Page 31 of War Games (Jacky Leon #11)

I had thought seeing them in Russia that I had closed the chapter on this part of my life.

I hadn’t considered that it would linger, still causing more damage.

I saw Michael and Helene Duray laughing as they watched television on the couch. Gwen and I were playing on the floor, mostly ignored.

“I thought I had left them behind,” I said again, this time out loud.

“I also like to believe I’ve left my father behind. It’s always painful to recognize that we never truly can,” Subira replied, sighing.

“You know, in Russia… they pissed me off so much, and I was so grateful to have Hasan.”

“Until he repeated a similar pattern. Which opened the wounds.”

I knew she was right.

I didn’t remember this moment in life, so I watched and waited for the quiet peace to end. My mother must have had something to do because she left, grabbing her keys to go buy groceries or whatever she did when she left the house when I was little.

My father wasted no time, calling someone and smiling.

“She’ll be gone for the night,” my father said.

“Oh, I knew long before I was ten,” I said softly as my mother’s friend walked into the house sometime later.

“Girls, go to your rooms,” our father ordered.

Gwen and I didn’t fight, but a feeling rushed through me. She was our godmother, wasn’t she? I always wondered why we didn’t see her around when she lived nearby…

Now I knew.

“I repressed knowing about the entire affair.”

“You did.”

“I told my mom at ten, but I knew years prior.”

“You did.” Subira’s simple confirmation was good, not offering more, just confirming what I was ready to think about. It was already hard enough to be here.

I saw my six-year-old self peeking out of the room, wanting something. Maybe to see my godmother, to hang out with the adults, to see if anyone would play with me and Gwen. Maybe just curiosity.

I caught them kissing. I was caught seeing them kiss.

Michael had stomped over to me, grabbed my arm, and hissed into my ear.

“You saw nothing. Do you understand?”

I felt chills down my spine.

When the child-me nodded, he practically tossed the six-year-old into the room and closed the door.

“Oh, that must have left a mark,” I said, shaking my head. “Probably was explained away as me jumping on the bed or something.”

“Correct.”

I was actually grateful she knew me better than I did.

Time passed. I watched it play out at least a dozen times as I got older. Gwen even caught on, seeing the weird things, how our mother’s friend would stay over.

When we were ten, that was when we finally left the house, following me and Gwen to go play outside.

“This seems bad,” I muttered, wondering what my twin and I were about to get involved with. Subira said nothing, letting me live with my thoughts alone this time.

“I can’t believe Dad is doing this to Mom,” Gwen said, sitting on the log in the woods right beyond our house.

“Right?” Ten-year-old me was so over it, I almost smiled. Gwen and I watched a lot of television. We already had a concept of dating and cheating. We weren’t doing it yet, but we weren’t fools either. Dad was kissing the wrong woman. “We need to tell Mom. She deserves better, right? Margie is her friend . And Dad says we need to listen to what we hear at church, and the church says a husband and a wife are meant for each other.”

“Yeah,” Gwen said, nodding. “But you know Dad. He’s always told us not to say anything. You know how mad he gets.”

“I can tell Mom by myself. I just feel really bad knowing about this now.”

“It’ll make Mom upset,” Gwen pointed out.

“Then Dad shouldn’t have been so stupid!” young-me said, huffing.

“Oh, gods, I was meddling,” I said, looking at Subira. “Would you want me to tell you that Hasan kissed another woman?”

“Oh, yes, so I could tear his balls off and feed them to him,” Subira said with a tight smile. “But I have more respect for myself than your mother had for herself.”

“Ouch,” I said softly, looking away from Subira. I wasn’t sure if it was her threat that Hasan cheated or her insult to my biological mother, which was the more painful part of that statement.

“Okay, so the next time Dad is gone, I’ll talk to Mom. I might need you to back me up. We both know. We both saw it.”

“Alright, Jacky… if Mom needs me to say it, too.” Gwen nodded.

And we waited until that moment. I felt adult fear of knowing these two versions of Gwen and me were in for a rude awakening.

“Mom, can I tell you something?” young-me asked, finding our mother working on dinner that evening. Michael was at work, and Helene was home with the kids. It was like that a lot. My mother wasn’t a stay-at-home mom, but I couldn’t remember her work schedule, either.

“What is it, Jacky? I’m busy.”

“I saw Dad kissing Margie.”

My mother dropped what she was doing.

“Don’t ever speak about it again,” she said, not looking at the younger me. I, the adult walking invisibly in the memory, walked closer to her to see the tears in her eyes and the fear in her expression.

“Mom—”

“Enough, Jacky.”

“But—”

“Enough, Jacky!” My mother, Helene Duray, turned and popped my cheek. It wasn’t a full slap, but it startled the hell out of the younger me. “When your elders tell you to be quiet and drop something, you drop it,” she hissed at the ten-year-old me.

“Mom…”

“You must be lying because your father would never do that to me,” Helene said, suddenly deciding to change the narrative. “He loves me, and I love him. I don’t know why you suddenly want to start these rumors and lie about your father, but I will not have it.”

I was a child. I didn’t understand that my mother was destroying my sense of reality with that tactic.

“She believed me,” I said, fuming as I watched the ten-year-old version of myself get punished for trying to help her mom. “For a second, she believed me.”

I watched my younger self turn around, and I followed, only to see Gwen standing just around the corner, watching but not saying anything, not stepping up, not helping me. She heard our mother call me a liar and hadn’t tried to help me.

“She was a scared little girl here, but I think this is why you two never had a real relationship,” Subira said.

“Why did I repress the entire affair?” I demanded. “Why all of it?”

“Because of the day you confronted your father about it,” Subira answered.

I was twelve. I saw myself working on something on the dining room table, angry about something.

“Your mother is visiting your grandparents this weekend with your sister,” Michael Duray said as he walked through the dining room.

“Why couldn’t I go?” I asked, revealing the source of why I had been angry.

“Because liars don’t get to go visit their grandparents. You’re grounded here,” Michael snapped, stopping at the table.

“I am not a liar! I was just helping the other kid! You told me we should help people!”

“Jacqueline, we are done having this conversation! You got into a fight on the playground. I don’t care what the reason was anymore! No one else saw the boy push that girl. You need to stop making up stories about people.”

“Like how I must have made up you kissing Margie?” I snapped at him. “I know what I saw, but Mom started calling me a liar when I told her. Now, I’m always the liar, huh?”

I froze. My childish temper had gotten the better of me that day. The scene froze with me.

“You told your mother what you saw. She called you a liar,” Subira said, whispering as she rubbed my back. “But you never saw Margie again.”

“No, I didn’t,” I confirmed, remembering all of it, knowing what happened next.

I stood there, letting the memory continue, knowing.

He was angry that I had been the one to catch him. He hadn’t known it was me. My mother must have confronted him and Margie but hadn’t revealed it was me. She let me live the lie, to be the villain to her for some reason.

My father, knowing his perfect image had been smeared by me, was furious.

He’d beaten the shit out of me.

A twelve year old couldn't run fast enough or scream loud enough. He’d taken the belt to me—not just to my butt, but my back and legs—until I gave in. I never outed Gwen, never said she saw it, too. She’d already shown me she wasn’t willing to say anything, and I couldn’t let her get hurt, too.

“I lied! I’m sorry,” I screamed for him, sobbing in fear and pain.

“You will never lie again. Do you understand me?”

And I would never mention any of this to anyone, knowing everything that came out of my mouth would be a lie to them.

“They made me take two weeks off school, telling me that sometimes bad kids needed to be punished.”

“They were monsters who didn’t deserve you,” Subira snarled. “And they were very good at making you believe that no one would help you for what they did. That they were just being good parents, that they had the right to treat you like that.”

I was shaking as I sank next to my twelve-year-old self. Alone, sobbing, having lost everything—all her trust in her parents, her faith that they were supposed to raise her right and protect her.

I became the problem child. I couldn’t say anything, thinking no one cared about me or my truth. I worked my ass off to get good grades, always falling short of Gwen, always tainted by the crimes I had supposedly committed as a child. My truth didn’t matter to them because it didn’t fit their narrative.

“How did I forget?” I asked.

“You wanted to,” Subira answered. “You needed to.”

I wanted to pick up the young girl in front of me and take her away.

Something had died inside me that day, and I knew it wasn’t over.

“When she got home, my mom said I must have deserved it.”

“I know.”

“It’s not even that bad?—”

“Don’t say that. It destroyed you. You had two options. Live with it and remain staunchly yourself with a righteous sense of right or wrong, or let them break you. The moment you had a chance to forget, you did.”

“I didn’t decide to forget,” I whispered, wondering if I had really done it to myself.

“No, you didn’t. You never told anyone. You didn’t tell your sister the truth about it. You didn’t tell your friends. You didn’t tell Shane. It was something you didn’t even want to think about. Eventually, you became a werecat, and it became something you didn’t remember, forging ahead with a new chance at life, leaving it behind entirely.” Subira sighed. “Perhaps there was some magic involved. Perhaps to keep the curse in check, your mind corrected for you, hiding this devastating piece of your life.”

“You think so?”

“If this had happened to a werecat child, they wouldn’t have survived it, not in their human form,” Subira said as she sat next to me.

They would have gone through the Last Change and tried to protect themselves… because I had given into his claims to do the same thing for myself because I had no other way of protecting myself.

“There’s no way of knowing the truth, but think of it like this… if you remembered that, would you have been able to stand in the same room with anyone who claimed to be your family?” Subira reached out and touched my shoulder. “There’s a reason I never brought it up, knowing that forcing this could hurt you. Sadly, we didn’t have a choice, thanks to what’s happened to you.”

“I…” I just wanted to cry. I just wanted to forget again. I wanted the pain to go away. My father had gone about his life thinking he’d done nothing wrong. That was how he could look me in the eye in Russia.

My biological parents were monsters.

“He broke me,” I cried softly, covering my face, sobbing alongside the younger version of myself, right where my father had left her.

“He got very close, but you are so strong, Jacky. You are so strong.” Subira wrapped her arms around me. “You kept going. You never lost yourself.”

“Why couldn’t they love me?”

“Because they loved themselves more and didn’t know how to love you. They didn’t even know the meaning of the word.” Subira held me tighter. “But I will always choose you over me. You hear me? I will always trust you. I will always love you. You won’t break our family. You never broke that one. It was always broken, and they needed someone to blame.”

I nodded, letting her hold me as she told me everything I needed to hear.

“And Hasan, for all his faults, will never hurt one of his daughters the way your father hurt you,” she whispered, sounding like it wasn’t meant for my ears but something she was telling herself, a promise she was making or a truth she was reminding herself of. “Nor the way mine hurt me.”

I pulled away, looking at her. Her father was the original werecat, a brother to the witch who had cast the curse that afflicted both of them. He was, by all whispers I had heard, a monster.

“What do you mean?”

“What? Did you hear me?” Subira asked, frowning.

“Yeah.”

Subira’s eyes went wide. Clearly, she hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“Oh. That would explain the change in scenery,” she said, exhaling a terrified breath. “You heard my thoughts while we were…” She released me quickly. “I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

I looked around and had no idea where we were. It wasn’t anywhere I had ever seen before.

“Where are we?” I asked, wondering what games the fae magic was playing now, grief being buried by fear.

“We’re deep in my memory now,” Subira answered, sounding more scared than I had ever heard her. “Just… let it happen, Jacky. If we’re in my memory, maybe that means I can break this connection, and your time in the dreaming land here is over.”

“What are we about to see?” I asked. I heard a whimper and turned to see Subira looking just the way I knew her, but not.

She was on the ground next to the base of a tree and was bleeding. Most importantly, from between her legs, a bump on her belly told me the truth. I wanted to gag as I looked for anyone else, knowing the real Subira was standing near me, focusing on trying to deal with the magic and get through this moment.

I found Hasan on the ground, and if I hadn’t known he was alive and well in the modern day, I would have been convinced he was going to die, based on his injuries.

“What happened?” I asked, pleading to Subira, turning back to her. “Who…”

“This is what my father did when he learned of my pregnancy,” she answered. “The pregnancy I carried for the husband he had decided on, but I forged a real relationship with. He’d attacked me, and when Hasan tried to help me, my father tore him up.” She pointed to each of the bodies in the memory. “Zuri and Jabari were my second pregnancy. This was the fate of the first. They don’t know that. I promised myself I would only give birth once. It took over five hundred years for me to be ready to try again a second time. After giving birth to the twins, I decided no more.” Subira took a deep breath. “Now, let us go. It’s time, Jacky. You weren’t supposed to see this. Let’s not linger, please.”

She held out a hand, and I took it, knowing as I held her hand that she was the strongest woman I had ever met. She had just journeyed through my worst memories, able to shoulder those with me. I wouldn’t ask anything more about this and wouldn’t try to linger.

As I looked back at Hasan’s broken body in the dirt, I saw a man I would never see in my human father—a man willing to die for his wife and children. He was always there.

I just needed to heal a little longer before I could handle the immense weight of what this scene had accidentally given me.