Shaking her head to clear it, she came to a standstill beside Dmitri as he looked down at Jiana’s apparently tormented form. “You were too clever, Jiana,” he said in a purr of a voice that wrapped ice around Honor’s throat.
Jiana continued to rock back and forth, her tattered nightgown clinging to her slender body, the bruises on her face having turned a sickly yellow-green at the edges as she healed. She gripped a serrated blade in one hand, the entire thing encrusted with dried blood that resisted the rain.
In a whiplash-fast move Honor didn’t see coming, Dmitri slid out a razor-sharp hunting knife from his boot and went as if to slice off Jiana’s head. The female vampire was flowing up and striking a defensive pose in the blink of an eye, her own knife slashing out toward Dmitri. He knocked it to the ground with inhuman speed, and, gripping Jiana’s wrist, held her in place as he put the edge of his deadly blade to her throat. “Now,” he said, “you will talk.”
Jiana’s gaze skittered to Honor. “Help me.” Such torment in her eyes, such a black depth of sorrow . . . and behind it, a prowling viciousness Honor would’ve missed if Dmitri hadn’t pushed the blade a fraction deeper, startling Jiana into dropping her mask of emotional pain for a single split second.
“You created him,” Honor said, sickened. “Whatever his madness, you took advantage of it to twist him even further.”
Jiana’s face morphed, the frail beauty of her transforming into something contemptuous and sneering. “He is my son.” No remorse. “Mine to do with as I choose.”
At that instant, Honor understood the depth of both Jiana’s malevolence and her intelligence. She’d had the foresight to play them from the start, her “penance” with the blood junkies a smokescreen set up just in case anyone came looking. Even if that hadn’t happened till months or years in the future, Jiana would’ve always been able to point back to her apparent distress at the time to lend credence to her protestations of being guilty of nothing except loving her child too much—a child she’d clearly always been ready to sacrifice.
And yet, Honor was certain the love Jiana had professed for Amos wasn’t all a lie. Something had tipped the balance—perhaps the fact that Amos had not only slipped the leash and begun to act on his own, rather than as Jiana’s creature, but that he’d started to attract the wrong kind of attention. “He’d become a liability,” she murmured, “might’ve betrayed you if he was taken.” Surrounded by the carnage Jiana had done—had enjoyed doing—Honor was convinced the female vampire’s hands were stained with far more evil than anyone other than Amos realized. “He learned everything he knew from you.”
A flash of vicious rage in those onyx-dark eyes that turned Honor’s guess into truth even before Jiana said, “I would’ve forgiven his taking of you—it was an intriguing amusement after all.” Words designed to stab and cut. “But the stupid boy planned to take two more hunters after I warned him to stay quiet and out of sight.”
So Jiana had set out to torture, then execute him. If she had succeeded, Amos’s death would’ve been far more painful than anything Honor could’ve ever devised . . . for he would’ve died looking into the pitiless face of the one woman who was meant to love him without corruption or condition.
A woman whose mouth now curved into a nasty smile. “I did so enjoy being kind to you in the pit. I had plans to return, to earn your trust. Your anguish would’ve been all the sweeter when I turned on you.”
“Enough,” Dmitri said, cutting Jiana off when she would’ve continued. “Where is Amos?”
“If I knew, do you think I would’ve alerted the guards?” Not giving any warning, Jiana lunged at the blade against her throat, but Dmitri was faster, dancing the weapon out of her way.
“There will be no easy death for you,” he said, gripping the vampire by the throat and lifting her up off her feet. “You will come before Raphael.”
Jiana began to kick and scream. “We fall under your purview, Dmitri! You must mete out the punishment!”
“First we must know all of what you have done.” With those words, he snapped his hand.
Jiana’s head lolled, her body going limp, and Honor realized he’d broken her neck as he’d done Jewel Wan’s. “It’ll be easier to transport her this way,” he said when he saw her staring.
The violence of his world staggered her, but she was no innocent. She’d known from the instant she decided to step onto this path that it would be no gentle ride. That didn’t mean she had to accept everything as it was. “She would’ve gone anyway.”
Dmitri passed Jiana’s limp body over to another vampire, with orders for her to be taken to the Tower under constant guard. “I was getting sick of her voice.”
“Dmitri.”
A dark glance, fine jewel-like beads of water collecting on lashes black as the night. “Trying to gentle me?”
“That line you walk,” she said, knowing he was pushing her on purpose, “it’s very thin. I’m trying to stop you from crossing it. Everything you do, every decision you make, it has a cumulative effect.”
He strode to the edge of the rise, a black silhouette against the chill gray of the morning, his eyes on the gracious home below. “Near to a thousand years, Honor.”
“You’re an almost-immortal.” Moving to join him, she touched her fingers to his. “You have another thousand to step away from that line.”