Only when his fingers brushed Riley’s cheek this time, there was only smoothness, sleek and unyielding. Misha blinked and realized the honeyed sunlight that had been kissing Riley’s relaxed countenance was glinting off metal now. The flutter of dark eyelashes distracted him for a second. He raised his gaze to Riley’s eyes just in time to glimpse a sliver of dazed gray changing into bright silver. Instinct twitched his hand away.
The unthinking reaction saved his fingers.
Spikes shot up from the metal covering Riley’s skin, thin and viciously pointed. Misha jumped to his feet, away from the bed, and that saved more than his hand. Riley damn near levitated into an upright position, metal flowing over him like water as he stabbed a foot-long blade into the space where Misha had just been. He hit only empty air, which messed up his balance, but he caught himself neatly on one knee. His head came up, eyes zeroing in on Misha, open wide and unreadable behind a mirror-sheen of silver. He was almost completely covered in metal by this point. It thickened and shifted as Misha watched in disbelief, almost too quickly to follow, formed plates and razor-ridged edges, wrapped the familiar body up in unfamiliar armor.
“What the fuck?” Misha yelled, hand going for his gun reflexively.
On the bed, the armored creature twitched forward aggressively, about to launch itself from the bed at Misha, but it drew up at the last possible moment, jerked to a halt with a discontented snarl. It remained like that, poised on one knee, coiled with tension but frozen still, tracking Misha’s movements yet making no move toward him. Intentionally or not, it had placed itself smack between Misha and the alarm button. Misha had plenty of time to study it while he tried to decide on the best course of action. It looked like a knight out of some geek fantasy, sleek and sexy instead of bulky and uncomfortable, something imaginary become real. Didn’t seem cowed by his gun, either, so Misha assumed it was probably bulletproof. Or it had no idea what a gun was, but he thought that was improbable.
Suddenly, the military presence at the diner and their shoot-to-kill attitude made much more sense.
Alien as it seemed, there was something about the way it held itself that was undeniably Riley. Tiny shifts as it worked residual stiffness out of its broad shoulders. An instinctive favoring of the left knee, mostly habitual now. Little things, but enough to bring Misha up short, remind him it was Riley beneath all that metal… or his body, at least. And that realization gave birth to an entirely different kind of terror; because there was no telling if Riley was still alive in there or had been replaced by this thing.
Misha’s gun hand dropped, the weapon suddenly too heavy to hold up.
“Riley?”
His voice wavered precariously between the wintry remoteness of his professional persona and an emotionally charged rumble that was all Mikhail Tokarev.