Page 84 of Piece You Saved

Beep.

The Hyundai’s lights flash.

Shit.

The wolf lunges and snaps his teeth at me.

Spinning away, drive my fist into his side, hitting something hard enough for a bone to crack. I grunt as claws rake my back. It burns, but it’s not fatal.

The footsteps slow.

The wolf and I go back to circling each other.

“Yeah, I thought I heard something.” A nervous laugh. “It was probably nothing. Anyway, don’t forget to—”

The wolf spins around and sprints away. A woman screams. The high-pitched sound rings through the parking lot and, for a brief moment, drowns out the traffic in the distance. Something smashes against the ground and footsteps pound toward the hospital entrance.

I watch the wolf thread its way through the parking lot, toward the bright city lights in the distance.

It’s only when I lose sight of him that I notice the shattered cell phone on the ground. A black coat flaps as the woman disappears into the hospital entrance, and I take my first real breath since the wolf’s attempted ambush.

And then I head back to the hospital to book the next two days off work. I stop long enough to grab a hoodie from my car and swing it on to cover my clawed back, knowing by the time I reach the hospital, my scratches will have healed.

“Looks like he’s the persistent sort, Jane,” I mutter under my breath. “Time we did something about that.”

CHAPTER 23

SAIGE

It’s the same afternoon Dariel tried to kill me. A normal person might do the smart thing: pack up and take off for Mexico. I sit at the kitchen dining table and pick at my scrambled eggs.

Mexico might work if you didn’t have someone like Rylan Trevailer after you. Even if leaving the country was an option, there’s no place on Earth he won’t find me.

Stay or go?

Staying means risking Dariel, Aden, and Kade. I should leave, protect them. But I won’t because I know them a little better now. Where I go, they will follow, and the last thing I want is to put them in more danger than I have already.

So I stay.

Aden is digging into breakfast, inhaling sausage, bacon, and eggs at a pace that would alarm me if he were human. But shifters have big appetites—and not only for good things like food—so I doubt his wolf is going to let him choke on a sausage.

“Saige?” Aden slows enough to frown at me. “Everything okay?”

Smiling faintly, I lower my gaze to my plate, fork up scrambled eggs and spend two minutes longer chewing than I should. I’m not hungry, but Aden cooked it for me, refusing my offer to help. He snarled a bit when he burned his arm on the side of the pan. I hopped off the counter he’d sat me on, wrapped my arms around him from behind, and he settled down.

If he can control his wolf and find a measure of normality in this fucked-up situation, I can eat breakfast like a normal person.

It shouldn’t be this hard. Especially since Dariel stopped howling minutes before, though Kade hasn’t come down yet from having parked himself outside of his door.

As Aden and I passed him on the way downstairs, Kade slipped an arm around my waist, drew me close, and kissed me before telling me all the doors in this house were reinforced. Dariel wasn’t getting out. I was safe.

“So why stay up here, then?” I’d asked him.

He’d glared through the door at the wolf on the other side, who was using his head as a battering ram. “Just have a couple of things to say to our Alpha, is all. Go eat breakfast with Aden.”

And so I had.

I keep letting them do things for me I should do for myself.

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