Page 21 of The Piece You Stole

He cocks his head, his gaze darkening as it dips to my mouth. “Felix said you were good. Not that blowjobs have been what I enjoy, but maybe I’ve been missing out all this time.”

“He was a good man,” I whisper as I visualize taking the knife from him and slashing it across his throat. In my mind, it isn’t Simon Trevor’s dead eyes staring up at me as he bleeds out on the ground. It’s Nathan.

He lifts a hand and his fingersalmostgraze my lips. “Is that why he was so easy to kill? The good ones usually are.”

“Nathan. Call the others. Time to go.”

Not even Rylan’s voice coming from our right makes me break our stare. I’m breathing as hard as I would after the pack had run me to ground at the playground. Only this time, it isn’t exhaustion or terror making my heart race. It’s fury. I tell myself to look away before Rylan punishes me for it. But I can’t. My rage is burning too hot and bright for that.

A flare of anticipation crystalizes in Nathan’s piercing blue gaze. There’s something about chasing after a person bleeding terror that will make Nathan’s eyes brighten the way a child’s would on Christmas morning. Tonight, it’s his Christmas morning.

Punishment number two: hours serving as prey for a pack of wolves.

Still smiling, Nathan takes a step back, opens his suit jacket, and slips the steak knife inside. He pats the pocket twice with gentle care. “Perhaps we might make use of it during our week together.”

Punishment three: a week with a sadist.

CHAPTER 6

SAIGE

There are no swings or slides in the playground, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a source of entertainment. It is. Just not for me. Or any regular human, for that matter.

It sits about twenty minutes southwest of Rylan’s apartment building, tucked far enough away from the bustling streets, the sirens and traffic noises are a barely noticeable hum in the distance.

“It’s five acres, baby,” Rylan told me the first time he took me there. Not to torment me, but to show me his slice of peace and tranquility in the city. A place that fed the wolf side of him.

“Right.”

My eyes must have glazed over because he flashed me a grin, took my hand, and kissed the back of it before he told me, “About four football fields.”

What the playground was, I later learned, was a waste of prime real estate which cost upward of five million dollars, according to the realtors he and his attorneys were constantly fending off. Land like that, you’re supposed to build condos and high rises and turn that five million into a fifty-million-dollar apartment block, not create a lush green oasis, fence it off, and refuse to sell it to anyone regardless of whether someone is telling you to name your price.

But if you’re a shifter like Rylan, land like that is the perfect playground for a pack of wolves who want a place to run wild and free. And he’s not exactly hurting for money.

A large part of Rylan’s wealth comes from the stock market. Fortune rewards the downright reckless, and Rylan gambled and won.Big time.He started with a two-million-dollar inheritance from his family, while another million came from ‘contributions’ from his packmates.

“I'm an alpha shifter,” he told me early in our relationship. “And not a weak one. I’m offering them my protection. Everyone has to pay their way; otherwise, what use are they to me?”

I should have read the warning signs about the sort of man he was right then and there, yet I missed them. Sure, I was eighteen to Rylan’s twenty-six at the time, but I wasn’t naïve. I knew there were predators in the world. Maybe I saw the signs. Maybe I just didn’t want to.

Within five years, he’d turned three million into a hundred.

Thing is, when you build your wealth that quickly, there must always be an ever-present prickle of fear that you could lose it just as—or even quicker than that. It’s why his phone rarely leaves his side. It’s why, as we approach his matte black Lexus in the apartment’s underground parking level, he has his phone glued to his ear. And there it will stay until we reach the playground, where we’ll meet the rest of the pack. Only then will he end his call, strip naked, and give me my five-minute head start.

Just like all the times I’ve been here before, the garage is empty of all sound but our shoes clicking across the concrete. Only Rylan’s Lexus, Nathan’s BMW, and Isa’s khaki-green Ferrari, fill the cavernous place. Either the other millionaires who live here use another level, or, as I’d always suspected, the people who bought apartments here did so for investment purposes and only Rylan lives in the building.

While Nathan could have been the one to drive us to the playground, Rylan likes for Nathan to stick close by him in case he needs to send him on an errand. Isa, who lives nearly thirty minutes away, usually serves as Rylan’s driver when he doesn’t want to drive himself.

As we approach Rylan’s Lexus, Isa starts up the car, the powerful engine filling the space with a vibration that makes my chest hum. Nathan gets to the car first, pulling the back door open and stepping aside.

Rylan slides into the backseat of the car, eyes in front, his conversation continuing without pause. Most of it goes completely over my head. Something about more investment properties and underperforming stocks in a company he’s thinking about buying. No surprise there. Nothing ever performs the way Rylan wants it to.

Nathan turns to me with a hint of a smile curling the corners of his lips. I see the smile and I know that when he goes to help me inside, his hand will ‘accidentally’ slip from my lower back to my ass. The way it always does.

I don’t follow Rylan into the car because I’m not going anywhere. Whether I decided it in the elevator, when we were walking toward the car, or just now, I’m not sure.

But I look at Nathan and I justknow. I am not going to the playground.

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