Angel’s Blood (Guild Hunter #1)(53)
Author: Nalini Singh

"It’ll be delivered within the next hour." As they walked, he wondered why a mortal’s opinion of him mattered. "Do you plan to walk those streets and see if you can sense him?"

"Yes." She strode forward with determined steps. "If he’s as fixated as you guys think-and hell, he is wooing her with bloody hearts-he won’t go far from her."

"No, he won’t." The bloodborn always killed another angel before devolving completely. In most cases, it was the angel who had been closest to them-a macabre sacrament, as if they were cutting away everything they’d once been.

Elena nodded. "Then we might be able to beard him in his lair while he’s sluggish from the amount of blood he took. Unless that’s different with you lot?" She glanced at him, her eyes sliding to his bloody hand and forearm before she sucked in a breath and looked away.

"From what we know," he said, hand curling into a fist, "the bloodborn-"

"Bloodborn?" She scowled. "You have a name for whatever it is Uram’s become? That means it’s not an isolated incident."

"The bloodborn," he said, ignoring her implied question, "are affected as the vampires are by overindulgence. He’ll be lazy, sleepy, vulnerable."

Elena’s fury at his refusal to answer her question was un-hidden, but whatever it was that she might’ve said was lost as her cell phone rang. Pulling it out of a pocket, she flipped it open. "Yes." Her eyes turned chaotic. "What?" A pause. "I-" For the first time, he saw her look unsure. "Yes. I’ll be there." She closed the phone. "I need to take off for a while. I’ll be back by the time Michaela delivers her map."

"Where?" he asked, disliking the expression on her face.

A hard glance. "None of your damn business."

He should’ve been angry. Part of him, the part with over a thousand years of accumulated arrogance, was. But the rest of him was intrigued. "A taste of my own medicine?"

She shrugged, her mouth pinched.

"Your father."

Her shoulders tightened. "What, you can listen in to conversations now?"

"Even archangels can’t do that." Not always true, but true in this case since he’d vowed not to eavesdrop on her mind. "But I did my research."

"Good for you." If words could cut, he’d have been shredded.

He looked down at his bloody fist and wondered if she saw him as a monster now. "Jeffrey Deveraux is the only human being you seem unable to handle."

"Like I said, it’s none of your business." Her jaw was clenched so tight, she had to be in pain.

"Are you sure?"

Raphael’s question repeated over and over in Elena’s head as she strode up the steps to the tony brownstone her father maintained as his private office. There was another office high up in a tower of steel and glass, but this was where the real wheeling and dealing went on. It was also a place you entered only by invitation.

Elena had never set foot across the threshold.

Now she stopped in front of the closed door, her eye falling on the discreet metal plaque to the left.

VEVERAUX ENTERPRISES, EST. 1701

The Deveraux family could trace their roots back so many years, Elena sometimes thought they must’ve kept records even while crawling out of the primordial ooze. Her lips tightened. Pity the other side of her familial ledger wasn’t so established. An orphaned immigrant raised in foster homes on the outskirts of Paris, Marguerite had had no family history to speak of-nothing beyond the vague memory of her mother’s Moroccan origins. But she’d been beautiful, her skin gold, her hair close to pure white.

And her hands . . . gifted hands, hands that wove magic.

Elena had never been able to understand why her parents had married. Most likely, she never would. The parent who might have told her was dead and the one who remained seemed to have forgotten he’d once had a wife named Marguerite, a woman who spoke with an accent and laughed loud enough to banish any silence.

She wondered if her father ever thought about Ariel and Mirabelle, or if he’d erased them from his world, too.

Ari’s eyes staring into hers as she screamed. Belle’s blood on the kitchen tiles. Her bare foot sliding on the liquid, the jarring hardness of the floor as she fell. Warm wetness against her palm.

A hand clutching a still-beating heart.

She shook her head in a harsh negative, trying to wipe away the mishmash of nauseating images. What Raphael had done . . . it had been another reminder that he wasn’t human, wasn’t anything close to human. But the Archangel of New York wasn’t the monster she’d come to face.

Raising her hand, she pressed the buzzer and looked up at the discreet security camera most execs probably never made. The door opened a second later. It wasn’t Jeffrey on the other side. Elena hadn’t expected it to be. Her father was much too important a man to open the door for his eldest living child. Even when he hadn’t seen that child for ten cold years.

"Ms. Deveraux?" A perfunctory smile from the small brunette. "Please come in."

Elena stepped inside, taking in the woman’s ghost-pale skin against the sedate navy color of her well-cut suit. She was every inch the executive assistant, the lone touches of flamboyance coming from the glittering diamond on her right middle finger, and the high mandarin collar of her jacket. Elena drew in a deep breath, felt her lips curve.

The woman’s spine went stiff. "I’m Geraldine, Mr. Deveraux’s personal assistant."

"Elena." She shook the woman’s hand, noted the cool temperature. "I’d suggest you get yourself a prescription for iron."

Geraldine’s calm expression flickered only slightly. "I’ll take that under advisement.’

"You do that." Elena wondered if her father had any idea of his assistant’s extracurricular pursuits. "My father?"

"Please follow me." A hesitation. "He doesn’t know." Not a plea, almost an angry declaration made in clipped private-school vowels.

"Hey, what you do in your own time is nobody’s business but yours." Elena shrugged, mind filling with the image of Dmitri bending over that blonde’s neck. Of the hunger in his eyes after she cut his throat. "I just hope it’s worth it."

The other woman gave a soft, intimate smile before leading Elena down the hall. "Oh, it is. It’s better than anything you could imagine."

Elena doubted that, not when she kept flashing back to Raphael’s hand on her breast, powerful, possessive, more than a little dangerous. Too bad she couldn’t forget that same hand shoving through a man’s rib cage to tear out his heart.

Geraldine halted in front of a closed wooden door. She gave a quiet knock and drew back. "Please go in. Your father is waiting for you."