by BM Hardin
“Try me.”
Silas shook his head and nodded in Horizon’s direction.
“Don’t tempt me. And from now on, if for whatever reason you have to speak to me, and oh how I’m praying that you don’t have to or maybe I should say that you won’t bother to, but if for some odd reason, if you have to speak to me, you can call me Mrs. Okeke. That would be just fine, thank you,” I said with a small giggle and wiggled my finger at her.
Her expression told me that she immediately noticed the band and that it had caught her by surprise, but she tried to play it off.
“Well, at least we got something in common now, Mrs. Okeke…number three,” she said and reached Silas the papers that she was holding and walked away.
I waited until we were inside of the house to speak.
I didn’t care what kind of business relationship they had or whatever ties that were still in between them, she wasn’t going to keep bringing her ass to my house.
Period.
“What was that about?”
“She handled the paperwork for Nolan’s death cover-up. He’s not dead of course, but he’ll never be seen again, so we had to take care of it properly. Her connections are stronger when it comes to hiding murders, staging deaths, changing identities and things of that sort. You’ll probably see something on the news today that a man was found robbed and dead in an alley. Face beat beyond recognition. He will later be identified as Nolan. Don’t worry, we didn’t kill him. I paid for the corpse. I also paid the workers at the hotel plenty for their help and their silence. The hotel footage of us ever been there, as well as our information was destroyed. So we can just try to put it all behind us okay,” Silas said.
I nodded.
Knowing who he really was, really allowed me to see what kind of things he was involved in and just what kind of things that he could actually make happen.
I was able to see what he was capable of and I was able to see how much power he had, and boy was it a lot.
And…I was also able to see Carmen’s power as well.
“So you told her about Nolan, but not about the marriage?” I questioned him.
“I told her what I needed her to do. She didn’t ask questions. She never does. She just does it. We didn’t discuss anything other than making sure that she handled what needed to be handled,” Silas said.
“What if she uses it against us one day?”
Carmen was capable of anything.
But Silas seemed to trust her with his life.
Maybe even more than he trusted me.
“She won’t. There’s too much dirt and too many cover-ups involved. Like I told you, you’ll be fine,” Silas said taking our bags to our bedroom.
I got Horizon a snack and then headed back out the front door to check the mail.
It was hot and sticky, but in a way, the sun and the birds chirping, made me feel just a little better.
But still I wondered, just what in the hell did they do with the real Nolan?
There was no telling what someone like Silas and Carmen were up to and it was probably better that I didn’t ask too many questions on the matter.
I grabbed over twenty envelopes from the mail and started to go through them.
All of them were bills, except for one of them.
Instantly I recognized the handwriting.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
It was from Sonni.
My sister Sonni.
Or should I call her Savannah?
She was reaching out to me?
Why?
I opened the envelope in a hurry, and read the note that was inside.
“Meet me at the park downtown. Tomorrow. Noon.”
That was it.
I read the note three more times, aloud, trying to make sense of it all.
So Sonni was back in town?
And she wanted to meet?
But the last time I saw her she’d said that she pretty much never wanted to see me or anyone else in her family again.
So why was she back?
Why did she want to meet now?
I hated to say this, but this couldn’t be a good thing.
She’d faked her death to get away from us, so if she was back, I was sure that it was for a reason.
Something had to be or had to have gone wrong.
And then again, maybe somehow she missed us and she just wanted to see me.
It was a slight possibility that was the reason.
Maybe it was “Savannah” who had a problem with loving us, and not necessarily Sonni.
With Sonni on my mind, on top of everything else, I headed back into the house, eagerly anticipating tomorrow...
I spotted Sonni as soon as I entered the park.
She was sitting on a bench, watching the kids play on the swings.
Just from looking at her from a far, she appeared different.
Her hair had grown back.
Actually it was way too long, too fast, so maybe it was a long weave.
The shade of her arm was about three shades darker than when I’d last see her and though she was sitting, wearing a loose fitting white dress, I could tell that she’d put on just a little bit of weight.
I was extremely nervous.
I was nervous as to why she wanted to see me and I could only hope that it was because of the right reasons and not because of something else.
I walked towards her, took a deep breath once I reached her and tapped her on her shoulder.
“Silas you’re late,” Sonni said, as she turned around.
She damn near passed out when she saw that it was me.
Silas?
She was here to meet Silas?
Huh?
“Uh….Envy, um, hi,” Sonni mumbled uncomfortably.
Why in the hell was she trying to meet up with Silas?
What business did she have with my husband?
“So you were expecting Silas? Not me? Why?” I questioned her.
She looked at me all funny with her weird ass.
“Why did you open his mail?” Sonni questioned.
Huh?
What kind of question is that?
“First off, he is my husband so if I want to open his mail, I’ll do as I please. Secondly, your envelope was addressed to me, not Silas,” I said to her.
She looked confused.
“No, it was supposed to be for Silas. Maybe you crossed my mind at the time and I put your name on it instead. I’m not sure. But I needed to see Silas…not you. I don’t need to or want to see you.”
You would think that her words wouldn’t hurt anymore, but they did.
They hurt so bad.
“Why?”
“Envy, it has nothing to do with you. It’s none of your business. Just go home,” Sonni said but I grabbed her arm as she tried to walk away.
“Let go of me Envy,” Sonni said angrily.
“Not until you tell me why you wanted to meet up with my husband,” I yelled at her.
“Envy, again, it has nothing to do with you. This is between me and Silas. Stay out of it and out of my way,” Sonni said, pulled away, and ran as fast as she could.
And I mean she actually ran as though I was going to chase her.
It was almost comical watching her run away as though she was a little baby roach and I’d stomped my foot in her direction.
But nothing was humorous about what had just happened.
Honestly, I just wanted to scream!
Literally nothing in my world made any sense these days.
Sonni was supposed to be playing dead but yet she was here and trying to meet up with Silas?
What the hell for?
Not me, her sister, but Silas.
A man that she’d only been around a handful of times…well at least to my knowledge.
There was no telling what the truth was behind this little situation, but I was going to make sure that whatever it was…came out.
Something in the water sure as hell
wasn’t clean and I was going to find out what was going on…
Again.
******************
Chapter FIVE
“You’re going out?” I asked Silas.
“Yes, just for a little while. Why?”
“Can you take Horizon with you?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I nodded.
I was in recovery mode, but that wasn’t going to stop me from snooping around while he was gone.
I’d just had an abortion the day before and physically and mentally, I wasn’t feeling too good.
No, I didn’t really want to have one.
I’d always been against them and vowed that I would never do something like that, but unfortunately I did.
I actually almost changed my mind seconds before.
I’d long since came had the birth control removed and I would have been super excited to find out that I was pregnant, but I wasn’t.
There was no way to tell if the baby was Silas’s or a product of the rape from Nolan.
Silas told me to keep it.
He was such a good guy.
He even said that if it wasn’t his, he would’ve accepted it and took care of it anyway because the baby hadn’t done anything wrong and it still would’ve deserved a father.
But I just couldn’t do it.
I just couldn’t look at my baby, every day, if it had been Nolan’s, knowing how it was conceived.
It just wouldn’t have been fair to the baby.
I just didn’t think that I would have loved it the way that I was supposed to, even if I’d wanted to.
And there was the possibility of it being Silas’s baby; which he wanted more than anything in the world, but there was just no way to be sure.
According to the doctor, I’d gotten pregnant on our “wedding-moon” and I just couldn’t take any chances.
Hell we could always try again.
Depending on what I found when I went looking.
The abortion was what was best and with Silas and Horizon backing out of the driveway, the hunt was on!
Maybe Silas was too smart to stash anything important in the house but it was worth a look.
Sonni hadn’t left my mind since the day that I’d saw her and if there was something to find, within my grasp, I was going to find it.
Instead of starting in the logical place, our bedroom, I decided to go to one of the bedrooms that we pretty much used as storage.
The house had a total of five bedrooms.
I hadn’t had time to turn the empty ones into spares as of yet, so there was stuff all over the place in them.
I started to go through boxes and looking under the cushions of the abandoned sofa.
Every piece of paper I touched, I read, and ever bag, hole, or whatever, I made sure I stuck my hand in it.
Nothing.
Oh well, I was heading to the next empty bedroom.
I turned around…
“What the hell are you looking for Envy?” Silas asked.
I jumped.
He and Horizon were just standing there.
Neither of them had said a word.
I hadn’t even heard the beeping noise that the door made to indicate that someone had come into the house.
My hand was on my chest as I tried to catch my breath.
Sneaky ass.
“I forgot my phone. And Horizon needed to go to the bathroom. Go ahead to the bathroom Horizon. So, what were you looking for Envy?” Silas asked again.
I didn’t know how to answer him because hell I didn’t really know what I was looking for.
I just knew that usually if you went looking, you were bound to find something.
I hadn’t told him about the little meet-up with Sonni because not only had I not mentioned that I knew that she was still alive from our pre-honeymoon trip to the Bahamas, I didn’t want him to go in “cover my tracks” mode, especially if he knew something in regards to dealings with Sonni.
I couldn’t afford for him to shut down on me.
“Didn’t I tell you that you could ask me anything and I would tell you?”
Silas said the statement as though he meant it.
Should I call his bluff?
Hell yeah!
“Sonni is alive. And she sent a letter to meet her at the park. I thought it was for me but it was for you. Why? Why does she want to meet with you? Did you know that she was still alive?”
“Yes. Sonni is blackmailing me Envy,” Silas said.
What?
“At first I was paying her to keep quiet about knowing that I was the boss of the thirteenth floor. She didn’t know about Grant; only me. I was paying her not to tell you. She’d spotted me one day in the office with Carmen, talking business, before you were even up there. She’d actually been standing by the door, listening to our entire conversation. Had she not been listening, she could have assumed that I was just a client, but because she listened, she knew that I was someone high up the chain, someone in charge. And then when you introduced us, so you thought, for the first time at the hospital, afterwards she popped up at your house one day with her request, and I’d been paying her to keep her mouth shut ever since. But later on, she confessed that she had something else. She said that she had proof of something that would put me away for a very long time. To this day, I don’t even know what it is. But she said that she wasn’t afraid to use it against me. I don’t know if you know this, but your sister is a little crazy too. I mean like Carmen’s kind of crazy,” Silas said.
Duh!
So Sonni was blackmailing him?
For what?
What the hell did she have on him?
“No, she doesn’t scare me. She said that she’s made copies and that if anything ever happened to her, someone else had the information too and she’d told them what to do with it. I will admit, taking care of her my kind of way, usually would have been an option. She would have been “taken care of”, but since she is your sister, I tried to take another route. But it hasn’t been easy. And I’m just being honest with you. And I still have no idea what she knows. And then one day she came to me with her idea of wanting to get away and fake her death. I jumped at the idea because that meant that I no longer had to worry about her hanging anything over my head. Carmen is the one that put everything together to fake her death. I gave her one large pay out, the amount we agreed on, and overnight, she was gone. So, why she’s back and wants to meet, your guess is as good as mine. We were never supposed to ever see or hear from her again. And all of that is the truth,” Silas said.
I just looked at him and shook my head.
I could tell that he was telling the truth.
But the funny things was that I wished that he was lying.
When he’d told me that there were some things about him that I wouldn’t need to know or that I would be much better off not knowing about, he was right.
What he’d just told me was one of those things.
I was disturbed and I didn’t like the uneasy feeling that it gave me.
Silas looked at me for a moment longer and without another word, once Horizon returned from the bathroom, he grabbed her hand and seconds later, I heard the closing of the front door.
What?
So, Sonni has something that Silas didn’t want to come out?
Whatever it was it had to be big!
And I was dying to know what it was.
I noticed that he hadn’t went into details about any of the past shames, so I figured that whatever it was that she’d found had to be bad.
Or at least something that he knew for sure that he personally would go down for.
I didn’t think that he was scared of what she knew. I just thought that whatever it was that she knew, he knew that it was going to have a major impact on his life.
And I had a feeling that it had something to do with me.
He hadn’t tried to kill her or do anything bad to her because of his love fo
r me, but he hadn’t hesitated to help her disappear by choice.
Yeah, whatever it was had to be massive.
And Sonni knew the whole time that Silas was a boss and didn’t say anything to me either?
That bitch!
How could she know that and not tell me?
I was her sister damn it!
I don’t care if she didn’t love me the way that she was supposed to or whatever, at some point, something in her had to tell her that what she was doing was a bit much.
Something in her had to tell her that I deserved to know.
All she had to do was open up her mouth and say something.
But no, she only wanted to use the information to get what she wanted.
She hadn’t cared a thing about me or if I was possibly in harm’s way.
She only cared about the money.
After all she’d done and said, I still loved her, but finding out this, I felt the closest thing to hate towards her for the very first time ever.
Screw her!
Sonni had said that friends helped her cover up her fake death, but really it had been Carmen.
I wondered if Carmen really didn’t know that Sonni and I were sisters.
More than likely she probably did, despite what Sonni had said.
But that wasn’t what was important.
I wanted to know what Sonni knew and if she ever planned on using it.
I was sure that Silas had paid her well, on top of whatever money she’d had from the hotel and wherever else, so something told me that it wasn’t about the money anymore.
So what was it about?
Obviously whatever it was, it was from the past, so I was sure that I wouldn’t hold it against him, at least I was going to try not to, but I was dying to know what it was and why he was so concerned that it could possibly destroy him.
So the question was, where in the hell was Sonni now?
Because this bitch, me, had a few questions!
***
“You mean the world to me,” Silas said as we laid in the backyard, on a blanket, looking at the stars.
Horizon was in the house asleep and we were spending some much needed alone time together.
“I know.”
Things had been so quiet and peaceful lately that things almost seemed normal.
We hadn’t seen or heard from Carmen.
Sonni hadn’t popped up again.