11. Zeke—Age 29

Chapter 11

Zeke—Age 29

Present Day

What are you supposed to do when you’re in love with three people, and one of them betrays and harms the other? It’s a frustrating and confusing situation.

Part of me sympathizes with Lev. The guy is pretty fucked up, and I can see how that wheel in his brain would think that kidnapping Mona would force Azadeh to come to the manor. But for Christ’s sake, he should’ve known our girl would slice his dick off for messing with her kid sister.

Another part of me wants to fuckin’ beat his head in until a pool of blood frames his pretty little face. Mona. The motherfucker took Mona. I glance between Lev and Azadeh, trying to gauge on a scale of one to ten how homicidal she is.

Azadeh’s face is blank, which scares me more than her anger. She doesn’t hide her emotions. When we were kids, her mother worried how the neighbors would judge her, but Azadeh didn’t care. Her response to her mother was, “Did you bring me to America to worry about the chatter of pathetic gossip or so I could be free?” Her mother mumbled something under her breath and shook her head—Mrs. Baran’s version of “I’ll turn my head, and you do what you want, but if you get caught, I’ll punish you.” I discovered that way of thinking was common in Persian culture. Don’t ask and don’t tell—a whole damn cultural philosophy.

At first, I assumed it was a religious aspect, but the Barans had no fondness or affiliation with a god of any shape or form. I think that’s what attracted me to the family. I loved being around Azadeh, but her mother became important to me. Nasrin Baran had many opinions but lacked a judgmental bone in her body. Being in their company allowed me a reprieve from my psychotic preacher father and robot mother.

My affinity with the Barans Is why I have the urge to snap Lev’s neck and watch his dead body fall at my feet. I’ve never wanted to harm Lev before. If anything, I’m fiercely protective of him. What he’s gone through is far worse in many ways than the trauma Cyrus and I are burdened with. The only negative emotion I’ve ever harbored toward Lev was jealousy, and I knew that was fucked up.

It’s fucked up to be jealous of someone I love, and I love Lev deeply. So much that not being with him romantically is like a razor cutting through my soul. But Lev and Azadeh have a connection I’ll never understand. Both of them were party to a systematic type of abuse that caused severe scars that hide below the surface. The world sees my and Cyrus’s damage, but Azadeh and Lev’s trauma isn’t worn on their flesh. It’s ingrained in their minds.

I touch the patch covering my eye, and my mind wanders to the night I lost it. When Azadeh, Nasrin, and Mona rushed me to the hospital after my father gouged out my eye with a soup spoon. They held my hand and told a shit-scared seventeen-year-old kid it would all be okay. Nasrin even told me I could live with them. She said she’d fight my parents. I knew that wasn’t possible because she’d never be able to go toe to toe with my dad, the great Reverend Joseph Summers. I appreciated her sentiment since she was the first adult to give a damn about me. But no one believed my father beat the shit out of me, let alone that he was capable of strapping me down as he scooped my eyeball from my socket like a child digging for treasure in their ice cream cup.

My father took out his wrath on my flesh, some fucked up ritual to cast out his demons. Dearest Dad, who couldn’t bear the world to unearth his greatest secret—his son’s attraction to men. Guess finding gay porn under his pubescent son’s mattress drove him to the edge. The man probably figured he’d beat my bisexuality out of me. God forbid his son got off on the idea of a cock up his ass while he pounded into a wet pussy.

That was the night Nasrin became more valuable than my mother, and the Barans became the family I would lay my life down for. It started with my falling in love with Azadeh and ended with Nasrin showing me what it was like to have the love of a true mother.

I killed my father after I got out of the hospital. Poetic justice, if you ask me. Took out the man’s eyes with my mother’s chef knife while I tied her to her mahogany dining room chair. That act got me two years in a psych ward, where I met Cyrus and Lev.

My mother’s shrill screams during my first kill are still my soundtrack when violence is all I can see.