Page 81 of Ezekiel
“I said do not call them that!” she nearly screamed at me. Her hand went to her throat, holding it from the obvious pain her shouting caused her.
“Sweetheart, I don’t underst—”
“I’m not your sweetheart! I’m… I’m…” the words flew out of her mouth. Her confusion and the emotions that were pouring from her were heartbreaking to witness. I looked back at Kai again, who had his own arms crossed over his chest. What would normally look to be a threatening gesture from my behemoth of a brother looked inwardly protective, the look on his face showing that he was trying just as hard as I was to piece together what the hell she was talking about.
“What don’t you understand? The fact that those… those people,” she spewed, wiping angrily at her tears. “Those people were in on it. They took me. They stole me. My parents did not die, Ezekiel.”
She never called me that. Her words tumbled through my own confused mind until understanding dawned.
Talia’s parents had adopted her.
When her biological parents died.
But they didn’t die.
They…
“Wait a second. You’re saying your biological parents didn’t die in that car accident?” I whispered, afraid to utter the words as explanations to her words flipped through my mind like a pinball machine.
Surely she wasn’t suggesting….
“No. They did not die. They didn’t. I… I… remember.” Her hands clenched tightly in her hair; the braid she had plaited it in had loosened until most of her hair was hanging around her face in a wild mass.
“You remember what, exactly?” Kai’s voice was eerily cold, almost as ice, as he spoke. He was piecing the truth together, just as I was.
“I can hear them,” she whispered through tears. I stayed stone still, completely silent as she spoke. “Their voices won’t stop.”
Still, Kai and I stayed perfectly still and silent. Dread filled the pit of my stomach, replacing the earlier feelings of despair with a combination of fear, loathing, and a white-hot hatred that I had never experienced before. As yet unable to reconcile the words she spoke as truth, I needed to hear it all.
“They keep echoing in my brain from that day,” she whimpered.
“From what day?” I spoke, the words almost getting stuck in my throat through the bile and disgust that had lodged there alongside them.
“The day the men took me from my parents and brought me here. To Zion.” She turned to look at me. No matter what words she had spoken, the blatant truth in her eyes was unmistakable, unquestionable, and unfathomable all at the same time.
“Fucking Christ,” Malachi breathed from his perch on the couch. His hands moved behind his head, his eyes wide with shock, mirroring the same emotions I knew were likely displayed on my own face. I couldn’t form words. “Hang on, hang on. Explain this to me like I’m a child,” Malachi continued.
“What is there to explain?” she laughed derisively. “The fucking… pedophiles… here in Zion took me, as a child. I remember it. I…” she trailed off with a sob.
Bile rose in my stomach, up through my esophagus, threatening to hurl from my lips.
“Tell me everything,” I finally muttered the words past the nausea and gut-wrenching disgust.
“I remember their voices. I remember the darkness of the hood over my head. I remember the way they spoke.” She laughed humorlessly, her hands gesturing wildly as she began to pace the room once more. “It’s funny. When your father came by the other day, the way he spoke to you… that tone froze me to the spot in the stairwell.”
I could picture it, the way I saw her freeze on the stairs when my father had shown up. I had thought it was because of the slap. My father’s tone didn’t surprise me anymore. His threatening tone that would strike fear in the strongest of men. He was a dangerous man. I had known it from an early age. But I had never imagined this.
“I remember their voices around me and the fear within me,” she spoke softer now. Her fear was palpable, and her pain, and it crushed the last bits of my heart into dust. “I can’t get away from their voices.”
“Jesus, Zeke. Do you think Father —” Kai’s words stopped abruptly, just as unwilling to admit the possibility that our own father could have been a part of this. But just as strongly as I didn’t want to believe it, I knew it was not only possible, but likely.
“Zeke.” Talia’s voice drew me back to her. “I’m sorry…”
“What on Earth could you have to be sorry about, love? This… what they… Fuck!”
The words wouldn’t come. I was a piss poor Dominant and an even worse husband. I had no idea how to help this woman, my wife, as she stood there pleading with me to hear her and to… to, I don’t know what. That was the problem. I didn’t have a fucking clue what to do about this. I didn’t know what to do for her.
I wanted to help her. I wanted to change it all, to show that it wasn’t true. But it was. It was all true. And I didn’t know what to do about that.
