Holding her gaze, he closed the final distance between them and went down to his knees, that beautiful bruised face looking up at her.
When he placed his arms around her waist and pressed the side of his face to her abdomen, the tears started flowing again, slow and quiet, over her cheeks. Dmitri didn’t bow his head to anyone; he didn’t surrender or submit. But he was on his knees before her, vulnerable to a kick, a stab to the neck, the most violent rejection. “Oh, Dmitri.” Trembling, she ran her fingers through his hair, this man who had been scarred so badly that distrust was an instinctive response.
She knew the wildflowers had set him off in the bedroom, but she still had no idea why. However, now was not the time to ask. Now was the time to decide.
“Forgive me.”
Did she have that in her? The strength to forgive him for the horror he’d brought back to life just when she’d begun to believe she’d beaten her abusers after all, for the hurt he’d done to her heart, but most of all for the humiliation of being reduced to a scrabbling animal?
Honor’s hand fisted in his hair.
The rain continued to fall outside, but inside there was only silence—and an acuteness of clarity that told her the decision she made in this instant, about this man, would resonate throughout her life. If she stepped off the edge on which she currently stood, she could fall hard, perhaps shatter forever . . . or she could find her way home.
Home.
The idea of it was nothing but a fantasy built out of her intense and inexorable loneliness, many would say. But they didn’t understand the incomprehensible strength of what she felt for this man who knelt before her, giving her something he gave no one. All her life she’d searched for him, even when she hadn’t known his name. He wasn’t who she’d imagined him to be—was a far more deadly, hardened creature.
Still mine. Still my Dmitri. Wounded, changed . . . but not lost. I will not believe him lost.
Honor didn’t fight the voice that wasn’t her own and yet came from her soul. It was a familiar madness by now.
Dmitri’s hand spread on her lower back. “Don’t end this.”
“Would you go?” she asked, unclenching her hand, stroking her fingers through that black silk again as she wiped away her tears with her free hand.
A long, long pause. “Yes.” A single harsh word. “If you want your freedom, I’ll give it to you.”
So . . . the choice was hers and hers alone.
29
In the end, the decision wasn’t so difficult after all, because when it came to Dmitri, she had no sense of self-preservation. And that, too, was a madness, as relentless as the need she had to touch him, hold him . . . love him. “Stay,” she said, and felt the shudder in the powerful body of the man who’d offered her freedom.
It broke her a little.
Sliding down to her knees, she wrapped her arms tight around his neck and buried her face against the heated warmth of his skin. His own arms came around her an instant later. Fear, that insidious intruder, that silent shadow, she waited for it . . . but it didn’t come, as if the raw brutality of their fight had purged it out of her system, leaving her bruised and battered but whole.
“Never again,” Dmitri whispered into her hair, his voice naked, his shields stripped to nothing. “I swear to you.”
Cupping his neck at the nape, she caressed him with tender strokes, and it was an act of gentling for both of them. For this harsh, dangerous man who was her own, and for the ragged, lonely girl within her. “Tell me why.” She needed to understand, to see into the shadows of his heart.
One of his hands fisted in her hair. “It’s a memorial,” he said, his voice so rough, it was difficult to understand. “No one other than Raphael knows of its existence.”
Her heart thudded, a huge wave of knowing pushing at her mind, but it slithered out of her grasp to fade away like so much mist when she tried to reach for it, to hold it. Letting it go for the moment, she thought of the wildflowers, so many colors, so many shades, all of them bobbing their heads in welcome as she parked her vehicle far off in the distance to avoid crushing them. She’d walked, slow but certain, through the riot of color, drawn to the invisible ruin—as if her body were a compass and the ruin true north.
The melancholy of the place had weighed down her limbs, but she’d been certain she heard the echo of laughter, too . . . of a child’s delight. “It’s a place with memory,” she whispered. “There isn’t only sadness, Dmitri. You must remember.” The words weren’t her own, and yet they were. “You must.”
“I remember everything.” A laugh created of jagged metal and broken glass. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t. But those memories, they’re set in stone, never to be forgotten.”
Honor thought of what it must be like to carry such sorrow through the ages, to mourn for nearly a thousand years, and felt an ache so vast it had no end. “She wouldn’t have wanted this for you,” she said, so certain that she didn’t stop to question it. “You know that.”
Honor was right, Dmitri thought. Ingrede would have been horrified to see who—what—he had become, how he’d let the loss of her and the children twist him. But he also knew another thing. “Some things, no man can resist. Some losses, no husband”—no father—“can ever forget.”
“Dmitri—”
“I don’t know what I can give you, Honor,” he said because she deserved honesty, “but I know I’ve felt nothing like this since the moment she died.”