Page 40 of The Piece You Stole

After leaving the Cerberus behind us, we make our way down the side road to find Dariel’s silver Mercedes parked up on the main road with its engine running. He’s the only one of us with a car. Aden has always preferred to walk or get a cab. With the amount I drink, it’s safer for anyone within a fifty-mile radius that someone else does the driving.

Aden’s eyes harden with determination. “Because I’d like nothing more than to watch Dariel tear into the men who have Saige.”

So would fucking I.

I’m not even close to forgiving Dariel for walking away, or for damn near ripping Aden apart, but hope spears through me because we have a lead. We have a name, and there’s a lot we can do with a name. And Dariel is on board.Finally. He can be the biggest cunt in the world when he wants to be, but once he’s made up his mind to do something, no one and nothing will stop him.

It looks like he’s made up his mind to go after Saige.

“Let’s get you sober,” I say as we leave behind the bar that doesn’t seem to matter much to any of us anymore. Not with Saige gone.

“And the shirt Dariel asked you to put on?” Aden asks, sounding like he’s smiling.

Guess this hopeful feeling is contagious.

I pull open the back door of Dariel’s car, still gripping the shirt in one hand, and turn to Aden with a grin. “What about it?

CHAPTER 10

SAIGE

The questions never stop.

They pepper me with them.

An endless cycle of question and silence. Question and silence.

“We can do this all night, Miss Leo. We have nowhere we need to be.” Detective Bradley leans toward me, the four hours we’ve spent in this room doing nothing to flatten those bouncy blond curls.

Sweat from the ever-increasing circle under his armpit grows, impossible to miss on his pale blue shirt.

“Just one thing,” Detective Ferdinand cajoles. His black flinty eyes are so mean even his cajoling feels like a threat of violence. “You give us something, and we can think about how we can help you.”

Help me into the nearest prison for a murder I didn’t commit? Yeah, no thanks.

If it means getting away from Rylan and Nathan, it might even be worth it.

But then I think of the trial.

Simon Trevor would have had a family. A mother. A father. Probably siblings as well. It might even be worse than that: he could be an only child, the apple of his parent’s eye, the pride who went to an Ivy League college, became a doctor, and carried all their hopes and dreams for grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

But that’s all gone now.

Forever.

They’d sit in the courtroom, eyes wet, clutching soggy tissues with their quiet judgment and simmering fury burning a hole right through me. I would live on in their memory forever as the girl who killed their son.

Maybe they’d send me a letter when I was in jail. Or worse, they’d read out a victim impact statement about how I stole their happiness, and how every day, they pray for my soul because clearly, I must need saving.

If by some miracle, I served the decades of my life sentence in a cell before lucking out with an attorney who knew his way around the appeal system, I would always be the girl who killed Simon Trevor. No one would ever let me forget it.

Detective Ferdinand tries out a smile that makes me wish he’d glare instead. It would be a lot less terrifying. “Tell us about Simon. We have no record of you having met before. How did a doctor's wallet end up in your possession?”

Because he wanted to help me.

Detective Bradley comes dangerously close to dipping the end of his red tie in the dregs of his long-forgotten coffee. “Doctors saw you two running in the hospital hallway. Explain that.”

He wanted to get me away from Nathan.

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