Favashi’s serene face betrayed nothing as she folded back wings of a soft, exquisite cream. “We both know he’s stronger than I am, Dmitri. And even were he not, you lead his Seven. I would be a fool to stand against you in battle.”
He snorted, though she was right. His strength as a vampire, coupled with his intelligence and experience when it came to combat situations, made it certain that no city would ever fall under his watch. And this city? He’d watched over it since long before it was a jewel coveted by many, would never let it slip into enemy hands.
“So you are here to stroke my ego?” he purred, his tone as deadly as the edge of a scalpel. “Pity that I prefer the hands stroking me not belong to a cold-blooded bitch.”
Fire in her eyes, a glimpse of the vicious power that lived behind the mask of a lovely Persian princess, elegant and benevolent. “I am still an archangel, Dmitri.” A whip of arrogance in the reminder, but then her lips curved. “I was a fool and this is my reward. Will you never forgive a young woman’s ambition?”
Dmitri stared at her, this archangel who had made him believe, for one shimmering moment, that he might crawl out of the abyss and stand in the light once more. With hair of a luxuriant mink brown and eyes of the same lush shade, her skin the creamy gold of Persia, and her body that of a goddess, Favashi was a queen who looked the part.
Men had fought for her, died for her, worshipped her. Women saw in her a grace that was lacking in Michaela, the most beautiful of all the archangels, and so they served her with willing hands and loyal hearts, never understanding that Favashi was as merciless as her brethren in the Cadre. “Ambition,” he said, “has its price.”
Flaring out her wings, as if to expose them to the night’s languid caress, Favashi turned her face toward the diamondstudded nightscape that was Manhattan. “Such a stunning place, but so hard. My land is gentler.”
“A man could burn to nothing in your deserts without ever being found.” He had no doubts that Favashi had buried many a body beneath those rolling sand dunes. He didn’t have a problem with that—he’d buried a few bodies himself. What he did have a problem with was the fact that she’d not only fooled him into believing in her, but that she’d expected to lead him on a leash, her own personal guard dog cum assassin.
Once, so long ago it was another life, Dmitri had been turned into a thing to be used. Never again. “Why are you here?”
“I came to see you.” A simple answer, but her voice held a soft, exotic music that turned it into an invitation. “Let the past lie where it belongs. I would court you again.”
“No.” He captured her wrist as she raised her hand to touch his face, squeezing so hard he’d have fractured a mortal woman’s bones. “The last time an angel tried to court me,” he whispered, leaning down to speak with his lips brushing her neck, “she ended up in bite-sized pieces I then fed to her hounds.” It was he who had courted Favashi before—or at least she’d allowed him to believe he was the one leading the dance. The one good thing that had come out of the experience was that he’d never again make the mistake of believing a woman’s sweet lies.
Running his lips along the sensitive edge of her ear, he sucked lightly in the way he knew turned her weak, while rubbing his thumb over the escalating pulse in the wrist he still held. “I watched the dogs feed,” he murmured, reaching out to run the fingers of his free hand over the curving arches of her wings in the most intimate of caresses, “and I wished I had taken longer to carve her with the blade.”
Favashi ripped away her wrist and stepped back from him. It mattered little—her eyes were dilated, her skin flushed. He smiled, touched his finger very deliberately to the rapid pulse in her neck. “The bed isn’t far if you wish to be serviced, my Lady Favashi.”
No flinch at the mocking appellation. She was an archangel, after all. But her tone held a concern that might’ve once fooled him into believing she cared. “You are not who you once were, Dmitri. I would not have a man such as you in my bed.”
“Pity. I have so many things I’d enjoy doing to you.” None of it would have anything to do with pleasure. “Now,” he said, having had enough of games, “tell me the real reason you’re here.”
A strand of mink-dark hair played across her face before falling as the wind fell. “I spoke the truth.” Her face flawless in profile, she watched a group of angels angle in to land on a lower balcony, their wings cupped inward to lessen the speed of their descent. “Raphael and Elijah both have consorts and are stable, unlike the others in the Cadre.