Page 142 of The Piece You Stole

He’s pulled on a pair of gray sweats, but that’s all he stopped to do. I peer around him to see if the strange man is leaving, but as if Kade feels me do it, he presses a hand to my belly and nudges me back. At no point does he take his eyes off the skeletal man. “Go.”

“Saige.”

I jump and whip my head around. Aden. He blinks at me through half-lidded hazel eyes, and I know he couldn’t have been awake for longer than a few minutes, but he at least thought to pull on a hoodie and stuff his feet in a pair of sneakers before venturing out here.

He holds out his hand toward me, and I take it, letting him pull me away. Before I can step inside the house, I peek over my shoulder, and my eyes connect with the strange man’s murky blue stare.

“Dead. That’s what you’ll be soon.”

The promise in his stare, as if it’s already a full-gone conclusion, has me whipping my head back around, but not before I see Kade grip the man by the nape of his neck and shove him away.

“Aden, who was that?” I ask as he leads the way to the kitchen.

“Hmmm? I’ll make you some coffee. Your hands are freezing.”

So, he doesn’t want to tell me who it was. Which means he knows.

“Aden…?”

He glances over his shoulder, offering me a smile that rings false. “And then a soak in a bath with Epsom salts to ease your sore muscles.”

Yeah, he really doesn’t want me to know who the man was.

I stare at Aden a little longer, struggling to read him. I don’t believe he or Kade will hurt me—or kill me—the way that strange man seems to believe, but Dariel? It’s all too easy to picture Dariel shifting and ripping out Monica’s throat before Kade could save her.

And there you were, alone in the garden with a man who could have killed a girl right where you both stood, throwing his tepid apology back in his face.

Maybehewas the one who killed Monica, and this man was a grieving relative.

But it’s a mystery, and one that has me curious.

If I survive Rylan, I might take Sam up on her offer to go shopping because, if anyone is going to be the one to tell me anything, it will be her.

CHAPTER 33

KADE

Eyes closed, I wait. Saige’s soft treads move to the door, and then they stop.

Her breathing grows heavier the longer she stands just outside Aden’s bedroom door. Back to her bedroom. That’s where she told me she was going, but when she finally moves, it isn’t right toward her room, but left, toward the stairs.

Her first three steps are a little faster than I’m comfortable with her going down.Especiallyafter hearing her nearly fall down them had me flinging myself out of my bed, my room, and down the hallway to catch her…if Dariel hadn’t beaten both me and Aden to it.

By the time she’s halfway down the stairs, she’s moving at a near run. And her heart?

Something is wrong.

Really fucking wrong.

I get up.

Beside me, Aden stirs, sweeping his arm across rumpled white cotton in a slow searching motion. “Saige? Kade? Where—”

“Go back to sleep.” I’d go after Saige buck naked, but after the speed she ran down those stairs, she might just keep running.

Since it’s looking like the thing she was running from was you.

With the brittle smile she aimed my way, and Dariel’s words in the garden still fresh in my mind, there’s no ‘looking like.’ It was me.

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