But it had.
Honor hadn’t known it was possible to fight the pleasure in a vampire’s bite before her abduction, but she’d learned to do it in that torture chamber after the first three times the architect of her capture sent her into an orgasm that had her throwing up afterward, the rape no less painful for having being done through her blood.
Jewel Wan hadn’t been pleased at her defiance.
Laughter, soft and vicious. “I will enjoy breaking you. When I’m done, you’ll call me mistress and beg for my touch.”
A cold, cold thing sliding through her veins, engulfing her chest. “Give me her address.”
Vivek twisted his chair around. “She’s four hundred and fifty years old, Honor.” Unhidden alarm in his voice. “Not powerful for that age, but more than powerful enough to snap your bones regardless of her size.”
Cutting pressure against her side, nails pushing in until they pierced the flesh. Fingers curling around her rib. “Now”—a malicious whisper—“who is your mistress?”
Her rib twinged where Jewel Wan had fractured it. The hole in her side had healed, the scar so tiny she didn’t even notice it usually, but today it pulsed a rigid lump. “I’ll look it up myself.” It wouldn’t be difficult, considering the vampire’s social status.
“No, wait. Here.” Vivek brought up the address. “Please don’t be stupid.”
Her mind was screaming at her to stop, to think, but overwhelming that was the sensory memory of those sharp-nailed hands, that hair of liquid silk. Touching her. Hurting her. Bile rose in her throat but she forced it down, memorized the address, and left. Vivek called out after her, but she wasn’t listening, the roar inside her a violent thunder.
Jewel Wan lived on an estate in the Hudson Valley, which meant Honor would need a car. However, when she went upstairs to requisition one, she was told a freeze had just been placed on her ability to access Guild resources.
Vivek.
Not bothering to argue, she strode out into the heavy but flowing traffic before rush hour. It took only seconds to hail a cab, direct it to the nearest car rental place. She swiped her credit card, filled in the paperwork with impatient hands, and fifteen minutes later she was on her way out of the city in a small, maneuverable SUV.
Be rational, Honor. You go there and she’ll kill you.
The thought was barely complete when another part of her mind said, Not before I put a few holes in her.
What about the others? the tiny, still-coherent part of her asked. The ones you won’t find because you’re dead?
“I’ll f**king well find her!” The voices went silent, overwhelmed by the red haze of a rage so vicious, Honor hadn’t known until that moment that she could hate with that depth of fury.
Two hours and a hundred ignored phone calls later, she looked down the evening-grayed straight of the empty road and saw a helicopter sitting in her path. “No. No!”
Braking to a halt, she shoved open the door and strode out to intercept the man walking toward her. Dressed in black, he appeared a darker piece of the falling night, but his chest felt very much real when she slammed her hands against it. “Get that thing out of my way!”
Dmitri’s eyes were full of a quiet, simmering anger when they met her own. “I thought you had a brain, Honor.”
“Yeah, well, seems I don’t.” Seeing his unyielding expression, she stalked back to the car. There were other ways to get to Jewel Wan’s showcase of a home.
Except Dmitri slammed the car door shut before she could reach it. “Jewel allows trained attack dogs to roam free on her estate and has a standing guard of four who all carry substantial weaponry.”
“Take your hand off the door.” Sliding out her gun, she pushed the barrel into his heart hard enough to bruise. “At this range,” she said, flicking back the safety, “I’ll do enough damage to put you down for hours.”
“Why this one?” A quiet question that cut her like a knife, destroying the ice that had carried her this far. “Valeria you handled with preternatural calm. Jewel drives you to insanity.”
Her muscles spasmed. Wrenching away the gun before she shot him by accident, she flicked on the safety and turned to look at the road she’d driven down only minutes before. When he came to stand at her back, she knew he was blocking the pilot from seeing her. That small act, it shattered her. “She didn’t hurt me.” A rough whisper. “Not until the very end.”
“Yet your hatred for her is so deep it blinds.” He touched his hands to her bare forearms, and she was startled when she didn’t pull away, when she allowed him to align his chest to her back, the masculine heat of him seeping through to her very bones.
It did nothing to wipe away the shame and humiliation that had her stomach in knots, but it melted the final fragments of ice, leaving her acutely exposed, vulnerable. “Except for the leader and his games at the start, the others,” she said, shivering with a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature, “no matter what else they did, only tried to force pleasure on me with their bite.”
Dmitri rubbed his hands down her arms, his breath hot at her temple.
“Everything else,” she continued, sinking into his heat, “was about power, about control.” When that failed to crush her, they’d amused themselves by making her scream instead. “But Jewel, she injected me with something . . . and then she touched me.” So delicate, so gentle, so horrifying.
It was near impossible to get air into her lungs now, her breath jerky, her blood pumping in erratic bursts. But she said the words, because the shame was too huge a thing to keep inside any longer. “She made me orgasm. Over and over.” Her body’s betrayal had broken something deep within her, taken the last shred of defiant pride.