Page 144 of Piece You Saved

Her hand flies up, swiping at her face before she sits up. “Oh, hey, Aden. What’s up?”

“Can I come in?”

She peeks over at me, eyes red and her face splotchy. “Sure. Sorry about this. It’s just—”

“I know,” I interrupt as I cross over to her and join her in bed. “I understand.”

She’s okay, Kade says. He needs to come up here and see what okay looks like.

Lifting my arm, I wait. Saige burrows into my side, resting her head on my chest as I wrap my arms around her back and press my lips to her hair.

For several seconds, I hold her, listening to the steady sound of her heart beating. “You know you can talk to me about anything.”

She nods. “I know.”

But she won’t. Not about this, because she thinks it will hurt me.

I give her a reassuring squeeze. “I said I would tell you the story about how we all met.”

Her heart trips faster, and I feel her anticipation. “You’re going to tell me now?”

I nod. “It’s a long story, but we have nowhere to be. Maybe Kade will join us for some of it.” A hint. I pause, waiting to see if he will take it. When there’s no response, I let go of my disappointment. “Or maybe not.”

“He keeps closing his laptop when I’m around. Is something wrong? I thought with Rylan dead, we didn’t need to monitor the security anymore.”

“Nothing is wrong. It’s just a project Kade is working on,” I say.

And one he might not complete if he never asks for the help he needs.

“One he doesn’t want me to see?” she asks

“He’ll let you see when he’s ready.”

She angles her head up to peer at me. “So, it’s about me?”

“It is.”

I feel the tension in her back, so I find her lips and kiss her. “Nothing bad. Promise.”

She gives me a searching look before she nods, and her tension eases away. “Okay.”

I never believed I would gain her trust. But I have. Her quiet acceptance is proof of that.

“You said you threw a rock and saved two shifters’ lives,” she prompts.

I’d never been so hungry, so desperate, and so sure I wouldn’t last another week on my own than I was then. If I hadn’t stumbled down that alley and into an abandoned warehouse, I would have died.

“I’d been alone for a few years,” I say. This isn’t a story I’d ever want to tell, but I’d like Saige to hear it. “Mostly on the streets when things at the house were too bad. When I was desperate, I’d go back. I’d always regret it.”

“The house, not home?” Saige says. After what she revealed about her past, I’m not surprised she’d pick up on the difference.

“A home is where you have a family who loves you, feeds you, and cares for you. That place was no home to me. It was just a house.”

She slips an arm around my hip and squeezes. “You don’t have to tell me this, Aden.”

I kiss her hair. “I know. But it’s important you understand how desperate I was not to go back there. Things had gotten worse, so I decided whatever happened on the street, I wasn’t going back to the house. Not again.”

“I understand.”

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