Page 66 of Venom Sweeter than Honey
“Wouldn’t be here without you.”
A brief silence hangs between us before he closes our conversation. “Love you, kid.”
The endearment relieves some of the tension; the emotion, as an affectionate smirk slides across my mouth.
He’s barely ten years older than me, and doesn’t even look it.
“Love you too, old man.”
I’m gonna get you to retire soon; you just don’t know it yet.
And maybe Jeriko can fucking help me.
When he hangs up, my attention lowers again to the address. Reality creeps in, and the ensuing shock follows. All these years... all this time. And I’ve finally caught the fucking rat I’ve been hunting for twenty years.
My hunger is never sated.
My heart is never full.
Solitude is my destiny.
Who am I?
Death.
VIOLETTE
37 YEARS OLD - CAERWYNATH
Sun shines brightly through the stained-glass windows of mysoulboundmatchmaking storefront, casting bejewelled colors across the warm space. My eyes briefly lift to a pair of ravens croaking and cawing across the street. Neither is Horus. I no longer feel the weight or despair of disappointment, but some small hopeful part of me refuses to stop searching. Even if the likelihood of him having survived this long is slim. After all, ravens can live to forty or fifty given favorable circumstances. And my sweet Horus is the biggest and baddest of them all.
Surely if anyone can survive the odds, it’s him?
With a sigh, I twist the open sign to face the window of the front door.
We aren’t located in the most pleasant of areas. And despite my unsavory neighbors, I adore my little shop. Plants thrive in every corner, intertwining with the decor, as a harp plays itself in one corner.
I’ve even hired a Security Moth, Arturo.
He is woefully opinionated—like most males—and I can feel his penetrative gaze from where he lounges on a decorativechaise longue that creaks beneath his hulking weight, sure to leave a layer of the intoxicating dust from his gigantic wings.
I’m thinking of firing him.
His baritone voice is a heavily accented, gravelly purr behind me.
“You smell like frustration… andunsatiated desire, female.”
Blasted noctarions—the fae-like moth beings with horns and fangs—and their over-the-top olfactory senses.
My eyeballs practically screech against the bone of their sockets with the force with which they roll into the back of my head before I turn to face him, glaring.
“Well, stop breathing then.”
A corner of his finely sculpted onyx lips—a stark contrast to the pale gray of his hide—curls at one corner.
I can feel the words hovering on the tip of his tongue, ready to suggest that he satiate me.
Thankfully, he doesn’t.
