“Yes,” Honor said. Amos, she’d realized, wasn’t the monster who haunted her.
It was the cage he’d put her in.
Getting out of the gleaming machine, she waited for Dmitri to join her and then she led them into the bowels of hell. The building was stickered with Do Not Enter signs, but she strode forward and through to an internal door that led to a cement-floored basement.
“He told me,” she whispered, nausea churning in her stomach, “that he planned to do up the place, turn it into an old-fashioned salon where only the privileged would gather, but first he had to make sure all his guests had the right appetites.” Appetites that meant Honor had almost died before Amos ever got the walls painted, much less replaced the mildewed carpet and broken floorboards.
A male hand closing over the doorknob. “I’ll go first.”
“I need to—”
“Face your demons.” Dmitri brushed her hair off her face with unexpected tenderness. “That doesn’t mean you have to do it alone and unshielded.”
Looking into that face that still bore remnants of the brutal gouges from the fight, she realized that he needed to do this, too, to protect her. She couldn’t pretend his protectiveness, his care, was unwelcome. Not here. Not when it was Dmitri. But—“Together.” She touched her hand to his. “I won’t hide from any part of this, not even behind your broad shoulders.”
A long, taut pause before he nodded and opened the door that led down into her own personal hellhole. But as she navigated the steps, Dmitri by her side, her nausea was wiped out by anger, cutting and bright . . . and then, as she stepped into the pitch-black room where she’d been held and tortured for two long months, by pride.
I survived this.
The thought had barely passed through her mind when the thing came at her out of the dark, teeth bared and fingers clawed, eyes glowing red.
She began to shoot, yelling, “No!” when Dmitri would’ve lunged past her. “I have it!”
The creature kept coming and she kept shooting, the noise deafening in the enclosed space. Finally it lay wheezing on the floor. Taking out her flashlight, she aimed the beam at whatever it was that had made this foul place its lair, never moving her gun off it.
“You.” A bubbling, blood-filled word.
He no longer looked anything like the photos Dmitri had shown her, his elegance buried under animalistic hunger. The skin had retracted from his mouth to bare his gums, his fangs; his face was hollow, falling into itself. As was his body under the tattered remains of his shirt, his broken ribs not yet completely fused, other parts of his torso pulverized with bullet wounds.
“I had you,” Amos whispered.
“No,” she said again, speaking to Dmitri.
“Honor.”
“He’s no danger.” Walking to look down at Amos’s emaciated form, she realized he’d somehow gotten himself here after Jiana carved him up. However, once safely hidden, he hadn’t had the strength to go out to feed, even as his body cannibalized itself to heal his massive injuries.
A pitiful creature.
But one with a reservoir of strength.
He lunged up at her with a hissing roar. Not losing her cool, she emptied her clip into his heart, blowing it to smithereens. “Will he rise again?”
“No. He was too weak.” Dmitri’s hand touched her hair. “It’s done.”
Turning, she looked around the smoke-filled room and saw just that. A room. “Yes. It’s done.”
Exhausted and emotionally drained, she didn’t protest when Dmitri flew them to the Tower and took her to his suite.
“I had a new bed delivered,” he told her as he drew her into the shower and began to help her strip. “You’ll be the only woman who ever sleeps in it.”
He owned her heart, this vampire with his scars and his darkness. “Come here.” Cupping his face as he leaned down toward her, she rubbed her nose against his, felt his body stiffen for an inexplicable second before he took her mouth in a raw claiming of a kiss, the kind of sinful, debauched kiss no good man would ever give to his woman. The resulting shower was decadent and welcome, but her body gave out when she hit the bed.
They wanted to dishonor her, the vampires with the hot eyes and the hands that roamed over her flesh as they pinned her to the wall. She knew that, understood that. “Forgive me, Dmitri,” she whispered inside her mind, and turned quiescent.
They laughed. “There, she wants it. I knew these peasants were all happy to spread their thighs for a real man.” Rough, clawing hands pushing up her skirts, another pair mauling her br**sts.
In spite of her shame, her rage, she told herself to be quiet, to not fight.
But then the third vampire walked into the nursery and came out with Caterina in his arms. “So sweet and soft,” he murmured, his tone chilling in its gentleness. “I have heard such blood is a delicacy.”
Quiet, quiet, she told herself even as fury turned her blood to flame. If she protested, the monster would know he held a piece of her heart in his hands and he would hurt Caterina even more. But her silence couldn’t protect her child, and she screamed in horror—“No! Please!—as the vampire lowered his head to Caterina’s tiny neck and began to shred it like a dog. Her baby’s terrified cry pierced the air, pierced the silence, pierced her until she bled.
Jamming her elbow into the nose of one of the vampires who held her, she stabbed the other with the kitchen knife she’d hidden in her skirts when they came into her home with such evil in their eyes. “Let her go!” Escaping because they hadn’t expected defiance, she wrenched Caterina from the feeding vampire’s arms. “No, no. Oh, no.” Her poor baby was dead, her throat so much meat, her little body already cooling.
“No!” It was the keening cry of a mother as the monsters tore at her again, but she would not release Caterina. Not even when they broke her ribs, shoved her to the ground, and pushed up her skirts. She didn’t care what they did to her, not as long as they didn’t touch Caterina . . . and didn’t discover Misha.
“Stay quiet, Misha,” she pleaded in her mind. “Stay quiet, so quiet.” He’d been playing in the little space below the roof that was his “secret” place, and she’d yelled for him to hide when she’d first seen the vampires. There had been no time to get to Caterina, but she had hoped they would not be so vicious as to harm a babe.
She felt no pain when they hurt her, felt nothing, every ounce of her being concentrated on listening for her son, on holding her daughter close. “I couldn’t protect her, Dmitri,” she whispered in a soundless voice as the vampires used her. “I’m sorry.” She would die here, she knew that. And whatever else, he would not forgive that. He was so stubborn, would carry the wound in his heart till the day he took his last breath, her beautiful, loyal husband who had loved her even when an angel came to woo him.