Archangel's Vipe - Nalini Singh Page 0,4

recognized the voice at once.

Male laughter came through those same speakers. “I thought, my fellow adventurer into the wonders of worlds unseen, you might need a little entertainment,” the vampire said in his warm tenor. “Would you like to come up?”

She caught sight of the plane heading in to land. Her heart began to beat faster. In preparation. Because with her and Venom, it was always a war. “No, but thanks. And since when are you an air traffic controller?”

“I’m keeping Andreja company.”

Trace signed off with a line of poetry that made her heart soar.

Her and Trace’s friendship was based in words, in the poetry in which they found wonder and comfort.

Then there was the man about to get out of the plane that had come to a smooth stop on the tarmac. He’d been part of her life almost since the hellish day when she’d watched helplessly, her body paralyzed by poisoned blood, as an insane archangel tore a screaming Shelley’s arms from her body as if he was pulling the wings off a butterfly, then paused to kiss Holly with his red-rimmed mouth.

“Shh.”

Hands curling at her sides as the hairs on her nape rose, she shoved away the past to focus on the man she was here to pick up, a man who’d irritated and angered her from their first meeting.

When the Tower had reassigned him away from New York just over two years earlier, she’d said good riddance. Only to realize that with Venom gone, no one in the city truly saw the part of her that was cold and deadly and eerily inhuman. The immortals who surrounded her were powerful and deadly, but no one else was so strangely other.

Venom was both immune to her capacity to mesmerize prey and the only person who could teach her how to deal with the ability. Which meant she’d had to have his annoying voice in her ear once a week over the time that he’d been away—in a place no one would mention by name to her. He’d been meant to return to work physically with her, but a strange, taut tension had gripped the immortal world in the interim, and Venom had made no visits to New York.

He stepped out of the private jet.

Of course he was wearing a flawlessly tailored suit in black, paired with a black shirt and no tie. Wraparound mirrored sunglasses obscured his eyes. Holly still hadn’t figured out if he wore the sunglasses because his eyes were sensitive to light, so people wouldn’t freak out, or simply because he was an asshole who liked to look impenetrable.

She’d bet on the last.

After striding down the steps of the plane with a battered brown—in an elegant way, of course—leather hold-all slung over his shoulder, he turned to look back at the plane, raising a hand toward the cockpit. The early-afternoon sunlight caught on the clean line of his jaw, the burnished brown of his skin glowing in the light. His slightly overlong chocolate-dark hair was brushed neatly, not a strand out of place.

The damn man looked like he’d stepped out of an ad for fine whiskey or luxury watches.

She was scowling when he met her eyes through the glass. She knew he was looking at her despite the mirrored sunglasses. Arms folded and feet set apart, she stared back.

He smiled and slid off the sunglasses.

Eyes slitted like a viper’s met hers, the color a bright astonishing green. I see you missed me, kitty, he mouthed.

Holly gave him a sickly sweet smile . . . followed by the finger.

2

Sliding the sunglasses back on, Venom laughed. He was inside the waiting area moments later. The raw power of him crashed into her. Violently. Despite her earlier thoughts, she’d forgotten just how incredibly strong he was—she knew this was no power play; he wasn’t trying to overwhelm her on purpose.

This was simply who he was: a vampire a hundred times more deadly than the guard outside.

“Damn,” she said with a downturned face. “I was hoping you’d fallen into a crevasse.” He’d mentioned in their last call that he was about to go out on a climb. “Too bad, I guess.”

“I see those little kitten fangs of yours are still just as cute.”

She wanted to hiss at him, controlled the urge only because it would amuse him—and because in the time that he’d been gone, she’d achieved iron control over the most obviously inhuman aspects of her nature.

As for the ugly voice that kept whispering inside her when

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