Thwarted Escape
Zorah couldn’t help but notice how even the two elderly people didn’t seem to flinch at the violence at their dining table.
She was shaking so hard her entire body felt it was vibrating. Dagoberto’s warm arm over her shoulder protecting her as Icaro leveled his gun in the direction of the other nurse was not enough to quell her terror.
“Speak now.”
The girl was on the floor her arms around her knees, “I swear, I said nothing. I wouldn’t dare, Mr. Lucchesi. She is the head nurse, and I dared not argue with her, but she was going on and on about how her sister saw the new Lucchesi bride acting like a whore,” she held her hands up screaming when a shot went past her head, “I didn’t say it, she said it.”
“Dad,” Zorah pulled on Dagoberto, “please. I can’t do this.”
“Weak!” the old man at the end of the table spat at Zorah’s pleading.
“Fuck you!” Zorah suddenly screamed at him noting the way his red-rimmed fleshy eyes widened with her cursing. “You don’t know me. My husband who has fucked everything with a hole in it from the day he turned fourteen took me, a bloody virgin, to a club last night so I could experience a fraction of what he did. I danced with a few men and yet I’m the horrible human being? You judge me for being and call me a harlot, but he fucked his way through every damn country in Europe and North America and he shoots people in cold blood because he can’t control his temper. I’m the bad guy?” She’d never cursed so much in her life as she pushed Dagoberto’s arm off her shoulder and raced from the room, avoiding the body laying there in a pool of blood.
Her heart was pounding as she ran along a corridor and then down a flight of stairs.
“Zorah!” Avaline’s voice calling her chased her through the house.
She ignored her and continued running until she found an exit. Racing into a beautiful garden in bloom she frantically looked around for a way out. Beauty amongst the carnage flitted through her brain. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t be in a family such as this.
Icaro killed a woman who simply voiced an opinion about her and every person in the room aside from her and the other nurse hadn’t even registered the level of depravity as absurd. The centenarians in the room in any other situation probably would have succumbed to heart attacks and died from such things and yet they barely even blinked.
“Zorah,” Avaline called her name again.
She noted a fence at the back of the garden and raced to it, running alongside until she found a gate and then nearly crumbled to the ground in frustration as she found it padlocked closed.
“No, no, no.” She whimpered as Avaline appeared in her line of sight. “I can’t do this Avaline. I can’t be part of this. It’s wrong. He just killed her.” She turned her head and vomited as the bile she’d been forcing back suddenly rose.
“Shh,” Avaline held her hand up, “Icaro forgets himself sometimes. He has such a bad temper. He is the only Lucchesi heir who has been exposed to his bride but unable to be with her for so long and it’s culminated in such a need to punish violently. It’s a blood lust.”
“There is no excuse.”
“Yet it is the excuse. It is the reason. We are used to it because we’ve been dealing with it for so long, but he has the bloodlust, Zorah. It’s why it’s important to get him back to Sicily.”
“He has me now so why is he still so violent?” she fell to her knees.
“He doesn’t really have you though, does he?” Avaline approached cautiously her hand still outstretched as if reassuring her she meant no harm. “You have not completed the marriage ceremony. You have not consummated your marriage and until there is a true union of your souls, his bloodlust remains unquenchable. He has become judge, jury, and executioner. He saw you twenty-one years ago and could never be close to you. There is a divide and that divide is filled with rage.”
“Am I to sleep with him to cure him?” she argued.
“Nobody is asking you to sleep with him. Icaro made it clear to us all, he wants for your first time to be with a man you love.”
“How can I love a man who is so violent, cruel, and cold? It’s one step forward, ten steps back. If it’s not a woman he’s slept with, it’s one he’s been violent towards.”
“She disrespected you, Zorah. A very thorough investigation is going to happen but, and I cannot emphasize it enough, the woman on the floor in the dining room, got what she deserved.”
“How can you say such a thing, Avaline. You are a faith-driven woman. Icaro tells me all about how you pray every day.”
“I do pray every day. I pray for my family day in and day out. My family is everything to me, Zorah. When an enemy sows discord in my family, they need to be dealt with. This nurse had information given to her she could have kept to herself. Her opinions were of no value to us. We don’t care what she thinks. However, she purposefully, with intent to cause a rift, went to my grandparents and told them information about you which made them upset. They upset my grandparents. They upset you.”
“She didn’t lie!” Zorah argued. “She didn’t say anything which was a lie. I did go to a club last night and I did grind and dance with other men. I am a bastard.”
“I imagine in the club, many people were dancing, and your husband was right there dancing with you. You did nothing wrong. As for being born out of wedlock, we are not in the eighteen hundreds, Zorah. Who cares. She purposefully went to two old people with the intention of making them reject you, hoping and praying it make us end the marriage. The nurse has made more than one play for Icaro, but he would never entertain it because she changes the diapers of his great-grandfather. What do you think her true goal was in sowing discord today?”
“Why does it always boil down to Icaro and sex?”
“All the women want to be his wife, Zorah and they think if he sleeps with them, then there is a chance.”
“I don’t know if I can do this. I can’t do this murder thing. One minute she was alive and the next she was,” her bottom lip started to tremble.
Avaline wrapped her arms around her. “It’s okay to cry, Zorah. Let it all out.”
Zorah wasn’t convinced letting it all out was ever going to be possible.
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