Page 71 of We The Depraved
It’s an unfamiliar number, so my finger finds the red button and I climb inside.
We move out into the traffic of Houston when the number calls again.
And again.
Finally I answer with w a snap, “Hello?”
“Mr. Safaryan?” a female voice hits my ears and it sounds so familiar.
“Yes?”
“This is Silver…”
She quickly fills me in on what has happened. Sage has located Khrystina and she thinks there’s a gun involved.
“Fuck,” I murmur.
“You’re the only person I think she might listen too,” my wife’s best friend sounds like there’s a quiver in it.
She’s worried and now so am I. The last thing I need is the headline Billionaire’s Wife Implicated in Murder on all the newspapers around here.
“Where do you think she went?”
“Her grandmother’s,” Silver replies.
“Thank you, Silver, I owe you one.”
Rattling off Sage’s grandmother’s address to Ivan, I watch as he calmly puts the coordinates in to the GPS. I know things like this about my wife because I’ve followed her a time or two when she had no idea who I was.
Forty five minutes later, we’re pulling up to Sage’s grandmother’s house. The pink bismol colored house seems to beckon me. My eyes don’t see Sage’s car but just as I’m sliding out and adjusting the suit jacket to my car, the door to the house opens and a woman steps out onto the porch. It’s not Khrystina but she looks a lot like Sage, deep brown skin shimmers in the light. Harsh music fills my ears and I hear the screech of tires.
Sage is most definitely here now. She cuts in front of my SUV and I hear Ivan murmur, “Holy Fuck,” from inside the car.
I lean back in, “Stay here. If it gets too crazy…”
He nods. “I got you, boss.”
Sage doesn’t even notice me as she jumps out. She’s changed clothes since I’ve seen her this morning.
“Why the fuck has Khrystina been at your motherfucking house bitch?”
My wife’s harsh voice cuts through and it’s a like a tempest. Sage has become a fucking Texas sized twister and I fear no one will be able to stand in her path. Part of me wants to watch the destruction that my wife is sure to cause but the other part of me says remember the potential headline.
I can’t get another thought in before I see Sage swing on her cousin and my stomach drops.
CHAPTER23
Sage
She knew where my sister was this entire fucking time. The moment I rolled up to my grandmother’s house I knew Reese and I were finally done tangoing. As kids we’d been best friends.
We’d been family.
As adults, none of that shit mattered when I had been searching night and day for my missing sister. Three days of looking up and down alleyways, and train stations and not being able to find her until Reese finally decided to be some sort of fucking saint.
She wasn’t a saint.
My father had seen to that. With my marriage to Niki solidified, he’d gotten the lawyer to go over details to have all my father’s assets distributed. Not that I’d cared about anything the Judge had until Carson Buckley had asked if the payments to a one Reese Ellen Donnovan is to continue. Confusion bursts through my brain; I tell him no and he says no further payments will go out. A sum of four thousand dollars has been hitting Reese’s checking account for years, the payments date back to when she was about thirteen. For the first few years, the account also had her mother’s name attached.
