Archangel's Viper

Or both.

“Your blood is valuable currency,” he added.

“Unfortunately.” Holly didn’t carry the deadly toxin that had resulted in Uram’s murderous insanity, but she carried something that wasn’t standard issue in either the mortal or immortal world.

No one had quite figured out what yet. They just knew Holly was a “strangeness unseen in nature”—words spoken by a healer working on her case.

“There’s another possibility,” Venom said. “You’re unique and such things rarely come along in an immortal life. As Zhou Lijuan collects the most extraordinary wings in angelkind, so another collector may seek to acquire you.”

Holly shivered inwardly at the mention of the seriously creepy Archangel of China. “How can she collect angelic wings? Does she cut them off?” she asked, horrified.

Venom’s answer was chilling. “No, she prefers the whole body. Like pinning a dead butterfly to a wall.”

“Fuck, immortals are twisted.” And theirs was her world now. “Did they react to you that way? Like a curiosity or a collector’s item?”

“I wasn’t as much of a shock. Not given the identity of my Maker.”

The Archangel Neha, the Queen of Snakes, of Poisons.

“But,” he continued, his voice a little distant, as if he was looking hundreds of years back, “I’m the only vampire she has ever Made who inherited so much of what makes her who she is. There were many who tried to lure me from her court at the conclusion of my Contract.”

Holly was intrigued despite herself. “Was Raphael one of those people?”

His laughter was incongruously warm for a man with the eyes of a viper. “The sire has never had to lure anyone, kitty.”

Hissing at him before she could stop herself, she braked to a hard stop in front of the gleaming spike that was the cloud-piercing form of Manhattan’s Archangel Tower. “You can slither away now,” she said when he didn’t move.

“You’ll be coming with me.” His tone was unbending. “Dmitri will want to know about the kidnapping attempt.”

Holly’s gut tensed. She’d been afraid of that. And while she cheerfully defied Venom for no reason except that he was aggravating, defying Dmitri was a whole another matter. It wasn’t that she was scared of him—though Dmitri could be terrifying. It was that she didn’t want to disappoint him.

Spinning the car left and down into the underground Tower garage, she parked in silence and got out. Venom grabbed his hold-all from the trunk, then prowled beside her with a liquid smoothness she’d thought an affectation until she’d seen him fight and realized his eyes didn’t lie—Venom had been changed down to his very cells during his conversion to vampirism.

She wondered why he’d made the choice and if it had been worth it to lose not just his freedom for a hundred years in payment, but also his humanity in ways even most vampires didn’t have to consider.

Stepping into the elevator, she kept her curiosity under wraps and her eyes resolutely trained frontward even as the sinuous slide of his power filled the small space. But she was conscious of him taking off his sunglasses and hooking them into the neck of his shirt. He rarely did that except with Raphael and others of the Seven.

The elevator doors opened smoothly on the floor of the Tower that held Dmitri’s office. Holly hadn’t been up there for a while, though Honor had told her about the renovation. The walls were a smooth gray, the carpet a richer shade of the same elegant color.

It had all been black beforehand, pure Dmitri.

Now, it reflected both the most powerful vampire in the city—and his hunter wife.

“What are those dents?” Honor had to be dismayed at the damage to her newly painted walls. At least the pretty artwork she’d picked out appeared to have survived unscathed.

“Looks like knives punching into the walls,” Venom said after a quick glance, his lips curved in what looked like genuine amusement. “My guess is Elena and Dmitri.”

Then there was no more time to prepare for what was to come; they’d reached Dmitri’s office. Raphael’s deadly second wasn’t standing behind his desk—Holly had never seen him actually sitting in his office chair—but was out on the railingless balcony beyond. He didn’t look a thousand years old, maybe in his early thirties at most. A dangerous man with black hair and dark brown eyes and sun-bronzed skin who “exuded sex,” according to the media.

Dropping his hold-all in a corner, Venom strode straight out.

Holly followed with more care—she’d been warned over and over that while she was like a vampire, she wasn’t quite one. And even a vampire would die if he fell from this height and his head separated from his body. That Dmitri and Venom were so cavalier about it spoke to the amount of power that ran in their veins.

Dmitri had been on the phone but hung up the instant he spotted Venom.

A smile breaking out over his face, he hugged the other man in a way that said they were friends rather than simply compatriots or brother warriors. More than six hundred and fifty years separated Dmitri and Venom, the oldest and the youngest in the Seven, but there was no distance in that moment.

As she watched, Dmitri slapped Venom on the back before the two men stepped apart.

“Holly.”

Holly walked to meet Dmitri halfway and, when he drew her into the warm strength of his arms, she didn’t resist. Where other women looked at him and saw a hard-bodied vampire who oozed sex appeal, Holly saw the man who’d found her at her lowest, full of self-loathing and guilt that she’d survived when her friends were all dead. He’d been so angry that awful night, had told her brutal truths about what would happen to her if she continued on her self-destructive path, but he hadn’t abandoned her when she admitted her fear of what she was becoming.

He’d stroked her hair as they sat on a cliff with a glittering view of Manhattan, and he’d let her cry until she had no more tears left in her. Until she was ready to claw out some kind of a life for herself from the ashes of who she’d once been. In the time since, he’d watched over her development and made sure she didn’t drown under the black waves of her nightmares.

Running his palm over her ponytail before he released her, he shifted so that he had his back to the precipitous drop behind him, while she and Venom stood in front of him. The wind whipped at his black T-shirt, the color the same as his jeans and his boots.

“Can we go inside?” Holly blurted out. She was loath to betray any weakness in front of Venom, but she hated seeing Dmitri so close to the edge.

To her surprise, Venom didn’t comment at all as they slipped inside Dmitri’s office. At which point he told Dmitri what had happened. Dmitri’s dark eyes sharpened, the lethal predator in him suddenly evident—this was the man spoken of as being merciless, Raphael’s “Blade” who made bloody mincemeat of his enemies.

“The bounty hunters specifically wanted Holly?”

“No doubts.” Venom pulled out the phone they’d confiscated. “I’ll have Vivek see what he can do with the e-mail address.”

Dmitri nodded before turning to Holly, the violence of his power making her teeth ache. “Were you hurt?”

“No.” She pointed at the torn shoulder of her top. “My father gave me this top just last week. The stupid goons ripped it.”

Dmitri’s smile was lethal. “If there’s a significant enough bounty, this will only be the first attempt.” He folded his arms. “The bigger threats will be the old ones so bored with life that risking death by attacking one of the Tower’s people will be a dangerous thrill. They won’t be as incompetent as this trio.”

Holly got a prickling at the back of her neck. “I can take care of myself,” she reminded him. “You made sure of that.” He was the one who’d thrown her into training designed to increase her control over her abilities.

Pinning her to the spot with the darkness of his gaze, Dmitri raised an eyebrow. “Could you have taken all three vampires today?”

Holly opened her mouth . . . and couldn’t lie. Not to Dmitri. “No,” she finally grated out. Mike and his fellow idiot goons had been big bastards, and while Holly could fight, she wasn’t an experienced hunter or warrior.