Page 96 of The Piece You Stole

Two, nope—has to be more than that—three-plus days means I’m functioning on less than four hours of sleep.

I lay stretched out on my bed, my head pillowed on my arms, eyes closed, listening in as Aden gives Dariel a brief rundown of what he’s missed these last couple of days.

He’s leaving a lot out, and Dariel is carefully not asking about Saige, even though it’s clear from his constant pauses he wants to.

Just fucking admit she’s ours, you idiot. We all know you want to.

I strangle the next yawn.

“Go to fucking sleep,” I mutter beneath my breath.

Dariel is back. It’s Aden’s turn to watch Saige, and I’ve threatened Leandro so many times now just a look will shut him up.

I have no reason to still be awake.

But I still don’t fucking sleep.

I peel my eyelids open and stare up at the ceiling. Now that Dariel is awake, we have to talk about his wolf, Rylan, and how we’re going to protect Saige. Dariel doesn’t know if Rylan is still alive, but my gut tells me he’s somewhere out there. Until I have his body laid out in front of me, I refuse to believe it.

Three days. The fuck had her for three days, and the damage he did…

Ijuststrangle a growl.

“She could have lost her arm,” the doctor had said, his fingers tightening around the metal clipboard in his hand. “The initial laceration was bad, but the attempt to sew it shut withthread? We’re managing the infection, but she’s not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.”

He’d stared at us, silently judging. Blue eyes accusatory.

“We didn’t do it,” Aden said, shuffling a little in place. He had his hands clenched tight as well, though not around a clipboard, but fisted.

The wound had turned septic. By the time we’d gotten her to the ER, she was barely breathing. We thought we would lose her before we reached the hospital. Aden had panicked. Had refused to believe she was still alive because he couldn’t find a pulse, but I could still hear her heart struggling.

If she’d been with Rylan any longer, she’d be dead. No fucking doubt about it.

The doctor had asked about the bites on her throat, the old whip marks on her back, the tiny fragments of glass they’d had to dig out of her palms, and not the least of all, the bruises on her hips and thighs, signs he’d expect to see in someone who had been sexually assaulted.

I’d had to walk out of the waiting room, go down to the back of the hospital, find a nice quiet place with a brick wall, and punch it half the fucking way down.

After I’d swiped my bloody knuckles on the sweatpants Aden had thought to pack in the back of Dariel’s car, I’d returned to the waiting room and told the doctor I planned on killing the people who had hurt her.

The doctor hadn’t asked if I was being serious. He’d glanced at my bruised and bloody knuckles, and a little of his judgment had dimmed. “We don’t condone retaliatory justice. We can call the police and have them take a state—”

“No,” I’d interrupted, my voice harder than the wall I’d knocked down with my fists. “No cop will do what needs to be done.”

I remembered how the cops from the police station had talked about Saige as if she were beneath them—a crime that they still need to pay for one day soon—and I know, from experience, there are other cops just like them, or even worse.

Saige had stayed in the hospital for almost twenty-four hours. Just until she was well enough that they could move her from intensive care. Staying any longer than that was too risky.

The sick fuck tortured her. Whether it was because Saige dared to run, or she was wearing mine and Aden’s scents, isn’t important.

The sick fuck is going to die screaming.

Neither Aden nor I had spoken much in the car on the way back to the house. Not about Saige’s condition, or about what was happening with Dariel. Aden had driven, and I’d held Saige in my arms. She’d been sleeping.

But we’d been told to expect that she would sleep a lot, especially in the coming days.

Before we left the hospital, the doctors gave us specific instructions to care for Saige. We were to keep the wound on her arm clean and dry, change the bandages daily, and apply an antibiotic ointment.

If the swelling returns or her breathing changes, we have to take her straight to the ER. They’d caught the sepsis in time, but that didn’t mean it can’t still come back and kill her.

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