“Oh.” Rami’s eyes drop to his hands. “If you don’t want to be the one to tell me, then I won’t push.”
I stay quiet until he returns my gaze. “I think you’ve been kept in the dark long enough.”
“That sounds…ominous.”
“Not ominous, not really, but serious. Some of this information has been rolling around the Hell_AI app for a long time.”
His eyes widen. “That’s a scary fucking app.”
I nod, then explain as best I can how, after his dad and Uncle Odd served in the Navy, they returned stateside and couldn’t stomach watching the powerful harm the powerless after all they’d seen. How they’d connected with others who felt the same.
“They killed people?”
“Yes. All of the people were bad, but they definitely killed a lot of them.”
“Do…?” Rami hesitates, then plows forward. “Do you kill people?”
“No. That’s a pretty hard line for me. Though I will put a hurting on some motherfucker who goes after the vulnerable.”
Rami flushes, dipping his chin as he rubs the back of his neck. He definitely likes that.
Rather than pursuing that line of questioning, he asks, “Do my grandparents know?”
“The rumor in Hell is that your grandparents knew their boys had certain proclivities, so they steered them toward murder for good.”
Rami’s eyes nearly fall out of his head.
“Those are just rumors though. You should talk to your dad and uncle about that.”
“And Baba?”
Omar’s records were a hell of a lot easier to find.
“He was gay in a family where it was very dangerous to be gay.”
“I know that much.” Rami’s eyes are sad. “But he refuses to talk about his family.”
“There’s a good reason for that.”
“Maybe when I was a kid, but I’m not that anymore.”
No, he is not.
I try to ease him in. “The thing he probably didn’t want you to know was that, when he was very young, he was forced into a kind of military service.”
Rami sits with this for a minute, his expression unreadable. Finally, he looks up.
“Are you saying my baba was a child soldier?”
“Yes.”
“He had to kill people as achild?” he asks, his voice cracking on the last word.
I nod, knowing this next part will hurt, but it is necessary for him to understand his father.
“Right before your father left for the United States, he was forced to kill his English tutor, a POW from Austin, Texas, who’d been kidnapped from his unit.”
Tears well and spill down Rami’s face.
