Archangel's Viper (Guild Hunter 10)

“Quite an empire you’ve got.” He nodded at the work area, he and Vivek not having had much of a chance to talk yesterday when he dropped off the confiscated cell phone.

“I still miss my Guild station,” Vivek admitted. “I pretty much built that from the ground up, ordered every single piece myself, customized the software.”

“I built a house once,” Venom found himself saying. “I’m a bad carpenter, but I built that house. And I still miss it.” Mostly because of the people who’d lived in it, laughed in it, shared their bounty of rice and wild greens, lentils and handmade sweets.

Vivek nodded, the movement jerky, as if his body wasn’t quite used to its new range of motion. “Things we build ourselves, they matter.” He touched a screen, at the same time clicking the sensor that protruded beside his cheek, his wheelchair also designed to his specifications. “Sorry,” he said afterward. “I spotted a piece of information Jason might be interested in.”

Venom noted the glow in the other man’s eyes, had to hide a chuckle. According to Dmitri, Vivek Kapur had a crush on Raphael’s spymaster. Not a sexual crush. The crush of a man who loved having his fingers in every possible information pie—and Jason was the best at that there was. “Did you have a chance to dig into the e-mail address associated with the bounty?”

“Only for the past half hour—healers forced me offline for the rest of yesterday afternoon, and this morning, and I didn’t want to delegate since you asked me to take care of it personally.” A sour face as he began to work again. “They call it physical therapy and muscle recovery. I call it sadism.”

Venom could imagine the pain Vivek had to bear every session. “Does it make a difference if the therapists wear gloves?” He assumed there’d need to be physical contact during the sessions.

“We tried,” the other man responded with a scowl, “but then they can’t feel the movement of my muscles as they need to. So instead I swear like a hunter, and the therapists wear earplugs.” The last words were absent, Vivek’s focus on his work.

Venom prepared to leave. “Send me a message as soon as you have anything.”

“No. Wait.” The hunter’s eyes moved with rapid speed and Venom realized the other man was using software that read his eye movements, at the same time that he typed. “I’ve hacked the e-mail account. It’s received four e-mails in total, not counting the one you sent using the confiscated phone. One is from Mike, whose skull you rearranged. He e-mailed to say he and his guys were taking the job.”

“Professional of him.”

“He’s a regular CEO.” Vivek’s tone was bone-dry. “The other three e-mails are from different parties who purport to have successfully snatched Holly.”

He pulled up those three e-mails on the large screen in front of him. “Photos are doctored.”

Two were bad, but the third . . . “That one would fool me if I didn’t know her,” Venom said, pointing to the picture of a terrified woman hog-tied on a concrete floor. Holly’s eyes stared out of the screen.

Something dark and angry uncurled inside him.

“It’s a very clever piece of photo manipulation.” Vivek continued to work. “That’s all there is right now. No money transfers to follow because, I assume, the buyer either knows these are forgeries—or doesn’t know which e-mail to believe.”

He used a second screen to bring up the photo Venom had taken, of Holly slumped in the backseat of the SUV. “That might be why you didn’t get a response to your message, though I’m more inclined to believe your surveillance theory. Mike and his men aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but they’ve got a better track record than any of these others—reason enough for the buyer to keep a hopeful eye on them.”

Venom saw that the last forged photo, the one that looked genuine, had only been sent fifteen hours earlier. After Mike and his crew struck out—and after Venom’s message. “You’re monitoring the bank accounts associated with the bounty hunter who sent that final e-mail?”

Nodding, Vivek said, “No movement at all.” A single account appeared on the screen that had originally held Venom’s photograph of Holly. “I’ll keep digging, in case he’s smart enough to have hidden accounts.”

“If this is what you can dig up in a half hour,” Venom said dryly, “I’m guessing you’ll have his entire life in sixty minutes.”

A sharp grin from the other man. “It’s a busy day, so maybe sixty-five would be a better estimate.”

“Forward me the details of everyone who e-mailed.” It’d give him and Holly a place to start interrogations as they attempted to track down the origin of the bounty. “And continue to monitor the e-mail address.”

“Done.”

• • •

Holly showered with a frown on her face. What the hell had happened to her last night? And why wasn’t she more mad about it? Probably because her body felt good. It was like she’d slept in the lushest, most comfortable bed on the planet rather than on a stone floor. And it wasn’t as if she was living in a hovel. This was the Tower. She only had a small room, not a sprawling suite like Venom, but most of the space she did have was taken up by a freaking huge bed.

That bed, an ornate extravaganza the size of a small continent, was courtesy of her parents. They’d wanted to give her a “moving in” present and what could she do but say yes? Mia had laughed her ass off over it until Holly had pointed out that a similar bed probably lay in her future, too.

The memory of her sister’s aghast expression made her grin.

Leaving the shower after a long, hot time, she dried off, then stepped out and stared at the bed that had put that look on her sister’s face. It was a white four-poster with a thick mattress and curtains tied to the posts. The posts were carved with love hearts, the headboard with a plump cherub pulling back his bow as he prepared to shoot an arrow at a whole bunch of hearts across from him.

“I have a giant princess bed drowning in hearts,” Holly said to herself, not for the first time.

Then she smiled, because her parents had been delighted when Holly accepted the gift. Daphne and Allan Chang had even bought Holly a set of ridiculously expensive Egyptian cotton sheets and an equally expensive goose down comforter. The bed was cozy and soft and warm . . . and the stupid stone floor had still been nicer.

“Argh!”

Making her way around the bed, she opened the walk-in closet and stepped inside to dress. She really liked that she could do that; it meant she didn’t have to pull down the blinds on the floor-to-ceiling window on one side of her room. There wasn’t much of a view, not this low down in the Tower, but on a sunny day, the light was beautiful.

Today, it was a moody, water-washed gray.

Dressed, Holly sat on her bed, shadows streaking across her skin as she pulled on her boots. The rain wasn’t heavy, more a constant mist, so she could still see beyond her window. In her direct line of sight was the building occupied by the Legion, the strange beings who’d descended on the city during Raphael’s battle with Lijuan.

Pale-eyed and pale-skinned, with wings like a bat’s, the Legion were the definition of eerie. Of course, who was she to judge? She wasn’t exactly Ms. Normal. And she loved what they’d done with their building, turning it into a living creation swathed in lush green.

Holly had thought more than once about walking over and asking if she could look inside. She’d never done so because the Legion were so other, and so clearly powerful as to be beyond her reach, but today, boots on and hair scraped into a ponytail, she felt the devil take her. Or maybe it was that she wasn’t quite ready to face what Venom had brought out of her the previous night.

Since the area between the Tower and the Legion building was archangelic territory no stranger could infiltrate, she didn’t bother to alert Venom as she exited the Tower.

She did however send him a message: Don’t go hunting without me. Fear of herself or not, she wasn’t about to be sidelined. She just needed a few extra minutes to find her balance.

Despite the constant misty rain that felt like a cool kiss on her skin, New York carried on unabated. Steam escaped from a grate, suited office workers heading out to lunch flowed toward the subway entrance in the distance, and the warm, yeasty scent emanating from a nearby pretzel cart drifted over to tantalize Holly’s taste buds.