Page 159 of The Piece You Stole

I angle my head in the direction the voice came from. Not behind my door, but the front door.

“Saige ismine. She wears my bites. She wears my scent. She wears the scars I left her with. Surely you’ve seen them now.”

“Is that right?” Kade’s voice comes next, soft with threat, a dangerous lilt in it too familiar for me not to know what it means.

I grab at my wolf.

We need to shift. Now.

Rylan’s taunts are meant to do one thing, and one thing only.

Don’t bite, Kade. He knows he can’t get to Saige with you right there. Don’t fucking—

An electric beep cuts through my thoughts. A familiar sound. The front door.

A growl erupts from further away. Kade’s growl. He’s outside the house, which means no one is watching the stairs up to Saige and Aden.

It means our plan just fell apart.

Fuck.

The only way I’m getting through that door is if I shift, but my wolf is fighting mehard.

Claws flash toward my throat.

I jerk my head aside. The claws catch my shoulder, opening me up, but I barely feel it.

Using my shoulder, I take the silver-eyed wolf to the ground, pin her, and rip out her throat.

Springing to my feet as she’s taking her final breath, I pause at the sound coming from just outside my door.

Paws. Two sets of them. One wolf's scent is unfamiliar. But the other…the other I remember. Rylan Treveiler.

A flash of memory hits.

Fire and smoke singe my fur. A dark brown wolf with silver eyes backs away, bleeding, knows he’s losing. I lunge to finish him off, but another wolf attacks from behind. I kill him. Spin around. But I know what I will find. Gone. He got away.

So that’s what happened.

Now that Rylan has drawn Kade out, he’s on his way up to Saige.

Since there’s no breaking through the door at my back, I have to get out of here another way.

Leaving behind a room filled with bodies, I tear through the dining room, and when a wall of broken glass comes into view, I leap through it and out into the garden.

My paws have barely touched the ground before I’m darting through the trees, the bushes, and around the side to the gate.

I throw myself at the black iron.

It doesn’t open.

Backing up, I throw myself at it again. And again.

The next time I launch myself at it, it’s already swinging open, and I fly out, crash into Kade, and take him down with a heavy thud. I stand on his chest, staring down into his watchful gray eyes, growl, and leap off because he’s not the one my wolf wants.

I sprint for the front door hanging wide open.

It’s the other one that has to die. The one who got away from me before.

---