Page 55 of The Piece You Stole

“She’s been booked out.”

With far too much whiskey—a disgusting amount of whiskey—making my head fuzzy, the cop’s words don’t immediately register. Initially, I’d believed it was the endless ringing, the dozens of cops speaking down phones in the open plan space, or a woman with a French accent loudly reporting a stolen handbag affecting my ability to focus.

It’s not. My struggle is less about the head-poundingly loud distractions filling the eighty-fifth precinct’s main room, and more about the contents I spent the better part of a day knocking back until I passed out on Greg’s couch. I drank so much whiskey that not even two black coffees and the few bites of a breakfast Laurel, the waitress, likely spat in have come close to helping me think any clearer.

I blink down at the cop’s thin, receding brown hair as he taps away at his computer keyboard.

Two seconds later, he lifts his head and shoots me a narrow-eyed glare. “Was there anything else?”

You have a brain in that head of yours, Aden. Time to use it.

I straighten too fast and burp up bacon. Swallowing hard when it threatens to come right back up again, I clear my throat and hope the cop didn’t notice how close I came to throwing up over his desk. “But she was arrested. Cops brought her here.” I lean on his desk. To get his attention, but also because the world is slowly tipping over.

Fuck, I’m still drunk.

“It was in the news,” I add when the cop refocuses his attention on his computer. “And the reporters are still outside.”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“That’s because they’re a swarm of locusts. They come. They feed. They’ll leave soon enough,” he mutters distractedly.

“But… Saige. You haven’t told me about her.” I remind him.

“And you haven’t told me who you are and what it is you want with her.” He scans a sheet of paper sitting beside his yellowing keyboard, flips it, frowns, and then turns back to the computer before stabbing at the delete button so hard it rocks the desk.

Since it’s movement that my stomach could really do without, I straighten. “She’s a friend.”

“Then you should have a contact number for thisfriendand use it instead of wasting my time.”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

As I stare down at him, I try to remember what made me think it was a good idea to reach for Greg’s Macallan. It’s a miracle I didn’t throw up over myself on the way here, but that had everything to do with Saige. Throwing up could come later, I told myself.

Everything was in our favor. There was no traffic on the roads. Kade didn’t kill Leandro, though, from the way Leandro was provoking Kade, I’d have expected a bloodbath in the back seat. And best of all: the reporters milling about outside was a sign that we’d come to the right place. That while Kade and I were losing our heads fighting with a chef over a TV remote, Dariel was using his.

Now what?

I lean over the cop’s desk, swallowing hard as I work to ignore my churning stomach. “Look, officer, I’m not—”

A hand grips my arm and pulls me away from the desk. Dariel.

He glances into my face, snorts, and shakes his head. “Don’t throw up.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I tell him with more confidence than I should.

His gaze drifts away from me. “Your face is green. That cop doesn’t know how lucky he was.” Lowering his voice, he pulls me further away from the cop’s desk. “I’ve been listening. An attorney walked her out of here five minutes ago.”

Five minutes. Had we come so close to getting Saige back?

I’m not ready to just walk away. Not when there’s still a chance we could learn who booked her out and where they took her. “We could still—”

“Let’s go. We’re wasting time here.” He darts a glance at Kade leaning on the wall. “Kade. Come on.”

But Kade isn’t looking at Dariel. While I was trying not to throw up over a cop, Kade parked himself just inside the station’s main room, arms crossed over his chest. I’d expected Kade would find a reason to argue when Dariel told him to put the t-shirt on in the car, but to my relief, Kade gave him a long look, snorted, and tugged the fabric over his head. The less attention we attract in a room full of cops, the better. Kade, thankfully, must have realized that.

“Kade.” Dariel injects more of an order into his voice.

Again, Kade ignores him. He’s fixed his attention on two cops standing beside a coffee machine in the far right-hand corner of the room. The shorter one with dark hair and a bulging vein in his forehead, is so furious that the taller man with big blond curls is failing utterly to get him to lower his voice.

---