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CHAPTER 1
ALIYAH
The ceiling lights are fuzzy orbs above me. My head is pounding, heart is racing, body aching.
What the hell did I do this time to make Jamal so angry?
I don’t even remember.
Not that he needs a reason. As long as he’s got a bottle in his hand, he’ll never not be mad at me for something.
Pushing myself up, I groan when a sharp pain lances through my skull. The entire right side of my face is throbbing, and my vision refuses to clear. I wipe at some blood that’s crusted on my chin.
“Get up.”
I jump at the sound of Jamal’s angry voice. His speech isn’t as slurred as it was before, which means I was out long enough for him to sober up a little bit.
Tears burn the backs of my eyes, and I try to blink them away, try to will away the hurt and pain he’s caused me the past two years, but it’s so hard.
It began shortly after we began dating. It would start with him getting mad over what I was wearing and who I was hanging out with. Then, it escalated to him backing me into a corner and screaming at me because dinner wasn’t ready when he wanted it to be, or because I hadn’t had a chance to do his laundry. Pretty soon, his words turned into punches, kicks, bites, and scratches. I chalked it up to him being tired from working such long hours.
And maybe I wasn’t making his life any easier by being late with dinner or hanging out with a guy friend he specifically asked me not to, even though our friendship had only ever been platonic.
“Just do what he says, don’t make him mad, and your life will be easy,” Mom had told me a few times.
I don’t want to end up like her—dead at the age of forty-five.
The cause?
Leaving a spoon in the sink.
The past year has been the hardest of my life—learning to cope with the loss of my mother, struggling with the knowledge that my dad is never getting out of prison for murdering her, coming to terms with the fact that I’ve lost both parents, and trying to rid myself of the thoughts that constantly tell me I don’t deserve to be here.
I just want to make my husband happy, and it seems like I keep doing everything wrong.
Jamal grips my upper arm and yanks me off the floor, making me wince. I stand on wobbly legs and grit my teeth when he digs his fingers into my arm and practically drags me into the living room where his gaming system is lying askew in the middle of the floor.
“How many fucking times have I told you to stop touching my shit?” he growls in my ear, grabbing a fistful of my hair to keep me in place. “Huh? How many times, Aliyah?”
So that’s what it is—he thinks I messed with his games. He was playing when I got home, but he must have been too drunk to remember.
Tears wrack my entire body; he’s so out of his mind with rage that I’m not sure what he’ll do next, but I try to brace myself for the worst.
“I-I didn’t t-t-touch it,” I force out, barely able to get the words out. “I swear.”
He growls and shoves me away from him. My head bounces off the wall with a sickening thud, and when I fall to the floor, I silently pray I don’t get a concussion from all of the head trauma I’ve endured tonight.
The room starts spinning, and, once again, I succumb to the darkness.
When I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize the person I see. My usually smooth light brown skin is now pale and splotchy from all the crying I've done and bruised from Jamal’s fists, my dark brown curls are so tangled that they look like a rat’s nest, and my dark brown eyes have no more life left in them.
He did this to me. Jamal has slowly but surely leached my soul out of my body, leaving behind only a husk where a person once was.
I wince when I bend over to grab the first-aid kit from underneath the bathroom sink; my side is still sore from when he kicked me a couple days ago. I should have gone to the hospital to get myself checked out just in case, but I'm beginning to run out of excuses for the things that have been happening to me. They never believe me when I tell them I fell, anyway. Every battered woman says that.
Or maybe I should start going to a different hospital?
Something tells me that won’t be any better, though, since everything is in the same system.
