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Dmitri hadn’t really paid attention to the transformation because he’d been on the same path But now the blue of Raphael’s eyes was touched with humor and he spoke to Dmitri as they once had on a field far froround “She ca what it said about him that he’d not just noted the difference in Raphael, but responded to it

“As she is not injured or dead, I take it you controlled yourself”

“Without difficulty” The truth hile his pride had been pricked by the way Favashi had played hi If Honor did anything similar, he realized, told him lies of love with such a sweet face, there would be no cold, only the s “If we are asking questions,” Raphael said, “then I have one of my own Why have you never blamed me for Isis’s interest in you?”

“Because,” Dmitri said, “Isis’s madness was her own And if there was any penance to be paid, you paid it in that room beneath her keep” Chained to the wall opposite Dmitri, Raphael had been forced to watch Dmitri’s violent, forced conversion, to witness Isis’s other atrocities, to listen to D screarede and Caterina

And he’d been there at the end, a silent guard, when Dmitri had held his son’s tiny body in his arms and cried until he had no tears left inside hiht I died in that roo with the ile Misha’s bones had been, how effortless it had been to snap the tiht you had, too”

Dmitri , then?”

“Perhaps I knehat you would one day becoel Or perhaps it was because you weren’t the only one who made a vow in that place of horror

Dh atinvolved with a hunter, and yet I findtoo important, a compulsion that wasn’t only sexual, wasn’t only physical

“It is no hardship,” Raphael said “To have a hunter by your side”

But she wasn’t simply a hunter She was the worede’s laughterit had been so very, very long since he’d heard it, but when Honor laughed, he felt as if he could ale ht—his heart ached with a need that had survived immortality, survived his every depravity, survived his oill

“Have you had her blood tested?” Raphael’s question was pragiven that the Guild keeps units of stored blood for all its hunters”

Ignoring the pain in his chest, Del “So certain?”

Raphael didn’t answer, because no ansas needed They wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation if Honor wasn’t important “I would not,” he said instead, “have you lose another ht of Illiuh he’d lost the hued angel had watched over her family until she passed, and then he had watched over her children and her children’s childrenuntil they spread out across the world, and the se where his love had been born ceased to exist