24

Holly’s breath rushed out of her.

Hair falling around his face and his eyes brilliant in the fading night, Venom pinned her wrists on either side of her body. His chest heaved, his shirt dirty and torn. And his smile, it was a thing of primal beauty.

Holly didn’t think. She just snapped up her head and captured his lips with her own.

Venom pushed her back down, his body erotically heavy and his tongue lashing hers. Her fangs nicked him. He ignored it. Emboldened, she licked her tongue around his own fangs. He made a sound that she couldn’t describe except to say it wasn’t human. His erection a brand against her, he deliberately nicked her lip.

She hissed out a breath, and he was sipping from her.

Holly groaned, her spine arching. She hadn’t known that being fed from could be erotic. Sliding his hands down her body after releasing her wrists, he grazed his thumbs over the sides of her breasts even as his mouth moved down her jaw and to her vulnerable throat. He nicked her there, too, just enough to release her blood but not enough to hurt.

He fed on her in little sips, like she was the appetizer to a main meal. He didn’t rip her shirt off her. He undid the buttons one by one, using both hands to push the sides open to expose her breasts before he dipped his head and captured a taut, sensitive nipple in his mouth . . . and then he nicked her there, too.

Holly screamed, uncaring of who might hear.

Venom flicked his tongue against her flesh, his hand on her neglected breast. It was too small, she knew that, but he was doing things with the pad of his thumb that were making her legs twist and her body curve. She kicked off her shoes and socks, tried to find a foothold in the earth, but it kept disappearing under a haze of need.

Smiling at her when he raised his head, Venom said, “I like your scream.”

He’d opened her jeans and his hand was between her legs before she could process the words. She screamed again, her tightly wound body coming apart on his fingers. When he tugged off her pants to expose the peach-colored lacy panties she wore underneath, she didn’t feel the least bit exposed. Twisting up with the primal speed he’d shown her she possessed, she switched their positions.

He let her unbutton his shirt to expose the hard, toned plane of his chest. His skin was the same beautiful burnished brown as on his face. “You go shirtless?” Older vampires found it difficult to tan, but Venom’s skin color was natural—it should still have been paler on the parts of his body that were most often covered.

“I spent a lot of time in an outdoor training ring while I was away,” he said, lying there unworried that someone might come upon them. “Extended combat training.”

Holly loved watching him move when he sparred—though she’d never tell him that. Leaning down, she played her hands over the ruthlessly toned plane of his chest before pressing her lips to his skin. The contact wasn’t enough. She wanted to rub herself against him, wanted to be skin to skin far more intimately.

Sitting up on his body, she went to peel off her shirt when the wings inside her spread out in a violent burst.

•   •   •

Venom knew he was making a mistake, but it was the most erotic mistake of his life. He watched with barely leashed anticipation as Holly opened up her shirt, exposing the taut mounds of her breasts, the plump flesh making his fingers curl into the grass. She was smiling at him in a slightly predatory way that made him feel a little hunted.

Venom liked it. No woman had ever looked at him that way.

Like he was her prey.

A heartbeat later, her back arched violently, her head dropping back as her chest began to burn with an acid green glow that formed into the shape of wings. Not angelic wings. Not bird wings. Strange, jagged wings with sharp edges that looked as if they might cut. The color was viper green and acid green and light, light green, rippling shades that seared bright enough to glow in the darkness.

He snapped up into a seated position, his hands on her waist. “Holly!”

Her fingers clutched at him, gripping so tight to his biceps that her nails cut into his skin. Pain, he realized, she was in pain. He made the only decision he could. Using his fangs to tear open a vein in his wrist, he held it over her mouth. He didn’t know if his blood would help her fight this, or if it would just fuel the effect, but he had to try.

Her throat moved. Again and again, his blood sliding down her throat.

The wings flickered . . . and faded.

Holly’s head came up into a normal position. Wiping the back of her arm across her mouth, the blood smearing the white of her shirt, she stared at him with eyes that were stark. “What happens now?”

Do I die? was the unasked question in those eyes stripped bare of all shields, all protections. Will you execute me?

Venom gripped the back of her neck and tugged her close. “Now,” he said, “we find out some answers.”

•   •   •

Holly’s chest still ached at ten the next morning, when she got out of the shower and began to dress. She’d had about five hours of dark, dreamless rest, which was enough to not leave her feeling like a zombie.

Amazingly, she’d actually fallen asleep on the short drive back to the Tower after they left Central Park, so exhausted she’d felt wrung dry. She’d woken with a start when Venom opened the passenger-side door of his Bugatti in the Tower parking garage, her heart thundering at what was to come.

He’d brushed his fingers over her cheek, his gaze inscrutable. “You’re in no state to have a discussion with Dmitri, kitty. Get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Now it was morning, and she had to face the judgment she’d tried to avoid for so long. In a way, it was a relief to have it all out in the open. No more hiding the howling otherness within her, the thing that was becoming ever stronger. No more pretending that she was getting better.

Having pulled on a pair of sleek black jeans, Holly stared at her naked upper half in the mirror tucked into a corner of her room. It was a freestanding one with an ornate frame that she’d painted pink. What that mirror reflected at her was smooth, unblemished skin. She ran her fingers over the centerline of her chest. Her flesh ached, but there was no visible bruise. Just an internal one.

When her hand brushed the slight curve of her breast, she paused, looked at herself again, this time as a woman. Her body was slender but had gained a lithe layer of muscle in the years since the attack. Her breasts, however, were exactly the same size as back then—she’d always hoped they’d get bigger if she had children, but she was part vampire now. No matter what, her body would spring back to this same state relatively quickly.

Slitted green eyes glinting at her, a man who saw nothing amiss in the small and taut mounds.

Color flooded her cheeks, her behavior of the night before a little embarrassing in the bright light of day. What had she been thinking?

Exhilaration. Heat. A dangerous, beautiful man who wasn’t afraid of her.

Her core tightening, she turned away to pick up a dark pink tank top and pulled it on. Over it, she pulled on another tank in blood orange, layering the two so that you could see both colors. It covered everything very neatly. Had her sister worn this, their mother would’ve called her an “advertisement”—Daphne Chang wasn’t the most emancipated of women when it came to her ideas about appropriate clothing.

Mia’s more generous assets tended to overflow tank tops. She always made faces when Holly dressed in tanks, jealous that she couldn’t wear them without being at risk of a wardrobe malfunction. Holly, in turn, had lusted after the lusciously gorgeous bras in her sister’s lingerie stash. One memorable night while Holly was in high school, Mia had helped her stuff a bra full of tissues so she could see what it’d be like once her boobs grew.

Grinning despite the knot in her gut, she picked up her phone and snapped a picture of herself after pulling on a long silver chain with a small bottle at the end. That bottle had sparkling “pixie dust” in it. Also on the chain was a tiny black high-heeled shoe, and an equally tiny pair of scissors forged in silver. Mia had given Holly the long necklace on Holly’s eighteenth birthday.

She added a message to the picture, the kind of message you could only send to a sister you’d played with, fought with, and grown up with: Thinking of you, Boobs.

Mia must’ve been awake despite having worked the night shift, because her reply came at once. Stupid boobs hurt because I decided to go for a run and didn’t wear the right support. Pull your hair back in a tail. Did you hear Wesley is trying out for the youth philharmonic?

Alvin mentioned Wes was considering it when I went over to watch his baseball game last week. A talented violinist himself, fifteen-year-old Alvin was more interested in being in a heavy metal band and was currently rocking a sneakily pierced ear under his shaggy haircut—he was working on the theory of ask parental forgiveness, not permission.

Holly had bought him a small stud for his birthday. When are the tryouts?

A month I think.

Holly made a mental note so she could give her brother a good-luck call, then re-sent her picture after pulling her hair back in a tail as Mia had advised: My sparkly painted boots or the ones with the sunflowers? Holly had bought both pairs at a charity shop for twenty dollars, then gone to town decorating them.

Sparkles. The word was followed by a smiley face. I’m glad you’re back, mei mei.

Me, too, jie jie.

Sliding away her phone after that affectionate exchange, big sister to little sister, she decided to message her two brothers, then call her parents, too—and that was when she realized what she was doing: saying her good-byes. Because Holly would fight to the death to live . . . but not if it meant freeing the monstrous and bloodthirsty thing inside her.

“I hear you’re hissing at handsome young men,” was her mother’s opening statement. “I was going to call you but since you were out so late with that handsome young man, I thought I’d wait. Well?”

“He’s not a young man. He’s one of the most powerful vampires in the city.”

“You should bring him to dinner.”

Holly was momentarily diverted by the idea of Venom at her mother’s dinner table; his wicked smile would surely charm Daphne. Shaking off the strangely compelling image, she managed to nudge the conversation along to other matters, then spoke to her father after her mother had to hang up to deal with a customer.

“Are you all right, Holly?” Allan Chang asked in his gentle way.

“Yes, Daddy.” Holly hadn’t called him that in years, but today, she felt like a little girl who needed her father’s embrace.

One last time.

Ending the conversation a far too short time later, her appointment with Dmitri looming on the horizon, she pulled on the black boots she’d spent two weekends painting so that they sparkled in the light, but not too much. They also had enough of a heel that she didn’t feel Lilliputian next to all the tall people who occupied the Tower. It was like there was a height requirement or something.

“Good things come in small packages,” she reminded herself as she pulled on a thick black watch on her left wrist, then added a bunch of colorful bracelets she’d picked up from a shop in Jackson Heights.

The eyes that stared back at her remained too stark, too scared.

Bringing out the cosmetics her sister had taught her to use when they were teenagers, she focused on those eyes, coloring her eyelids in a pink and orange pattern of sweeps that was probably over the top, but who cared when she was going insane anyway. Her lashes she mascaraed in thick black, after using a glittering silver pencil to line her lower lid.

Ready as she’d ever be, she stepped out of her room and began the walk to the elevators. Her heart was a cold drumbeat, her skin icy. When the elevator doors opened to reveal Venom, however, she didn’t hesitate, just walked straight in. Because from the day she’d first heard a psychotic whisper in a voice not her own, she’d known this was coming.

He punched the button for Dmitri’s floor and her eyes caught on his hand, on the fingers that had caressed her body, clenched in her hair.

Not ready to think about how he’d made her feel viscerally alive, she said, “Did you tell Dmitri already?”

“No. You can tell him.”

Holly folded her arms across her chest. “It’s never been like that before. I was glowing, wasn’t I?” She’d just barely caught the glare of it before agony arched her spine—a futile attempt at escape.

“Wings,” Venom said with a glance at her she wasn’t ready to meet. “Unnatural, serrated wings, glowing in your chest.”

Holly nodded, as if she understood the insanity of it all. When Venom’s hand came to her upper abdomen and he picked up the delicate set of pendants on her long silver chain, she didn’t stop him.

“A gift from my sister,” she said, refusing to acknowledge the curls of desire aroused by his mere proximity, his scent clean and fresh and undeniably masculine. “The scissors because I used to make clothes for her even in high school.” Tops that flattered Mia’s lush figure while not scandalizing their conservative parents. “The high heel because I love shoes.” She pointed down to her boots. “And the pixie dust because . . .”

Venom didn’t step out of the elevator when the doors opened, his unshielded eyes on her fading smile. “Because you’re a dreamer.”

“Once.” Holly tugged away the necklace and stepped out to face what might be her final hour of life.