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.
“You don’t go anywhere alone until we figure out who it is that wants you and why.” The words were an order. “I’ll speak to Janvier and Ashwini, see who best to assign you.”
“I can babysit,” said the aggravating vampire beside her, the one whose power kept sliding around her, the feel of