Page 112 of Ashes

Merde.

I headed to my office and threw the door to the basement open. I stirred our devices open and promptly called Kai. He answered on the first ring and I placed my phone on top of the desk, putting him on speaker.

“Wh—”

“I can’t find Sienna,” I said, cutting him off.

“Hold on, what do you mean you can’t find her?”

“Kai, I don’t know where my wife is,” I bit out.

“She’s not home?” he asked.

Impatience and anger slowly replaced the suffocating panic overwhelming my lungs. “She clearly isn’t or I wouldn’t be calling you. She texted me an hour ago saying she was coming home, but there’s no one here and she isn’t answering her phone.”

“Did you track her?”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

My stomach twisted, dread zipping up my spine as I waited the few seconds it took for the program to pinpoint her location.

Wait.

“She’s at the hospital,” I hesitantly relayed to Kai.

“She might have been pulled for an emergency,” Kai proposed, most likely trying to soothe my worries, but it wasn’t working.

Maybe that was true, but she would have texted me. I know she would have.

“Jamal?”

“Something’s not right,” I told him, my intuition nagging my gut that something about this felt off. “Meet me there,” I ordered before hanging up. Then I locked the computers, picked up my phone, and went upstairs.

After grabbing my keys, I rushed out of the house and into my car.

The temperature had changed and droplets of rain were now drumming lightly against my car windows as I raced down our driveway and toward Monte Claro Hospital.

I pulled into the parking lot thirty minutes later, finding Valentina leaned against her car. I parked right next to hers and jumped out of the driver’s seat, then rushed over to her.

I was about to ask where Kai was when he walked out of the employees’ exit, an anxious look on his face.

“I just checked at the front desk of the emergency and they said she left as soon as her shift ended,” he explained and it only stirred further the deep fear that had rooted in my gut.

My warning instincts from earlier rang louder this time. Sienna wasn’t working and she wasn’t here either, despite the tracker in her phone indicating that she should be.

I ran my hands over my head frustratingly. “Fuck, fuck,fuck!”

I drew my phone out of my pocket, opened the app where I still had the location of her tracker, and followed the red dot, Valentina and Kai trailing close behind.

The signal flashed stronger as I got closer to the back of the parking lot and my eyes landed on her car, but still no sign of her. My mouth went dry as I made my way over, praying I wouldn’t find her body lying somewhere.

I kept walking toward her car when I stepped on an object, a crunching sound resounding in the late night.

My stomach bottomed out as I looked at the ground, finding Sienna’s phone under my foot. I crouched down and my hand shook as I picked it up, finding the screen fissured at the bottom.

A picture of us from last weekend glinted underneath the cracked screen with several notifications of my missed calls.

“What is it?” Kai asked, looking over my shoulder.