Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 51051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 255(@200wpm)___ 204(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 255(@200wpm)___ 204(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
“Stop acting like a little bitch, Lev. I know you’ve been watching the whole time.”
I see Zeke and Azadeh rising from the bed on a clear area of the screen. Azadeh’s back is to me as Zeke takes her in his arms, holding her tight. I wince at the sight of the crisscross scars on her back. I think about the man who put those scars there and what we did to him when we found him living in America.
Chapter 22
Lev—Age 26
Arizona Desert
“Please, let me go. I have a family. A wife. Two young children. They need me.” The man pleaded. He’d been begging from the moment I shoved my gun against his temple.
“Did you care when you placed nooses around all those innocent Iranians' necks?” Zeke asked coldly as he tapped two spoons on his knee.
I’d never seen Zeke Kill anyone. Unlike me, he wasn’t in the habit of dropping bodies.
“I’ve killed no one,” Ali protested.
But we knew he had. We’d spent hours researching online and looking up cases, and we were sure beyond all doubt that this man was responsible for wielding the whip that scarred Azadeh and so much more.
Zeke grabbed the file and threw it on the ground at Ali’s knees. Hundreds of photos slipped out of the vanilla folder. “Fuck you, motherfucker. We know exactly who you are.” Zeke picked up a photo of a girl who couldn’t have been older than thirteen. In the picture, she was smiling and holding up a peace sign. “You remember her? Shirin Mousavi? She wanted to be a human rights lawyer. You and your buddies raped her before you dragged her to the noose.” Zeke grabbed the man by his hair and dragged him a few inches to another photo. “What about him? He tried to help his father as you hanged him. You slapped him so hard that when he fell, he hit his head and died two days later from a brain aneurysm.”
Zeke kicked Ali in the face, making the man fall back. Gathering all the photos from the sand, Zeke dropped all but one on Ali’s chest. “What about this girl?” He held up a picture of Azadeh at twelve, dressed head to toe in black. The only part of her visible was her sweet face. Zeke stomps on Ali’s chest. “You remember this girl? Remember how you whipped while she cried and begged you to stop? Remember how you told her she was a whore for showing an inch of her hair?” Zeke smashed his foot into Ali’s face repeatedly until blood pooled on the Arizona sand. “You remember her, Kosketch?”
Kosketch was one of the many Persian swear words I’d learned from Azadeh’s brother. The direct translation was a pimp or a cuckold, depending on how you saw it. But Persians used it interchangeably for an asshole or a dishonorable person. Never in all my years of knowing Azadeh had I ever heard her swear in Farsi. I asked her once why she swore so easily in English and not in Persian, and she said, “Persian swear words are far too crass and direct.”
Ali squirmed like a pathetic reptile as he tried to wriggle away from Zeke. “Please. I’ve changed. I’m not the same man.”
“That’s what my father said when I stood above him like this,” Zeke spit. “You see this eye?” Zeke pointed to his eye patch. “My father did this. Despite all the violence he inflicted on me to that point, I didn’t lay a hand on him.” The sun reflected off the spoon as Zeke held it in the air. “He used a spoon similar to this one.” He bent until his face hovered over Ali’s. “The only time I harmed my father was when he threatened the girl I loved. When he insulted her and demeaned her, I bashed his head in with my mother’s favorite pot. It was the only thing in the vicinity. And when he said he’d kill my whore, well, that’s when I showed him what it was like to lose an eye. But I didn’t stop there.”
“Can we hurry the fuck up?” Cyrus demanded. “It’s hotter than a whore in church out here.”
“Church,” Zeke said as he gazed out. “I’ve hated that word for most of my life. Can you guess why, Ali?”
“No,” Ali said, his voice cracking as he shook his head.
“Because a man like you,” Zeke spit, “used religion and its institution to create terror in my heart.”
The man was shedding tears. The fucker had killed all those innocent people, and he was crying for his miserable life.
“Why are you scared of death, Ali?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be looking forward to death? Don’t you believe that all those you killed deserved it? Weren’t all those deaths and violent lashings for God? If you truly believe in God, especially an Abrahamic one, you must know the first thing he demands of his children is not to kill. Wonder where you’ll end up, Ali?”