Page 3 of Phoenix Falling
“I assumed you wouldn’t.”
She drilled me with that deep blue stare. “There’s more to this than what you’ve told me. I’m not buying your story.”
I said she was smart, didn’t I? “You don’t have to.” She simply had to do as I requested.
“So you want information on every attack, not only the women who escaped.”
Kat was, as far as we knew, the only triggered female to have escaped. Lyris knew one other, but she had not been bitten. “Yes. If we could start locally and then expand outward?”
Risk leaned toward me. “If I find any reason to believe you would use that list to harm them—and I will be looking—you won’t be getting it. Once I’m sure they will be safe…” Risk shrugged. “It’s your money.” She named her figure.
The price was fair. I didn’t hesitate. The Archai had no worries about money, given we’d been accumulating wealth and investments for millennia. Not to mention that I was, in fact, a prince. I gave the female a silent nod.
“Will do.” Risk began to slide her way around the opposite side of the booth. “I’ll have an answer for you by next weekend.”
She paused at the opening, her stare on the dance floor. I waited.
She glanced back at me through the veil of her hair. “It was good to see you again, Sun.”
Her words startled me. Surely she didn’t mean them. And yet there was something almost…wistful in her tone. As if she truly had missed someone. Cale, more likely. Except she had been the one to break things off with the warrior, not the other way around. Why would she miss him?
That certain something underlying her words had me speaking without thought for the first time all night. “Risk, are you all right?”
I shouldn’t ask. Shouldn’t want to know. Shouldn’t care for anything more than having her body or her blood. And yet I was unable to hold the words back.
She seemed puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Why indeed. I gave her another nod.
She stood, preparing to leave.
“Risk…”
She hesitated, gaze still on her exit.
Whatever had been on the tip of my tongue, I swallowed it down. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
ChapterTwo
RISK
Ididn’t dare say his name, nor did I look back as I headed for the rear exit of the club. The pull to do so was strong, much stronger after the nights I’d spent watching him roam Nashville on the cameras that kept an eagle eye on the city.
The man—and I used that term loosely—was more tempting than a box of the most expensive chocolates. The good kind, with caramel and nuts, fudge and coconut added in. But chocolates weren’t dangerous to anything but your waistline. Sun was dangerous, period, and to far more than my libido.
We’d met a few months ago. Very long months during which my fascination with him had grown. And the pain from what had happened with Arik had started to fade. It had left an ugly scar, but I was no stranger to those. Arik had been the only man I’d ever felt love for. The only man I’d ever given myself to. I might have given other men the illusion of myself, but that was all it had been. An illusion.
I was good at illusions.
Moving into the farthest shadows of the back alley, I drew the darkness around me. My cloak. My protection. If I wanted to be hidden, I was. If I wanted to look like someone else, I could. If I wanted you to believe you’d fucked me…well, I could do that too. It was my gift, bought at the worst price imaginable. But it had kept me alive for nearly sixty years.
Not that I looked it. Whatever I had become that horrible night so long ago, it had changed both my physiology and my psyche.
Those around me thought they knew me, but no one could ever truly know me. Not even Arik. And that should have been my clue that I didn’t trust him as much as I’d wanted to. The fact that he’d never seen my true face. Hell, he hadn’t even known my true hair color. Brown, by the way. Plain old coffee-colored brown. But redheads were so much more exotic, weren’t they? Redheads like Sun. Or like the mate Arik had taken after that battle with the Anigma weeks ago.
Yes, I knew their name, even though no human alive should. I knew the Archai too. Arik. Cale. Sun. And others. The truth was, I was no longer human either. I was something else, something both sides would use for their own gain if they knew the truth about me.
