Page 36 of The Piece You Stole

But when I see the size of his gulp, I regret my willingness to share. “It’s not like you to be reaching for the bottle.”

He pauses, shoots me a glance, and prepares to take another gulp.

I grab the bottle from him. Watching perfect Aden drinking from a bottle—not that he’s looking perfect right now with his rumpled blond hair and sleepy, red-eyes—is just wrong.

“I’m no further along than I was when I started.” He rakes a hand through his hair. It should’ve returned the sleep-tousled strands into some semblance of order, yet it makes him look even more unkempt than before.

I scratch my shaved head and sigh in relief.

It’s times like this that I remember why I shaved my hair. Little to no maintenance required.

“I even took a cab up there,” he admits, sounding defeated as he rubs eyes that look so heavy, it’s like they’re ready to close any second and stay that way.

As I study him, I get the sense that whatever sleep he had was neither long nor beneficial. He looks fucking exhausted. “You said it would be a waste of time.”

“Yes, I did,” he admits, his voice not just tired but drained. Defeated. “But I didn’t know what else to do. Have you heard anything from Dariel?”

He’s running on empty.Shit, I should have let him sleep.

I lift the bottle to my mouth. “Who the fuck cares?” I ask, shooting him a rapid glance.

He’s staring into space, brow furrowed. He might look like he’s deep in thought, but I doubt he’s harboring the same fury heating my belly. There aren’t many things Aden won’t forgive, but when people get on my shit list, they stay on it until they give me a good reason I should take them off it. Failing that, a punch or two has been known to put me in a more forgiving mood.

“You were gone for nearly two days, Kade,” he says as I lower the bottle from my lips. “Don’t tell me you were just wandering the streets the entire time?”

I give him the sort of wide grin you’d only find pasted on the face of someone without a care in a world. “Maybe I found a pretty little socialite who let me warm her bed for the night.”

Aden stares at me without expression.

The silence extends.

I let my smile fall away as I sigh. “Yeah, wandering the streets sounds about right.”

When it got too cold and I was attracting too much attention, I found an alley to hide my sweatpants, shifted, and continued my hunt for Saige in my four-legged form instead. I’d thought an alley smelled bad as a human, as a wolf? Fuck me. Those foul, ripe scents had me retching into my mouth.

Neither of us speaks for a long while.

“What do you think they’re doing to her?” Aden asks, his voice so hesitant it’s as if he doesn’t want to know the answer, but the question butts its way out of him anyway.

That same question is the reason I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, and didn’t stop for five minutes before I was moving again. It’s the reason I spent nearly two days sniffing the streets in bare feet and a pair of sweatpants, making more than a few people think I belonged in a padded room.

And I don’t have a fucking thing to show for it.

Between the constant street sweepers and the heavy, overpowering stench of perfume from girls with more money than taste, if Saige and her kidnapper’s scents had once been there, it wasn’t any longer.

Those shifters damn near destroyed Saige’s mind with what they did to her body. Now she’s back with them again. Alone. How much can a person take before they break? How much can Saige?

After taking another swig from the bottle, I press it into his hands. “You shouldn’t be thinking about that.”

I fix my gaze on the night sky. We still have no way to get her back, and the longer we go without finding her, the more chance we never will. That’s if she’s even still alive. When the bottle reenters my line of vision, I damn near snatch it out of his hand.

“So, what’s the plan?” I wasn’t willing to listen before, but now I am. Now I have to. There’s too much at stake to fuck off on my own like that again.

“I’m not an alpha,” Aden reminds me, a deeper note in his voice that makes me wonder if his mind isn’t taking him to the same dark place mine has gone.

“I doubt you can do worse than the one who walked out on us, so the job is yours.”

“Not yours?” he asks, taking the bottle back. “Because I hate to tell you, but I’m all out of ideas.”

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