Page 34 of The Piece You Stole

He won’t come out and call me a prostitute, but he’s thinking it. They both are.

They’ve decided I’m a whore, and nothing I say will get them to change their mind. So, I sit back in my seat and wait for this interview to be over so they can take me to a nice, quiet cell.

“Bradley and I were curious about something,” Detective Ferdinand murmurs, his brow furrowed, and his tone intimate, as if we’re all the best of friends. He leans toward me. “Is that where you met Frank?”

Frank?

I don’t know anyone called Frank. Not one person.

“She looks a little confused.” Detective Ferdinand shoots Bradley a sly smile. “Don’t you think she looks a little confused, Bradley?”

Detective Bradley returns the sly smile with one that has alarm bells whirling in my head. “I don’t know that she does, Ferdinand. I’d say she knowsexactlywho Frank is. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they were in it together. She would line up the mark, and Frank would step in and get rid of the goods.”

My confusion grows.

“But doctors are smart. Has a lot to do with all that fancy education.” Ferdinand nods his dark head and straightens his thin blue tie. “And this doctor had afancyeducation. Yale, if you can believe it. Though you probably already knew that, being thefriendsthat you were.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively at me. Not enough that the camera would see him do it. But I do. “Yale doesn’t accept stupid people unless they’re rich. Was the doctor rich?” He aims a glance at Detective Bradley.

“I don’t know that he was,” Detective Bradley responds, narrowing his eyes and scratching at his blond curly hair as if deep in thought. “He didn’t have the bank of Mom and Dad greasing any wheels to get him in. Which means he must have had pretty big brains to get all that fancy Ivy League education. Maybe he clocked on that you were helping yourself to drugs in the hospital, and he threatened to talk.”

I don’t even blink in case they view it as some kind of admission of guilt, but all the while, my confusion grows. What the hell are they talking about? I barely left my hospital room, and any CCTV in there would show it. Why would they think I had been stealing drugs?

And how did they even know I was with Rylan? Is this a new punishment?

Apparently finished with his head-scratching, Detective Bradley leans back in his seat and folds his arms over his bulging gut. Despite his relaxed pose, I brace myself because I don’t trust this isn’t leading somewhere. “We’ve thought about something over and over, and it just doesn’t make sense to us how Doctor Simon Trevor’s wallet would end up with Frank. Perhaps you can clear up that little confusion for us.”

The pickpocket.

Frank is the pickpocket. They’re trying to tie the girl who spent more time on the street than in school with the pickpocket who lifted Simon Trevor's wallet from me.

Detective Bradley uncrosses one arm from his belly, reaches into the folder, and plucks a photograph from it as if by random, which he slides toward me. It’s a still from a security camera outside a grocery store. A pale-faced woman with wild dark hair and bare feet is facing a man with a bushy beard and a scruffy, torn coat. Me. The woman is me.

I don’t remember seeing his face since evading the pimps chasing me down the road was my only priority then, but it looks like I’m staring right into his eyes. As if we know each other.

The moment lasted one second, possibly less than that, but the photograph makes it look like that second went on for much longer than that. It’s…intimate. It looks like Frank has his hands on my hips, but that’s not true. He was lifting Simon Trevor’s wallet from my pocket and likely rifling through the other empty one too.

What happened is perfectly innocent.I’minnocent. Unfortunately for me, this one photograph confirms the exact story the cops have decided to tell. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the camera from the store itself suddenly ‘malfunctioned’, and this was the only picture they could pull from it. They seem like those kinds of cops.

The wooden chair creaks ominously from Detective Bradley’s bulk. “Because from where we’re sitting, you two look pretty friendly to me.”

Now it’s my turn to sit back in my seat because it looks like we’re going to be in here for a while. Alongwhile. And I know, in the next few hours, regardless of what I say, these cops are going to perform for the camera, laying out so many coincidental little things that make me look guilty as sin.

The second I open my mouth, they’ll take whatever I say, twist it, and use it to trap me.

But if I say nothing, they will come at me over and over and over until they’ve sapped all my energy and I say something just to get them to leave me alone.

A long night, they told me. Orthreatenedme with, because now I know it for the threat it was. There’s going to be no cell for me. Not tonight.

Can I stay strong long enough for…

What, Saige? What are you expecting to happen? For the hounds to save you when they have no idea where you are? Or for Rylan to realize that, actually, he prefers to have his mate chained to his bedroom wall and not caged downtown?Just what do you think is going to happen here?

Detective Ferdinand trains those bottomless black pits for eyes my way. “So, Miss Leo, tell us about Frank. Maybe he talked you into something you didn’t want to be a part of. If that’s the case, there’s no reason we can’t make a deal here.”

“Because when you look at this—” Detective Bradley nudges the photograph to my side of the table. “—It’s not looking good for you. Not good at all. And right now, only you have the power to save yourself. Tell us something, Miss Leo. Tell us something we don’t know, and we can help you. Save yourself.”

The power to save myself.

It’s almost enough to make me smile. When have I ever come close to saving myself from anything? Never, that’s when. Not once.

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