Archangel's Viper

Her large hoop earrings swung with each move, light sparking off the gold.

Dmitri still got her pinned, but he was sweating by then. And when he hauled her back up, he said, “You just volunteered to be my sparring partner while Raphael is away.”

Sauntering over to lean one bent arm on her husband’s shoulder, Janvier’s glowing pride unhidden, Ashwini said, “I’ll think about it.”

Holly felt her eyes widen even further.

“Still in awe of Dmitri, I see.”

“I don’t see you arguing with him.” She turned to face the vampire whose presence was a prickling across her senses. “Venom,” she said, mimicking how Dmitri had said his name in the office. “And off you ran like a good little vampire.”

“Oh, how you have wounded me, kitty.” Cool amusement in every word.

Probably because, unlike her, he was totally confident of his place in the Tower and in his skin. He wasn’t some weird hybrid creation no one knew quite what to do with.

“To be wounded,” she said, “you’d have to have a semblance of humanity.” She shook her head, her face pitying. “Too bad you sold your soul to the devil centuries ago.”

A nictitating moment, his expression icing over in a way that had her going motionless. Holly wasn’t afraid—she had a predator inside her, too, and it was poised to strike. But then Venom smiled and it was the charming smile he kept for women he was trying to get into bed. Not that he had to try very hard: viper eyes or not, once he focused his attention and languorous charm on a woman, she tended to melt.

Holly felt like kicking those women’s backsides and telling them to have a little respect for themselves, and to stop giving him further encouragement to be an asshole who thought he was God’s gift to women. “Not even if the Hudson freezes over and turns into a candy-colored snow cone.”

“Alas, kitty,” Venom said from his lounging position, “you’re too bite-sized for me. But I thought you might be starved for male attention, being that your prickles scare them away.”

“Oh, you’re so kind, so generous.” She clasped her hands in front of her chest and beamed before dropping the act with a roll of her eyes that made him throw back his head and laugh.

It erased the lingering edges of ice, and of that charm she saw as a mask.

Refusing to let the warm sound wrap around her—or to consider how handsome he was with smile lines cutting into his cheeks—she returned her attention to the sparring circle. Dmitri was leading Ash and Janvier through a series of moves that appeared easy enough—except that both were sweating. “What am I not seeing?”

“It’s the muscle tension,” Venom said with deceptive laziness. “It’s the lack of speed that’s the killer. Try to do this.” He showed her a single arm move. “And hold.”

Holly copied him because, his aggravating tendencies aside, Venom was highly trained. At first, it was fine. And then . . . Teeth gritted, she rode past the pain, past the haze of red that started to flicker in her brain.

Venom snapped out an arm toward her, so fast that she had to move or take a punch in the face. “Into beating up women now?” she snarled, careful to keep her voice low so Dmitri wouldn’t hear.

Eyes glittering, the slitted black center onyx against the brilliant green, Venom leaned in close. “I thought you had your masochistic tendencies under control?”

Holly flushed. “I don’t enjoy pain.”

“No?” Venom’s power slid over and around her, slow and sensuous and deadly. “Then why were you trying to snap a tendon by holding a pose that’s not meant to be held beyond the pain threshold—at least not until you’re an expert?”

Massaging her abused arm, Holly looked away. Venom was the last person to whom she’d admit that she’d rather feel pain than the viciously inhuman urges that had begun to rise up inside her more and more often. I’m not insane, she told herself even as fear gnawed at her insides. I’m not a monster.

“Some of us,” she said aloud through a forcefully relaxed jaw, “like to push ourselves.”

Venom didn’t reply, but she could feel him staring at her with those astonishing eyes that had fascinated her from the first. It didn’t matter. Venom had no right to her secrets. Mia alone suspected something was wrong beyond Holly’s continued fight to create a new life for herself, but Holly’s sister was a mortal who had no knowledge of immortal horrors. She’d never guess that it wasn’t just a terrible echo of trauma.

“Venom, mon ami!” Janvier called up at one point. “Come over tonight for dinner.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You, too, Holly,” Ashwini said before Holly could sidle away. “Let’s dress up.”

Caught, she nodded. It wasn’t that she didn’t love spending time with the couple—they’d become two of her favorite people—but being forced to make nice with Poison was not her idea of a good time. “Don’t you have to go rest?” she said to him. “It must’ve been a long trip from . . . Where were you again?”

“Nice try, kitty, but knowledge of certain places in this world is earned.” Rising to his feet with a muscular grace she grudgingly admired, he said, “I do need to check on a few matters. I’ll pick you up at six for the drive to Janvier and Ash’s.”

Holly didn’t say anything—but neither did she agree to meet him for the drive. Walking down the bleachers to the training area once the session was over, she shadowed Dmitri as he’d ordered. He went up to his and Honor’s apartment to grab a shower first, leaving her to work on her laptop in a spare office on the same floor as his own office.

Holly had stopped her studies for two and a half years after the attack. When she’d picked them back up, her former major of fashion studies had seemed like the daydream of a silly girl. A girl who’d been offered an exciting position at a fashion house and who’d planned to finish up her degree part time.

Holly missed that girl sometimes.

After her return to school, she’d wandered through the curriculum aimlessly for two months before she’d found herself sneaking into psychology lectures—and staying for hours. Not hard to figure out why she was drawn to the study of the mind. Jeez, she was a textbook case of “physician, heal thyself,” but that awareness of her own messed-up psyche hadn’t stopped her from switching majors and starting from scratch since cross-credits weren’t about to happen.

No one at the Tower monitored her schoolwork—that was her parents’ job.

Daphne and Allan Chang insisted on paying as they had before: “This is our responsibility!” they’d said when she’d talked about taking out a loan. “Do you think we saved for your education so you could get a loan?”

Of course, that meant the two kept an eagle eye on her grades. They were also pushing her to go all the way and get a doctorate. Apparently, one doctor in the family wasn’t enough. The old Holly would’ve been frustrated by their desire to be so involved in her life, but the Holly who’d died and lived again just smiled and sent her mom and dad copies of her exam results and graded essays.

Because her future . . . it was a total unknown. While the healers thought she’d have a vampiric life span, it was also possible she’d drop dead in ten years without warning—or go frothing-at-the-mouth mad and have to be put down.

Uram’s bloodborn taint was a gift that never stopped giving.

Was it any wonder she was half crazy?

5

Venom wasn’t the least surprised when Holly wasn’t waiting for him at the front of the Tower for the six P.M. pickup. Since he knew she wasn’t in any way stupid, he was very sure she hadn’t headed out to Ash and Janvier’s on her own. So he tracked her.

And found her at the very top of the Tower, her eyes on the glowing red golds of the Hudson under a startling sunset. Venom had called this land home for nearly two hundred years, but he still appreciated the magnificence of it. As he appreciated the wild nature and unbreakable spirit of the fine-boned woman who stood staring at the setting sun.

After what she’d undergone, Holly Chang should’ve been a candidate for what mortals had once called insane asylums. She’d teetered on that edge for a while, but she’d never fallen. Today, she stood dressed in a sleek black cheongsam that celebrated her femininity. Hitting her midcalf, it was printed with tiny flowers in indigo blue. She’d pulled that silky hair full of color up into a high and equally sleek ponytail.