The Archangel of New York closed his fingers gently around her throat—not a threat, but a mark of possession. “Is our relationship so weak?”
“No.” She would fight to the death for it ... for him. “It’s something extraordinary—and it deserves to be protected against all the crap the world is going to throw at us.”
The metal receded as she watched, replaced by a penetrating, piercing shade akin to the mountain sky at noon. “Ah, Elena. So eloquent.”
“I mean it.” Her stomach was so tight, a thousand knots within.
“I will have Dmitri think of another suitable punishment.”
Air rushed into her lungs as she took a true breath. “I’m sure he’ll have no problems.” Dmitri was one of the oldest vampires she’d ever met—and he had a thing for pain. “There’s nothing here, scentwise.”
“I didn’t truly expect it. He was meant to be transported here later tonight, after having had time to put his affairs in order.” Raphael stroked his thumb over his consort’s pulse. “What is it I sense in you, Elena?” Fear, an insidious intruder, one that would steal her from him.
She gave a slight shake of her head. “Not you.” A pause. “Me. I’m a little messed up. Sometimes it all just roars back to the surface.”
Stroking his hand along the back of her neck, he tugged her close, took her lips in a slow, deep caress that reminded her the nightmares had no claim on her now—she belonged to an archangel.
His hunter lifted her fingers to her kiss-wet lips when they parted, eyes huge in the darkness. “Shokran, Archangel.”
“You are welcome, Guild Hunter.” Wings brushing over his consort’s, he turned to walk back to the house with her. “This murder is a message. It can be nothing else.”
“The question is who—” Elena froze. “The killer’s scent was heady with oleander. It’s a flower, but it’s also a toxic poison.”
“Neha.”
Leaving an exhausted Elena to her bath—though the idea of joining her was a much more pleasurable thought—Raphael walked down to the library and put through a call to Neha. The Archangel of India took her time answering, and her visage, when it appeared on the screen, was pure arctic chill. “Raphael.” With her hair pulled off her face into a tight bun and her features free of artifice, she had a pure, unadorned beauty.
The impression was furthered by the folds of the white silk sari set neatly over her shoulder, the stark shade bearing only the thinnest border of small faceted beads. Around her throat lay a necklace shaped to mimic a slender black serpent, its hissing mouth open. But of course, Raphael knew that was no necklace.
“Neha,” he said, watching as she allowed a cobra to twine its way around her arm. “You know why we’re having this conversation.” Vampires, Elena had told him as she sank into the bath, had strange, unexpected scents, so the potency of poison could mean nothing. However, as evidenced by Venom, Neha had a way of marking those she Made.
Now the Queen of Snakes, of Poisons, curved her lips into a smile that held an amusement as cold as that of the blood that flowed through her favored creatures. “It is but a game, Raphael.”
A mortal may have attempted to appeal to her conscience, tried to make her feel guilt for the senseless death—most likely deaths—she’d engineered, but he spoke to her pride. “It is beneath you, Neha, to act through such pathetic fools.”
Titus would’ve exploded at the insult, Michaela would’ve hissed in anger, but Neha ... Neha sighed and reached up to pinch closed the mouth of the snake at her neck, holding it shut until the creature started to struggle before releasing it. And still it stayed curled around her throat. “You are right,” she murmured. “But you helped take something I love from me, Raphael.”
“So you would take what I love from me?” So smart, so vicious, he thought, so like the snakes she kept as pets.
“I’m sure your hunter is none too pleased to discover that by becoming yours, she has placed everyone she loves in mortal danger.” Stroking her fingers along the cobra’s gleaming skin as she confirmed her part in the murders at the school, she met his gaze with eyes of darkest brown, eyes that were very much sane. “As for the other ... betrayal is always a hard pill to swallow. He was weak, ridiculously easy to break and control.”
Raphael had already set Dmitri and Venom the task of ensuring Neha had planted no more snakes in their midst. “Why kill him?”
Neha lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug. “He may have known something, though the point is moot now. As a tool, he wasn’t the most useful one—and I’m sure he considered it a mercy. He would’ve never survived his punishment with his mind intact.”
Perhaps. But Raphael was quite certain the man would not have chosen to die by having his internal organs ripped from his living flesh. “You know what Anoushka did was anathema.” Neha’s daughter had been party to the brutalization of a child. It was one of the greatest taboos of their race.
“I am a mother, Raphael.” A pause, an instant of piercing sorrow. “I was a mother.”
“Now you would make other mothers feel the same pain?” Neha was one of the few in the Cadre who had always treated mortal children as precious.
A slow blink, cold and dark, as she stared at him with a gaze that had been known to ensnare lesser angels. “I think you will soon have far bigger problems to worry about than my modest games.”
Raphael said nothing.
Smiling, Neha reached out of the shot, and when her hand returned, those elegant fingers held a black orchid. “I thought this was a nice touch on my part.” She ran the ebony petals over the cobra’s skin. “It’ll amuse me to watch you when she rises. She left you to die broken on a field far from civilization, did she not?”
Having expected the taunt, he didn’t react. “Neha,” he said softly. “I will, if not forgive, not retaliate against these trespasses because you lost a child—but do not play games in my territory again.”
Neha laughed, a bitter hiss of sound. “What would you do to me, Raphael? I have lost that which matters most.”
“A lie,” he murmured, waiting until her laughter died to deliver his coup de grace. “You would not like to lose your power.”
Neha’s expression went flat, hard. “You are arrogant enough to think you have the strength to affect my rule?”
“Never forget that I was the one who executed Uram when it needed to be done.” It had taken something from him to end the life of another archangel, but Uram had turned monster and could not be allowed to savage the world. “Never forget what and who I am, Neha.”
The Archangel of India held his gaze for a long, long moment. “Perhaps your mortal has not changed you after all.”
Raphael said nothing to that, ending the call, but as he turned to walk up to join his hunter, he knew Neha was wrong. Elena had changed something fundamental in him. Do you wait for me, hbeebti? he asked, touching her mind, finding her awake.
The bed’s cold without you.
As he opened the bedroom door, he knew he would never again be able to return to the life he’d led before her—where hardness of the heart was nurtured and love termed a weakness. “Are you tired, Elena?”
Rising up into a sitting position, his hunter allowed the sheet to slide down to pool at her waist.
12
Elena’s throat went dry under the unwavering focus of Raphael’s gaze, the skin over her br**sts suddenly too tight. Her need for him was a deep, aching hunger fueled by a day that had stirred hidden fears, painful secrets. She wanted his mouth on her, his hands on her—but there was a dangerous look to him tonight. Nothing akin to the rage that had made him burn so cold after the events at the girls’ school, nothing that scared her ... except in the most sensual of ways.
“Planning to come over here, Archangel?” she asked when he continued to caress her only with those eyes of inhuman blue, the ache inside her transforming into something darker, hotter.
He leaned against the closed door to the bedroom. “First, I intend to savor the view.”
She was a hunter, had never been a prude, but he made her skin flush, her ni**les bead to urgent points. “At least take off your shirt,” she said, rubbing her feet against the sheets. “Make it fair.”
“Why would I wish to do that when I have a na**d hunter in my bed, ready to submit to my every whim?”
Her toes curled, because right now, that look in his eyes—it was that of a conqueror, a man used to surrender. But that wasn’t the only thing she saw on his face. The faintest of smiles tugged at those lips that knew her every hidden pleasure point; his shoulders were relaxed in a way that told her he was playing with her. Oh, not all of it. A large part of him was, in all probability, experiencing the same arrogant satisfaction as any conqueror faced with a woman clothed only in her skin, a woman who had no intention of denying him anything . . . but this particular one had given her the right to make her own demands.
Eyes on him, she ran her hands down her rib cage, then back up to palm her br**sts. Liquid heat in that gaze, but he didn’t move from the doorway. “More, Elena.” It was a command, given in the tone she only ever heard in bed, sexual and demanding and, sometimes, without mercy.
“Always with the orders,” she whispered, rolling and tugging at ni**les that begged for a harder, bolder touch, yet so unbearably sensitive that she thought she might shatter if he so much as put those strong hands on her. “Maybe I want to be the one giving orders in bed.”
“What order would you give?” An intimate question, his gaze lingering on her lips with unhidden intent before dropping to the hand she slid provocatively under the sheet.
Breasts flushing under the sexual kiss of those eyes, she took in the hard power of the magnificent body braced against the door. “I’d say come here”—stroking her fingers between her legs in sinful emphasis—“so I can show you how very ready and willing I am.” The physical connection ... they both needed it on the deepest level tonight—to burn away the cold, dark places in the soul, to lock them together in an earthy glide of flesh.