Page 67 of The Piece You Stole

You have to be brave, Saige. You don’t regret what you did, so you have to be brave.

He pins me to the wall for another long moment, as if he hears the frantic tempo of my heart and knows exactly what the wait is doing to my state of mind.

Without another word, he releases me.

My shaking knees don’t have a hope in hell of keeping me up. My feet touch the ground and I crumple, leaving me to sit in my blood on the cold marble floor, cradling my arm against my chest.

Less than a second later, Rylan fists a hand in my hair and yanks me back up to my feet.

I suck in a sharp breath and hold it as he pushes me in front of him, guiding me around the pool of blood where Nathan’s body once lay, past his pack gathered like sneering hyenas in the bathroom doorway, and who peeled apart at our approach.

He steers me through the living room, into the bedroom, and toward the low bed in the center of the room. I remember when he once made me laugh so hard that I snorted red wine all over his thousand-dollar sheets.

This time, the thing that stains his sheets won’t be red wine but my blood.

He gives me no warning before he shoves me face forward onto the bed.

I crash onto it, land on my arm, and scream at the fresh agony lancing through me.

“Na—” Rylan stops. No one says a word, just waits for him to remember that Nathan is dead, so he’s not here to do his holding anymore. “Tyler. Hold her.”

I don’t see the person who seizes my right arm and forcefully flips me onto my back. And then Tyler’s face is hovering over mine, his hands pinning my shoulders to the bed.

He smiles, and I know he’s loving every second of having me helpless beneath him. “Like this, Alpha, or should I sit on her?”

Rylan is silent for so long that I know he’s thinking about it. Or maybe he just heard my heart spike, and he’s taking a moment to soak in my terror. Probably the latter.

“Not this time,” he says slowly as he peers down at me from the foot of the bed.

The rest of the pack mill around the bedroom door. Flat on my back, I can’t see them, but I know they wouldn’t miss seeing me suffer for the world.

Eva appears on Rylan’s right and smirks at me as she hands him a thin needle threaded with a dangling length of long black thread.

I see the needle, and that’s when I give in to the panic I’ve been holding back all this time

The muscles in Tyler’s forearms don’t even tense as I struggle, that’s how little effort it takes him to keep me pinned.

As I struggle, I never take my eyes off Rylan as he rounds the side of the bed and perches on the edge before he reaches for my bleeding arm.

He could have just gone for bandages, but this isn’t about stopping the blood from soaking through the white sheets. This is torture, pure and simple.

For a long moment, he does nothing, just studies my arm dispassionately as I drag air into my lungs, every muscle in my body taut with my tension.

He places the needle and thread on the bed beside him.

Like an idiot, I think he’s changed his mind. That maybe his wolf, the only part of him who seems to give a damn whether I live or die, has stopped him.

But then he stretches his hand toward my arm, frowns a little, and with one hard jerk, yanks the shard of glass out.

I shriek, my back bowing as pain floods my body. I’m senseless with it. It’s just me and my agony in this bubble, endlessly feeding off each other.

Slap.

My head rocks hard to the side. Gasping, I fight to breathe as my right cheek stings.

“Shifter hearing is a blessing,” Rylan murmurs, repeating words from so long ago as he reaches for the needle and thread. “You’re making it into a curse.”

He stabs the needle into my arm.

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