Black Keys (The Colorblind Trilogy #1) (20 page)

A new round of tears attacked her cheeks as she cried her pain.

“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry, I swear, I’m so, so sorry.”

“No, no. I didn’t mean it that way. Please, don’t misunderstand me.”
Way to go, Marie. You upset her even more!
“I meant that he went through all of this just for you, because he loves you, Janna. He really does,” I reassured her.

She looked at me with her tears-clouded eyes. “Does he, really? Why don’t you believe he only did it out of pity? He knew they would’ve killed me if we couldn’t get married. I wish he would’ve let them do it; I wouldn’t have let you and my brother suffer because of my own mistake.”

“Hey, don’t say that,” I said. “No one deserves to die...to get killed... because of a moment of weakness,” I found myself reassuring her.

“Marie, you can’t imagine what I’ve been through since that day,” she sobbed. “It’s only gone from bad to worse. I’ve been to Hell and back. Several times. I lost the little respect I had from my own family. Mazen was my everything. IS my everything. And he can barely look me in the eyes. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel? He had to give up a lot for me, and now to discover that you didn’t even want it,
and
that he knows it? It’s breaking my heart into pieces. I could’ve never imagined that my actions would hurt the one I love the most that way.”

I swallowed.

Give up a lot, as in…his cousin?

“My father had a stroke when he found out about my pregnancy. He’s been lying in bed since then, God only knows if he’ll ever recover from it.” She wiped more tears with the side of her pointer finger.

The king was sick? How bad? What did that mean for the prince? Would he be the next king if his father died? But…his heir. He didn’t have one. What did that mean?

“If it wasn’t for Mazen, Fahd would’ve beaten me to death. I could only be thankful that Mazen was there when he started hitting me and I ended up with few strikes to the face instead of broken bones and a miscarriage–he was so mad.”

Oh, my God! Her other brother hit her? That’s horrible!

What is wrong with some brothers?

“My stepmother couldn’t hate me more, and after what happened has cost Mazen, she could only wish they did kill me instead of the trading,” she wept. “Oh, my God! I’m sorry, Marie, I didn’t mean it that way–it’s just she wanted him to marry another, it’s her sister’s daughter an-”

“It’s okay, Janna,” I interrupted her. “Don’t worry about it.”

It wasn’t like I cared who the prince would’ve married if he wouldn’t have had to marry me.

I just couldn’t understand the swell in my heart at the mention of him marrying another.

It was stupid.

I shouldn’t have felt anything.

It wasn’t right.

Wrong.

“It’s only Mazen I care about. I wish he could forgive me someday,” she sniffled. “But he said that it wouldn’t happen in this lifetime,” she said with sorrow, looking down at her hands in her lap.

“You’re so important to your brother, Janna. He told me so himself.”

She smiled sadly. “I’ve never doubted his love; I owe him my life. But for him to forgive me…I don’t think he ever will. And now with everything–I’m glad I still get to breathe the same air he’s breathing, for another one would wish me death instead of what I’d brought on him.”

Ouch!

“When Yoseph told me that you were excited about the idea of marrying my brother, I about died out of happiness. I couldn’t believe it myself. I really thought that death was what was to come for me next, and in one day, with your approval of marrying Mazen, I found hope again,” she told me. “I had that niggling feeling that it wasn’t true, that it was unbelievable for an independent, young American woman as beautiful as you to accept an arranged marriage, but I shrugged it away and told myself to just be grateful.

“I was brought to life again; I couldn’t have been any happier. But I didn’t know that it was all fake. I had absolutely no idea.

“Yoseph told me that I had to prepare everything for you myself because we wouldn’t have time to wait for you to come to the kingdom then start preparing. I bought you everything I had bought for myself and a bit more. When I liked a piece of clothing, I bought two of them, one for me and one for you. And if I could find only one of it, I’d put it in your closet instead of having it for myself. I arranged everything in our wedding with only
you
in my head. I wanted you to have the best of everything: it was the least I could offer you after what you were doing for me.

“I was surprised that only you and Yoseph came in the plane, and only half a day before the wedding day, but again Yoseph told me that you two were each other’s only family, and that your job and your busy lives left no time for friends or anything like that. I was upset you missed your henna night, but there was nothing I could do about it. I made sure that my cousin would be with you the whole day. Huda is my best friend, and I was sure she could make you feel as welcome as possible, better than anyone else. I then made sure that at least half of the princesses in the kingdom were there beside you instead of being with me because I didn’t want you to be alone at your own wedding.

“I tried, Marie. I really tried. I wanted to do anything to make you happy. I had no idea that you were just about to get that destroyed. And all because of me. God! I’m so sorry,” she cried. It seemed like her tears would never dry.

My heart ached for her. Her words, her kindness and her actions…it all made it so easy to see why my brother was head over heels about her. She was so easy to fall in love with.

An angel.

My hand reached out and touched the back of hers. “Stop it with that, Janna.” I told her gently. “No more apologizing, I’ve already told you I forgive you.”

Another sad smile that reminded me a lot of her brother’s. “Thank you,” she whispered, and after a pause of silence she spoke again,

“When he came back after handing the sheet to my maid the morning after the wedding sporting a black eye, he told me he fell.” She chuckled humorlessly. “His lies didn’t stop even after the wedding; it hurts me even more.”

I shook my head slightly. No wonder the prince was calmer when he came back yesterday: he had taken his rage out on my brother.

Served him right. I wasn’t even slightly upset about it.

“Why did you need to give them a sheet, anyway? Your family already knew that you weren’t a virgin!”

“Um, yeah. Only my brothers, father and stepmother, but not the rest of the family. God forbid they know!”

“So, you had fake evidence of a virginity loss on your sheet, as well,” I sighed.

Janna looked at me with a questioning look in her eyes. I knew she wanted to ask something; it was very clear in her eyes. But instead, she only bit her bottom lip and looked down again.

“Yeah. Thank God ‘common deflowering’ is no longer practiced nowadays, as it was before. Or I would’ve been dead by now when they practiced it on me,” she said, her face paling as she spoke the words.

What the heck is ‘common deflowering’?

“Common deflowering?” I questioned.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” she said, shuddering slightly.

“No, really, tell me,” I insisted.

Janna sighed. “It’s a
very
old custom that some had practiced forever. On someone’s wedding night, they would bring some women from the families of both the bride and the groom, and they would, uh…” She bit her lip, her already-flushed cheeked reddening even more.

“What?”

“They would pin the bride down roughly while one of them took her virginity with her...uh, her white-cloth-covered finger while the groom watched, as well as the rest of the women obviously.”

My eyes widened and my jaw dropped to the floor. “That’s freaking disgusting!”

“I know! It’s horrible.” Janna shook her head. “If the bride turned out not to be a virgin, they’d kill her on the spot and considered her as if she had never been born.”

My God!

“But, thank God it’s fading away with time; you hardly hear about it anymore other than with the Bedouins who still practice it to this day. It hasn’t happened in the royal family in decades, though.”

“It should never happen at all,” I told her, disgust filling my voice.

“True,” Janna said. “Islam promises whoever does something as horrible as that towards a woman with hellfire, but I guess religion is not their priority when it comes to honor, just like the killing itself if it’s proven the bride wasn’t a virgin. It’s a grave sin.”

“That’s really sad,” I said. If their religion wasn’t supportive of it, why couldn’t they obey it? Nothing in the whole world justified killing another soul. Let alone for a mistake or a moment of weakness.

“It is.”

“They should make a law against those who do that, it’s not right!” I said.

“Oh, Marie. I wish,” Janna said sincerely.

It was like I had forgotten everything the two of us were going through at the mention of this subject matter. It was such a terrible thing to do, and I couldn’t believe that some people still practiced it.

“If it has nothing to do with the religion, how did it start, then?”

“I don’t know. Some people say that in the very old days, the enemies used to deflower young girls and teenagers in front of their fathers and brothers to humiliate them, to let them see how their enemy could do whatever they wanted to their girls right before their eyes without them being able to do anything about it.” she explained. “They say that they even used to do it using a sword or a knife.”

“Oh, my God!” I gushed.

“Yeah. So, the families after that used to deflower their girls themselves to prevent them from facing that fate or to make them less appealing to the soldiers, you know? It’s like that saying, I’m not sure what exactly it was but it’s something along the lines of
‘I’ll kill my children myself instead of handing them over to evil hands’
–or something like that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.”

“So basically after that people kept doing the same thing, thinking it was a sign of honor or whatever.”

“That’s really, really nauseating,” I told her, still not able to process everything she was saying.

“Some people say that ancient civilizations used to do it to satisfy the Gods of Evil, giving them something of the bride, and what is more precious for a girl than her virginity, right?” A wave of sadness washed over her pitiful-ever-after face as she said that.

“Yeah.”

“Some others say that the ancients did it to control the girl’s lust, by circumcising her once she was barely aware of things around her, then once again on her first night of her adult life, because they believed that the soul’s discipline comes only from pain and humiliation.”

“Okay, seriously, we need to stop talking about that because I’m really going to throw up.” I wasn’t lying.

Those people were nutcases!

“I told you so.”

“Remind me not to doubt you again.”

Janna offered me a small smile–of course it didn’t reach her eyes, but it was there anyway.

Such a young, beautiful girl with a heavy heart and troubled features
.

May God forgive you, Joseph.
I
never would.

“There is something I don’t understand, Janna,” I said after yet another minute of silence, and she waited for me to continue. “Was it convincing to you and the family that I would just give up everything, including my parents’ company, and come live here just like that? Wasn’t it a bit strange to any of you that I would easily do something like that?” I asked.

“No, of course not. Like I told you, I had some doubts, but Yoseph never said you’d give up your share of the company or anything like that. He told us that you would take care of the company’s branch here until it was finished, then you’ll be the manager of it from then on, while he takes over the management of the company’s headquarters in New York, which made sense and made it even more believable.”

I nodded. At least he wasn’t going to try and take the company away from me. Because when it came to that, he could only try. It was my parents’ company. I would’ve
killed
for it.

“I can’t stay here, Janna,” I told her honestly, finding her to be the
only
person I could tell this to because no one else would understand, just like I knew she found me to be the only one she could open her heart to because no one else would listen. “This is not my home. You have no idea how it’s hurting me that I’m away from my country and my people.”

Janna’s troubled features turned into wretched ones. She looked like someone who was in great pain, like someone was pulling her heart out. Slowly. And I was really upset that I had once again reminded her of what her actions did to me. The prince’s words found their way into my head yet again:
‘It’s killing her’
.