Page 9 of The Piece You Stole

He’s not ugly, but he’s so cruel that I have never found him attractive, or even viewed him in any other way than objectively handsome. Short, dark hair just a little disheveled, as if picking up a brush was too much effort. His expression is so impossible to read it’s like staring at a pool of water. Astagnantpool of water. A sharp, pointed nose always made his role as Rylan’s hunter make sense. But his eyes are a blue so piercing it’s like a weapon, filled with a hunger I’ve always known would hurt me, if it didn’t plain kill me.

His gaze dips down, settling on my bare breasts. He licks his lips.

My skin itches, and a new shiver makes my body shudder. This one has nothing to do with being cold.

With the bedsheets either under me or Rylan having kicked them to the bottom of the bed—likely on purpose—I cover my breasts with one arm and jerk my attention back to Rylan. “What are you talking about?”

Rylan doesn’t lift his head from the papers in his hands. “Not all humans can be turned.”

His beauty used to blind me to his cruelty. Now I look at him.Reallylook at him. I take in his sloping nose, his full lower lip, slightly wavy brown-black hair, perfect olive skin, heavy muscles, and strong jaw—everything a girl would look for in a man. The perfecteverything.

Now I look at him and see him for the monster he is. The monster he’s always been.

“You said it doesn’t always take,” I say, as, apparently finished with the papers, he hands them to Nathan and turns to study me as if I’m an experiment that hasn’t behaved in the way it’s supposed to.

Afailedexperiment. That’s me. One he can’t or won’t stop testing over and over again.

Stupid. Or insane. That’s what someone would call you if you keep repeating the same action and keep expecting the result to be different. If someone were to call Rylan stupid, he’d rip their face off.

I marvel at his cold detachment.

When did you stop loving me? Or was the thing you felt for me not love at all but just obsession?

“But I didn’t say why,” he says as he rises smoothly from the bed. He’s just as naked as I am, but he’s never been embarrassed about his nudity the way I am.

Something about his relaxed side-to-side neck stretch, or maybe it’s the way he’s sharing things he hasn’t before, puts me on alert—moreon alert—than I already am. I fight not to bite my lip, to keep my face passive.

If Rylan knew how many questions were bursting to get out of me, he’d make sure the answers to those questions came with painful conditions. And he knows, just as I do, it wouldn’t take long before I was begging to know what he meant when he said my mom couldn’t be human.

This must be a trick. Or a new punishment.

Darting a glance at Nathan doesn’t offer me any idea what’s coming. He stands in a pair of low-slung black sweatpants and nothing else, hands tucking the papers I’m desperate to see behind his back, eyes blank.

“Three things will happen when a shifter bites a human.”

I jerk my attention back to Rylan.

He’s standing in front of the wall of glass that overlooks the city, with dim light trickling in around him. Must be noon, maybe even later. But naked or dressed, day or night, has never stopped Rylan from wandering over to the window.

“They will die,” Rylan intones.

His voice is so flat there’s nothing in it to suggest whether my dying from his bite would have the slightest bit of effect on the man. Only his wolf would mourn me, but I doubt it would be for long.

I train my attention on the goose pimples covering my too-thin, pale thighs.

“They will become a shifter.”

A longer pause now, as if he’s waiting for me to say or do something. The silence goes on for so long that I can’t sit in it any longer. I lift my head and meet his clear blue stare. It’s impassive. Cold. Just like the surface of a stone.

How could I have thought his eyes were the most beautiful thing in the world?

“Or?” I prompt.

“There is something…” His face twists in disgust. “Differentabout them that makes their body reject the change. They will remain…ordinary.”

He says ordinary, but he means ‘less than.’ Not good enough. And Rylan Treveiler’s mate cannot be ordinary.

My fingers clench around a handful of the two-thousand-dollar sheet, wrinkling the silky-smooth fabric. “Something like what?”

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