Chapter 135 The sleepless night
Sage's POV
I woke up for the third time that night, tangled in my sheets and covered in sweat despite the cool air coming through the window. The clock on my nightstand read four thirty in the morning. In less than twelve hours I would be married to Diego Vasquez.
I gave up on trying to sleep and got out of bed, padding over to the window yet again in my bare feet. The backyard was still lit by those string lights, casting everything in a soft glow that should have been romantic but just felt eerie in the pre-dawn darkness.
My phone sat on the nightstand where I had left it, screen dark and silent. No calls, no texts, no last minute plea from Ryder begging me not to go through with this. Part of me had been waiting for it all night, expecting him to show up or at least reach out one more time.
But there was nothing. Maybe he had finally accepted that we were done. Maybe he didn't care as much as I thought he did.
Or maybe he was just respecting my decision, as painful as it was for both of us.
I picked up the phone and scrolled through old messages between us, reading conversations from before everything fell apart. There was one from two weeks ago where he had sent me a photo of a sunset from the highway with the caption "Reminded me of you. Beautiful but gone too fast."
I had responded with a heart emoji and told him to drive safely.
It seemed like a lifetime ago. Back when I trusted him completely, back when I thought we had a future together, back before I knew he was capable of murder.
I kept scrolling, reading through weeks of messages. Jokes that made me laugh, him checking in to make sure I was okay during the investigation when he had to be at the clubhouse and couldn't spend the night with me. Every message was a reminder of what we had and what I was giving up tomorrow.
My finger hovered over the call button again. It would be so easy to just call him, to hear his voice one more time before I married someone else. To tell him I was sorry for accusing him without proof, to ask him one more time if he really killed my father.
But what would that change? Even if he swore again that he didn't kill my dad, I still heard him admit to killing someone. I still knew he was capable of aggravated violence when he decided it was necessary. And I would still spend every day wondering if he was lying to me about my dad.
I put the phone down and walked to my closet, pulling open the door to stare at the wedding dress hanging there in its garment bag. The white fabric looked ghostly in the dim light from the window.
In a few hours, I would put that dress on and walk down an aisle to marry a man I barely knew. A man who was related to the president of an MC that was probably even more violent and dangerous than the Steel Wolves.
But at least I knew what Diego was. He had been honest about his intentions from the start. He wanted the marriage for alliance and power, not love, even though he said he really liked me. There were no illusions between us, no pretending this was anything other than a business arrangement.
With Ryder, everything had been built on trust and feelings and the belief that we were partners. And all of that had turned out to be based on lies and secrets and violence I had known nothing about.
I closed the closet door and went to sit on my bed, pulling my knees up to my chest. The house was silent around me, everyone else either sleeping or gone. I had never felt more alone in my life.
My mind kept circling back to the investigation, to all the clues we had found and the suspects we eliminated. RC with their double Y pattern in the emails and messages. The tape recording of Dante blackmailing my dad into getting him drugs from Dr Martinez and trying to get him to marry me off to him also. The bloody shirt and gun I had found in Jaxon's closet that I still hadn't confronted him about.
Jaxon. My brother who had been acting strange since I got back from Manhattan, who had pushed me toward this marriage harder by the day, who seemed relieved rather than concerned about me marrying into the Blood Sisters.
What was he hiding? What did he need protection from?
I thought about the conversation we had earlier, how he asked if I had given up on the investigation or found something. The careful way he phrased his questions, like he was fishing for information about what I knew.
And I thought about the gun and bloody shirt in his closet. Evidence of violence that he had never explained or even mentioned. Evidence that could implicate him in any number of crimes, including murder too, just like Ryder.