Page 150 of The Piece You Stole

That’s when I know what happened. I broke the moment.

Words I hadn’t known I was thinking spill out without warning. “Rylan said I might not be normal.” My fingers flutter to the more recent bites on my throat, but I don’t touch. “He said—”

Kade grips my chin and gently angles my head to face him. “Rylan is a freak of nature. What the fuck does he know about normal?”

I shake my head, my brow furrowed, chewing my lip as I lower my gaze to his soft, white cotton t-shirt. Who does the laundry here? Aden? Kade?

I don’t see Dariel sorting through the dirty laundry, so it can’t be him. Probably Aden, if he does the cooking. “Maybe normal isn’t the right word.Human.” I lift my hand to grip the bottom of his shirt. Not tightly, but touching Kade and Aden seems to help when I feel the shadows sucking me under. Keeps me grounded in the here and now. “He said I lived through things most humans wouldn’t.”

“Like the bites,” Kade offers.

With my gaze still locked on Kade’s perfectly white shirt, I nod. “Like the bites.”

They all would have seen I had more of them, even if no one has commented on the state of my neck. But Aden kissed them when he took me to bed, and he didn’t recoil from them. Kade touches them often, too. Light, lingering caresses, the way he will sometimes touch the scar I carved into my left wrist with Felix’s steak knife. As if he wants me to know he sees them, and they don’t disgust him.

I hesitate because there’s so much I haven’t told them about Rylan and his pack. “And the bridge. I…” my voice trails off. I don’t regret killing Felix, but to admit what I did would mean admitting I was in the car. They would want to know why Felix. I’d have to tell them about the elevator, the whips, the…

Too many things.

So I stop right there, and I don’t go any further.

But I can tell them about the bites. It’s not like they can’t see the state of my neck.

“Twelve.” My voice is whisper-quiet. Kade will hear me because he’s inches away. Aden would have to strain, and even then, he might not have heard me. “That’s how many times he’s bitten me. That I can remember. Sometimes I passed out, so it could have been even more. How many bites can a human survive?”

Kade doesn’t answer for so long that I know Rylan is right. There’s something different about me. Something that makes me not as human as I’d always believed.

Kade’s lips part.

An alarm shrieks, deafening me.

Kade explodes to his feet. “Aden,” he shouts, already moving toward the door and taking me with him. Dariel is already in the hallway. My gaze flicks down and then quickly away again, heat blooming on my cheeks. Okay, so he’s naked. Wasn’t expecting that.

His face is expressionless as he stalks past me toward the stairs. Briefly, his stony gaze settles on me, and it almost looks like he’s getting ready to say something.

“Angel.” Kade’s hands grip my arms and turn me.

He frames my face with his large, warm hands, dips his head, and kisses me with the passion and heat that only Kade can give me. I sink into it and him because I’ll never get enough of him.

Lifting his head, he gazes down at my face.

A screaming alarm can only mean one thing.

Rylan has found me, and now he’s here to kill the hounds and take me.

I grab the front of Kade’s t-shirt and hold on tight. It pulls on the stitches in my arm, but I barely feel the ache. “Kade.Don’t.”

They can’t die trying to protect me. They just can’t.

I have to stop them. My fingers tighten around Kade’s shirt as my breath wheezes out of me, shallow and too fast. “I’ll go. Maybe—”

“That won’t stop anything.” Dariel’s deep, flat voice draws my eye.

I’d thought he had gone down the stairs, but he hadn’t. Overhead, the alarm continues to shriek, but I do my best to tune it out. That he’s naked is…distracting, so I keep my gaze trained on his face. “You don’t know that.”

He stares back at me through emotionless, emerald eyes I’ve never been able to read.

Not emotionless,I mentally correct myself. There’s always the same old pain I saw in the photograph hanging on Aden’s wall. It’s buried deep, but it’s always there.

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