Holly couldn’t make herself get up, even though she knew it was ridiculous to keep lying on the floor when Venom was walking around doing things. “I don’t know that word,” she said after several minutes. “It sounds like a yoga word.”
A low chuckle. “It’s Sanskrit. It has a complex depth of meaning, like all Sanskrit, but the easiest way to describe it in this context is the primal life force that lives in us.” He knelt beside her. “I made you a cookies-and-cream shake.”
Holly turned her head; it felt deliciously heavy. “Can I drink it lying down?”
“No. Up.”
Exhaling again—and really wanting that shake—she managed to get herself up into a seated position. It was only after she’d taken two long draws of the shake through the wide straw that she realized one thing. “How do you know this is my favorite?” She shot him a suspicious look.
“Starting to come out of the haze, I see.” He sat down on the floor, his hands braced behind him. “I know everything, kitty.”
Holly thought about hissing at him, but the shake was delicious and he looked strangely delicious, too, with his shirt half-ripped to reveal smooth skin and rippling muscle overlaid with skin of honeyed brown. She was obviously more dopey than she realized, but right now, she felt too good to care. “Tell me about prana.”
A shrug. “Many use the word to describe the energy that is life, but I’ve always chosen it to describe the part of me that came into being during my Making.” His eyes nictitated.
Setting aside the shake, Holly went to crouch beside him on her hands and knees. She stared at his eyes. “Do it slowly.”
A smile. “I can’t.” There it went again, that membrane that turned his eyes into a shattered stained-glass artwork.
“Pretty,” she murmured, raising her fingers to his cheek.
He nudged her gently back. “Drink your shake.”
Realizing that she was still acting drunk, Holly did as ordered. “So,” she said after several more gulps, “what was this about?”
“Teaching you that you’ll have better control if you stop fighting yourself.”
Holly frowned and sucked up even more of the shake that was a rush of sugar and fat and all those yummy things her body was craving. She was so glad she wasn’t a full-on vampire. “The only good thing about Uram attacking me is that over the past four months, I’ve developed the metabolism of an Olympic athlete.”
Venom yawned, his eyes slits of green behind lids gone heavy.
Rolling his shoulders, he lay down on the part of the floor that was stone. That seemed perfectly normal to her right then. Finishing off the shake, she put the glass carefully aside, then lay back down in the same stony area herself. And realized it was sumptuously warm. “Do you have a heated floor?”
“Just this part.”
Yawning, she curled onto her side. “It’s nice.”
A pillow softly hit her face just as she was about to drop off. Squeezing it to her chest, she snuggled in.
• • •
Venom woke first. He’d known he would—Holly wasn’t used to what they’d done last night, would take time to recover. She was curled up like the kitten he so often called her. In sleep, she’d made her way closer to him, so that his heat blazed on her back, while the floor’s heat blazed into a large part of the rest of her body.
She slept with her head half on the pillow, was hugging the rest of the pillow to her front. Her right leg was pulled up to lie partially on the pillow. The torn sides of her dress fell on either side of her leg, revealing a sweep of creamy skin marked by a few small bruises and scratches from their tussle. He’d been very careful not to badly hurt her, but some wounds were inevitable.
She’d heal relatively quickly.
His eyes skimmed her leg again—“Rein it back,” he ordered himself. “She really is a kitten.” Small and new and finding her feet. He wasn’t about to take a bite out of her.
Finding a soft, silky blanket, he threw it over her. She immediately tugged it right up under her chin and snuggled in for a longer sleep. He felt his lips kick up. When she wasn’t awake and snapping at him, she was pretty cute. Though he had to admit he liked the snappy, snarky side of her.
A softer woman would’ve been crushed that first day of horror.
Leaving her asleep, he went and stripped off his torn clothes before stepping into the shower. He turned up the heat, let it sink into his bones. He tried not to act too “snakey” as Holly would put it, but he couldn’t give up these burning hot showers. And why deny himself this one pleasure when there was so much he could never have?
He didn’t step out of the shower until a long twenty minutes had passed. Drying off, he hitched the towel around his hips and went to check on his houseguest.
9
She was moving a little but was still on the floor. Her eyes half opened at sensing him. A big yawn before she snuggled back down, her body soon going motionless in a way that told him she’d fallen back into deepest sleep.
He went and got dressed in a dark gray suit paired with a white shirt, then spent a couple of hours on the sofa in the living area going through security reports and other Tower data that Dmitri had forwarded him to bring him up to speed with current events. Regardless of any other calls on his time and attention, he was one of the Seven and he’d taken a blood vow to protect Raphael and his territory.
That vow was a thing of honor, not compulsion. Venom could walk away at any time. He chose not to do so, chose to lend his strength to the reign of an archangel he respected with every fiber of his being. As he respected Dmitri and the others in the Seven. He’d already updated himself on most of this data on the flight from the Refuge, but he wanted to ensure he’d absorbed every detail.
He also didn’t want to continue the search for those who were hunting Holly while she was asleep and unable to assist. Venom understood what it was to fight your demons—he wouldn’t steal her chance to conquer hers. His position on the sofa allowed him to keep an eye on her as she slept on.
He’d woken at nine in the morning. She was still fast asleep when he rose at noon to head back into his bedroom to grab his sunglasses. As he hooked them into the front vee of the shirt, he thought of how Holly had snatched them off his face. Most people were either fascinated by his eyes or repelled. Holly . . . the fascination was there, but there was also a sharp annoyance when he covered his eyes.
He was still thinking about that when he went back to the living area to see Holly sitting up with the blanket pooled around her. She looked a little confused in that soft “just woken” kind of way. Going to the bar to one side, he poured himself a glass of blood from the bottle in the underbar fridge. It wasn’t his favorite way to intake it—fresh from the vein was always better, but this was convenient.