Page 100 of The Piece You Stole

But I lie there with the sheet tucked under my chin, waiting for Dariel to kill me.

Seconds tick into minutes, and he doesn’t shift or lunge at me. Despite the danger I know I’m in, despite the threat I know him to be, the impossible happens. My eyelids grow so heavy I couldn’t keep them up even if I wanted to.

I sleep.

And then I remember.

I rip my eyes open, cursing myself for being so stupid that I fully deserve to find him tearing out my throat.

But the doorway is empty, and Dariel is gone.

Even though the danger is living under this same roof with me, I sleep again.

For no reason I can think of, I don’t tell Kade or Aden about Dariel watching me in the middle of the night. They glance at me and each other when they stop in my room, so they must know I’m hiding something, but they never ask what that something is.

Kade and Aden are keeping secrets too. Rylan would never give me up without a fight, so they would have done something to free me, and their refusal to tell me what that something is makes my anxiety rise by the day.

I sit quietly in bed as Kade feeds me breakfast, chicken soup, or whatever meal Aden has made that day. It doesn’t matter when I tell him my palms don’t hurt as much as he seems to think they do, he refuses to let me feed myself.

I say nothing when Aden helps me bathe before he cleans and applies ointment to the wounds I’m not supposed to get wet. He bathes me, he told me with a smile, because Kade has a one-track mind, so there’s no guarantee I’d leave the bathroom any cleaner than I’d entered it. I can’t say I’d disagree with him.

When the redness and the swelling in my arm go down, Aden smiles more, and the tension that would tighten his shoulders every time he would peel the bandage away eases. My arm still hurts, but the pain is nothing compared to the agony I was in before.

While Aden and Kade look after me, refusing to let me even go downstairs, my mind drifts back to Dariel, and I ask myself: was that the first, second, or third time he stood in my doorway watching me sleep? What did he want? And why am I so determined to keep this dangerous thing a secret?

* * *

On the fifth day after I crossed the hallway to Kade’s black-painted room, I realize I’m seeing Kade and Aden less and less, and Leo more and more.

Dressed in a pair of Aden’s gray sweats, one of Kade’s white t-shirts, and my hair still drying on my shoulders from Aden having washed it for me that morning, I eye the long-haired man leaning his back against my bedroom wall, his arms folded.

I sweep my gaze over his strong jaw, the barest hint of stubble on his chin, his sloping nose, kissable lips, the lower fuller than the top, and that emerald stare that is Dariel, but…not. The fact that I’m almost positive he’s wearing a black button shirt and black pants I’ve seen Dariel wear only makes it even more unnerving. There’s an arrogance and a lazy amusement that I could never imagine seeing in Dariel’s sterner features. If he ever smiled, it had to have been years before.

How can a person look so much like another and be so different?

Leandro’s lips quirk in a smile. “You look interested in getting to know me better, angel eyes.”

I raise my eyebrow. “Only Kade calls me that, and I think he would have a problem if he heard you.”

Although I’ve barely left this lilac room, which feels too feminine for it to have ever belonged to any of the hounds, I know the house can’t be so big that wherever Kade is, he won’t hear Leandro. And likely kill him from the threats which have floated up the stairs these last few days.

Aden said it’s a seven-bedroom house. Other than one of the three bedrooms on the second floor, which Leandro is staying in, and an attic that only he uses to store some of his things, they rarely go further than the first floor.

There’s a large garden that is so wild and overgrown that Aden doubts Dariel has been out there in years. But Aden didn’t tell me why he and Kade had moved out of this house, which they must have, and into apartments that were like empty shells. Lived in but devoid of life and color.

Here, Aden has his walls painted a dusky blue with silver-framed photographs of him, Kade, and Dariel. He has a dresser with books and CDs. He had a life in that room. Memories. While Kade’s room is all black, it isn’t empty either. He has a desk with an expensive-looking laptop on it, leads for a million different things, a stereo, noise-canceling headphones.Things.

There are signs someone lives there. Someone who never makes the bed, but signs of life. Kade’s minimalist apartment was like a painting someone had started but never finished. They’d drawn out the outlines of the things they wanted to paint: a bed, couch, and coffee table. But they’d never painted in the personal touches that would make a cold place like that feel like home.

A place like that makes sense for a person like Rylan. Someone who only values money and control. It doesn’t make sense for Kade, who knows how to laugh and joke, and who will feed me chicken soup because he doesn’t want me to hurt my hands.

This is where they lived before until something broke them apart.

But what? And why are they all back together now?

“Kade is all talk,” Leandro says with a half-shrug, as he slides those familiar emerald-green eyes over me.

If I’d woken to find him standing at my bedroom door in the middle of the night, I’d have told him to go away and gone back to sleep. I wouldn’t have frozen and held my breath the way I did with Dariel.

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