Page 166 of Piece You Saved

“Yes, she didn’t want Iwan to follow,” Niamh explains. “Friends of friends helped her to leave and start over. Every now and again, Ciara would send us a note or a photograph. Something small to let us know she was still alive and well, but only when she felt it was safe. We had heard she’d married and had a child, and then the notes stopped. Suddenly the world felt colder.”

“She died. Cancer,” I explain.

Mom always loved to be surrounded by nature. If she was from a small Irish village, she must have felt more at home there than in the city.

Yet she left it, left her family and her home to protect them from a man she believed would hurt them. How terrifying and heartbreaking must it have been for her to leave behind everything she knew and loved not just to start over in a new town or city, but a new country?

Their sadness is so tangible, it stretches across the table and embraces me. “We knew it had to be something bad. And then one day, Liam was in the pub, and a news report flashed up. Some brief international round up. He nearly killed himself rushing home to tell me he’d seen a face in the news, and it looked like our Ciara’s,” Niamh says.

“And your Da?” Liam prompts. “Is he still alive?”

I think of Dad. Not how he was at the end; how he was before Mom died. Like when he worked in his shed in the garden carving the most beautiful things in the world. I remember him beaming at me as he tossed me in the air beside the cabin we loved to spend our summers. Before grief turned him into a man I didn’t recognize. “He was the best dad in the world.”

Until he wasn’t.

Swallowing hard when my throat closes up, I throw Kade a smile when he squeezes my hand. “He died too.”

“Oh dear, you’re alone?” Niamh breathes, sounding devastated.

“No,” I tell her faintly, squeezing Kade’s hand in return. “I’m not alone.”

I have the Hounds.

Kade leans toward me and kisses me. “I’ll leave you to talk with your grandparents.”

He moves to get up, but I hold on to him, stopping him. “How did you do this?”

“That piece of shit said you weren’t normal.” When Kade glares down at me, I know it isn’t me he’s raging at. It’s Rylan. “I decided to do some research.”

I peer up at him, conscious my grandparents—how strange is it to think I have grandparents?—are listening.

Before Rylan burst into the house and nearly killed Aden, I sat in Kade’s lap and told him about Rylan’s repeated attempts to bite me. I explained how Rylan thought I couldn’t be normal, or maybe he meant I wasn’t fully human, because no matter how many times he bit me, he could never turn me.

He was right.

“About me?” I ask.

Kade nods. “You needed answers, and I wanted to find them for you.”

So did Rylan. He sent Nathan, and all Nathan could find out was that Mom didn’t have any official records. “What did you find out?”

Clearly, he discovered a lot more than Rylan and Nathan did.

“That there must be more to you. I kept running into walls,” Kade says.

“Until?” I prompt.

“Until I spoke with Detective Morgan, who told me the station had received an international phone call from a couple wanting to speak with Saige Leo. A woman they suspected was their granddaughter,” he tells me, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.

I smile up at him. “And then what did you do?”

“What the fuck do you think I did? I booked them on the first flight here.”

I love you.

My eyes turn watery. “That sounds expensive.”

“Expensive?” He kisses my brow. “No, angel. It was priceless. I’ll leave you to speak with your grandparents. Take your time.”

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