Page 50 of Piece You Saved

I angle my head, and—

She slips her hands between us, flattens her palms on my belly, and pushes.Hard.“No.”

I stop and pull back a couple of inches.

She can’t hide her arousal from me. I see it in her eyes, and I can scent it. It’s fading now, but it was there. So, what stopped her? What made her change her mind?

“You wanted me to kiss you.”

She stares at me. “You don’t get to kiss me and suddenly everything is okay.No.”

“That isn’t what I was doing.” I search her face, willing her to see that I mean this. “If I could take back what I said—how I treated you—I would. Let me make it right.”

Her eyes fill with tears. It’s like someone gutted me, seeing those tears and knowing I’m the one who put them there. Not Rylan.Me.

“You made me think everything Rylan did to me was my fault. That I deserved it.”

She showed me the whip marks on her back and the scars on her wrists. I gave her cash, hoping to send her away before she did any lasting damage to Kade and Aden.

Wrong. All of it was fucking wrong. She isn’t someone who would rip us apart.

She’s ours to save, to love, to care for. And I tried to throw her away.

I lost control of my wolf that day in the Cerberus. I saw the tears in her eyes, the scars on her body, and I realized I’d fucked up. Bad.

She’s ours. Aden knew it first. Kade knew it next. And me? The Alpha. The leader. I was too fucking blind to see it until I made her hate me.

I lower my head, wanting to comfort her. “I know.”

She shoves me so hard that I take a step back. Not because she’s strong enough to move me, but because she’s going to hurt herself. I’ve done more than enough damage.

She glares at me with shiny eyes. “You could have stabbed me, and it wouldn’t have hurt as much. Call me nothing. Punch me. Whip me.” She shoves me again.

My wolf snarls in my head. He doesn’t like her shoving me. Too fucking bad. It’s the least we deserve for what we did to her. It’s easy to ignore him when Saige’s pain is bleeding out of her eyes. “But don’t tell me that it was my fault.” Her voice breaks at the end. “Don’t.”

Pain lashes me because maybe I can’t fix this. “I won’t.”

We stare at each other.

“You’re the same,” she whispers, as if she’s seeing me for the first time, her eyes still swimming with tears she refuses to let fall. “What you can’t control, you break. I won’t let you break me. Once was more than enough.”

Her breathing is heavier than mine, and her hands are shaking, but I’m the one more out of control. There’s a wildness—a panic—growing in me that wasn’t there before.

What if I can’t get her to forgive me?

Her pain is so visceral that I could touch it. Maybe she’s right to think alphas are the same. She will never forgive Rylan for what he did to her. I might not have left her with bites or scars on her body, but I’ve left scars inside her. Deep ones. I see them now.

A snarl cuts through our silence.

“Dariel!” Kade yells. “Get the fuck up here.”

Turning away from Saige, I pause at the foot of the stairs with my back to her. “Whatever he did to you, I never would. I was wrong to think you were a threat to us, and I was wrong about you. Iwillmake it right.”

And then I charge up the stairs, because it sounds like Aden is awake and back to fighting his wolf for control of his body.

CHAPTER 14

SAIGE

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