Burn For Me (Phoenix Fire #1)(106)

She’d never be able to forget his kiss. He’d been the first man that she ever kissed. The first to make her feel like she belonged to someone.

A someone who sometimes seemed to hate her.

“You can trust me,” she whispered to him, desperate to make him believe her.

He gave a hard shake of his head. “No, that’s the last thing I can do.” Then he was moving away from her, leaping back.

For an instant, she didn’t move. His eyes were on her, sweeping from the top of her hair down to her small sandals. He seemed confused. Yeah, well, so was she.

Don’t kiss me and jerk away. She didn’t have the damn plague.

“I woke up a week ago,” he told her quietly, his voice still making her ache. “In an alley that had been scorched. I was naked, and there were ashes all around me.”

Her heart beat faster as she straightened on the table.

“What happened to me?” he demanded.

“Dante, I—”

“Is that my name?” The memory loss seemed more severe than it had been in the past.

“Y-yes. That’s what you told me to call you.” But was it really his name? She wasn’t sure. He’d never confessed too much about his life—at least, not his life before he’d come to be a prisoner.

“What happened to me in the alley?”

Okay. If she was going to get his trust, then she was obviously going to have to share with him. “I think you died.”

He laughed. The sound was bitter and hard, just like the laughter she’d heard from him a dozen times. She’d tried for years to get a real laugh from him. That hadn’t happened.

“If I died,” he asked, “then how am I breathing now?”

That was the tricky-to-explain part. “Look, Dante—”

Shouts erupted from the other room. High-pitched, desperate screams that were immediately followed by the rat-a-tat of gunfire.

They found me.

Cassie’s heartbeat froze in her chest. Then she was the one leaping forward and grabbing Dante’s hand. “We have to go. Now.”