Page 83 of Piece You Saved

“You’re lucky,” he calls out. “It’s going to be a beautiful day. Enjoy it for the both of us, huh?”

“Will do.” I grin. “Right after I sleep through most of it.”

He laughs back.

As I cross toward the parking lot, car keys in hand, I run through the mammoth list of tasks I need to complete before I can crawl into bed.

My car needs gas. My belly needs food. I can’t remember the last time I cleaned my apartment. And groceries. I won’t have any food in my refrigerator, only a couple of casseroles and a platter of stale sandwiches from the funeral. I had no appetite to eat them when I let Simon’s mom talk me into taking them with me, and I have no appetite now.

And then there’s Jane, AKA Saige Leo. The woman Simon asked me to check up on during my shift. A woman so terrified that she considered launching herself out of a hospital room to get away from me. Simon hadn’t been lying when he’d told me he had a troubled patient who needed more help than he could give her.

“She’s in trouble, Harley, and she isn’t accepting help from me,” Simon had said after he’d finished his shift and was on his way home. It had been one of our last conversations.

“Just stop in and check on her, okay? Maybe you can get her to open up,” he’d said.

Just a woman in trouble.

Saige wasn’tjusta woman in trouble. A shifter—or shifters—hadn’t only left her throat covered in bites. They’d scarred her. Mentally as well as physically.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t beautiful. Or fierce. Or…

Mine.

She smashed into me. Her beauty, her sweet, alluring scent, the vulnerability in her large blue-gray eyes. She didn’t just capture the man, she caught my wolf’s attention, something no woman has ever done before.

And then she disappeared, and no matter how hard I searched for her, I couldn’t find her. Not until a news report flashed up and gave me her real name and reminded me that I hadn’t dreamed her up.

Now she’s back in my life—or I’m back in hers—and she’s as attracted to me as I am to her. I don’t intend to let her disappear. Not again.

I reach my car, a ten-year-old green Volvo, and stretch my key toward the lock.

My brain is fried. The five-minute walk from the hospital entrance to the staff parking lot felt like a marathon, and my stomach is growling as loudly as my wolf suddenly is.

I am fucking exhausted, but the internal alarm that kept a twelve-year-old boy alive on the street still works. So I pay attention to my wolf growling in my head and throw myself to the right, side-stepping the claws a wolf punches into my driver’s side door instead of the back of me.

A black-brown wolf with piercing blue eyes tears its claws free and swings around to face me, its jaws falling open to snarl soundlessly at me.

I redistribute my weight to the balls of my feet, peel back my lips from my teeth in a soundless, human snarl, and meet his stare with one of my own.

This is the same shifter as before. The same alpha who was sniffing around Aden’s hospital room.

His hind legs bunch. I change the grip on my keys, letting three of them drop and tucking them between my fingers like metal claws. I don’t have time to shift, so this will have to do.

The wolf leaps. I whip out of the way, spinning to my left this time, and punch out with my right hand, my homemade weapon aimed right at the wolf’s side.

I punch hard.

My keys penetrate thick fur and tear into flesh beneath. My nose wrinkles as the scent of blood taints the air. The wolf releases a furious growl. And then I’m moving again as the wolf slashes a claw at my throat. I leap back, whirl around, and stay low to the ground. But I never take my eyes off him.

We circle each other. A red Hyundai on our left, a black Nissan on our right, and the hospital path I walked down contain our fight.

If this was the same wolf who ripped out Simon’s throat, he’s going to die for it.

A door whooshes open. The hospital door. Footsteps crunch across the concrete, headed this way.

“Just milk, or do we need bread as well?” A woman yawns. “And did you call Melissa about dinner tonight?”

I stare at the wolf.

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