Page 65 of Phoenix Falling
Confusion choked me even as my heart soared at the sight of my mate. What was she doing here? “She’s—” But what could I say?She’s Risk?She obviously wasn’t. She wasRissa,not Risk. But I’d been carrying Risk. Hadn’t I?
“Azrael?”
He shot a quick glance over from the driver’s seat as he steered wildly for the compound gates, then did a double take. Eyebrows hit his hairline. “That’s not Risk.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Cale said behind me.
We skidded, our tires fighting to grip the asphalt on the turn to the main road. I clutched Rissa’s body tight to my chest. Azrael sputtered, maybe for the first time in his long life. “Don’t look at me. I haven’t got a clue who she is.”
But I did. I knew—or thought I knew—every inch of the woman who lay unconscious in my arms, and she was definitely not Risk, despite looking exactly like her mere minutes ago.
So if she wasn’t Risk, who was she?
ChapterTwenty-Five
RISK
“You are an interesting one, aren’t you?”
The voice tugged me up out of the depths. What depths, I wasn’t exactly sure. I just knew I floated in a sea of quiet, perfect blackness until some jackass started talking in my ear. I tried batting him away, swatting at someone I refused to open my eyes to see, but the man merely chuckled.
In my head.
Tension seized my entire body. He wasn’t talking in my ear. He was talkingin my head.What the fuck?
“Time to wake up,”he said. In my mind, then laughed at the flash of alarm shooting through my brain.“If you want me to stop talking to you this way, you’ve got to open your eyes. Which you have to do anyway. Someone here wants to talk to you.”
No one ever said I wasn’t stubborn. I kept my eyes closed, trying to sense what was around me, trying to figure out where I was, search my memory for what had happened, how I’d gotten here, wherever here was.
Nothing popped up.
“She’s awake,” I heard aloud. That same deep, unfamiliar, masculine voice. “It’s a good thing we didn’t bring you to the cells. We’re going to need privacy for this discussion.”
“Shut the fuck up, Grim.”
Sun. Shit.
“Get up, Rissa. Or Risk. Whoever the fuck you are.”
Oh shit.
I opened my eyes. The room was dim, the walls dark gray, curved, and slick-looking in a weird way my brain took a moment to translate. A cave, I finally realized. We were in a cave somewhere.
Standing in a semicircle in front of me were several huge males taking up all the cool air I desperately needed to breathe. A couple I recognized: Sun, Hollywood. We’d met in the club, along with the dark-skinned one on the other side of the room, his red-tinged eyes boring into me. And Cale.
Of course Cale was here; my luck was definitely in the toilet. They, along with a couple others, stared down at me on whatever I’d been placed on—a couch, I realized after a quick look—putting me at a distinct disadvantage. I jumped up, only to have the room do a crazy spin that almost had me falling on my ass before a strong hand gripped my bicep, steadying me. When I looked, I cringed. The male was as big as Sun but draped in a long black robe that covered him from head to toe, the hood pulled down until only his full mouth was visible. I yelped.
“Easy there.”
That voice, the one in my head. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I think we’re the ones who should be asking that question.”
Sun. Only this wasn’t any Sun I’d faced before. Turning my eyes on him told me something was terribly, terribly wrong. What—
Wait. He’d called me Rissa. And Risk. Both of the names he knew me by.
I jerked a look down at my body. My Rissa body, not Risk. Not tall, athletic, confident Risk. This was…
