The Dirty Saint (Dirty #1)

20. Chapter Twenty

20

Chapter Twenty

After

EZRA

“I heard about your conversation with your mom. Wanna talk about it?”

I shake my head. “I can’t think about her right now, not with everything going on in my life. I can’t keep allowing her to be at the forefront. It isn’t fair to me, and it isn’t fair to my son.”

“You think this is it,” Briggs asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.”

But I can’t envision coming back from this.

“You’re a saint,” I say as Brianne hands me my daily coffee.

“Only the best for my baby cousin.”

I take a sip and then place my mug down. “I’m really not much younger than you, you know?”

Briggs makes the letter V with her fingers. “What is it, two years, give or take?”

I scoff at her, and she smiles.

I take another sip.

“Noah’s babysitter Addison’s funeral was yesterday, but I couldn’t bring myself to go.”

“I’m sure her family understands.”

I let out a huff.

“Yeah.”

Briggs takes my hand and forces me to look up at her. “Tell me what you’re thinking right now, Ez.”

“I’m thinking that I should get a better security system to keep you the fuck out of my house.”

“No, seriously, Ez. What’s running through your mind?”

Lana.

Addison.

Joey.

Everything.

“I should’ve confessed right then and there.”

“Ezra—”

“If I had just given him when he wanted, then Lana never would have had to die.”

“You don’t know that.”

But I do.

Because I lived in that cell, too.

I was beaten by the same men.

I was raped by the same monsters.

There was no mercy. And the only reason I survived was because the man I cared about died.

“You have survivor’s guilt, Ez.”

I look up at her. “Don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Why do you think I’m still having nightmares all these years later? Look, you made it out, and Lana didn’t, and you can’t understand why. But making it seem like it was on you is not the answer.”

I rest my chin on the palm of my hand, nodding ever so slightly.

“It isn’t fair,” I say. “None of it is fair.”

Lana shouldn’t have been killed. She didn’t do anything. She was a teenage girl who had her whole life ahead of her.

Similar to Addison.

“I was selfish. And cruel.”

“Your life was on the line.”

“I got her killed .”

“You had a son to think about.”

“So did she,” I let out. “So did she!”

My head falls into my hands as the realization hits me.

“One night, Lana told me about Joshua. Said that she and the father had been together for a while, and the baby just…happened.

“We spent the night talking about our boys. Apparently, Josh loves trains.

“All she wanted to do was get back to him and Roy. I used to hear her crying and begging for them. When she was being raped or beaten—or both, she would close her eyes and whisper Roy’s name. If she could picture being back in the arms of the man she loved, then I guess she could keep going with what was being done to her.

“She just wanted her family back, and I knew deep down only one of us was going to get that. And I really, really wanted it to be me.”

Look, I will always be grateful for being spared, but it came at a great cost. For me to win, someone else had to lose. In order for Noah to have his mother, Joshua now has to mourn his.

“How do you do it, Brianne,” I ask, ignoring my tears. “How do you go on?”

My cousin takes a breath.

“You pray to God that when you fall apart, you somehow have the strength to put the pieces back together.

“We’re gonna get through this, Ez, just like everything else.”

I shake my head. “I just feel so weak . All the time. And I can’t help but think that I’ll never get better.”

“Well, as a person once said, ‘maybe life isn’t about avoiding the bruises. Maybe it’s about collecting the scars to prove we showed up for it.’

“Look, Ezra, you won’t survive the rest of your life if every time you feel broken, you push it to the back of your mind until it comes out and kicks your ass.

“I’m not healed. There is no way to heal. And I’m not saying this to scare you; I’m saying this because it’s the truth. You need to stop beating yourself up because of the actions of someone else. You are two seconds away from draining yourself, and it isn’t that easy to fill back up.”

“You speaking from experience,” I ask.

Briggs nods.

“I only ever do.”

During

JOEY

I wince as a shot connects with my nose.

“You promised me answers,” Michael yells, slicing through my flesh with the blade of his knife.

“Argh.”

“Fuck you,” Ezra yells, yanking and tugging on her chains, trying to get closer to me. “Fuck you!”

Killian holds Ezra down in an attempt to control her.

“What do you wanna know,” she shouts.

“Ezra, don’t!”

“I will tell you everything. Just stop hurting him…please.”

“Ezra!”

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

And then she opens them.

“It’s true. It’s all true. I killed your son. I killed Caleb Santo, and I buried his body in the small park near the church.”

“Ezra, stop,” I whisper.

“His blood was all over me. Stained my clothes and my fingernails and even got all tangled up in my hair. But even when he screamed and begged for mercy, I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop.”

“You fucking bitch,” Michael hisses.

“See, that’s just it, ” Ezra barks. “You don’t know the whole story. And yet you blame me as if you do. Your son, your pride and joy, yeah, he took me behind the bleachers after school, where he raped me. He also broke my nose when I told him to stop. Oh, but the real cherry on top is that he got me pregnant. With a baby boy, one you seem to believe you have claim over. So you have no right to lay a hand on me. Or to sing praises about your child.

“Do you think I care that Caleb was a good boy when he was barely three months old? Or that he helped old ladies cross the fucking sidewalk? Your son was a sick person.”

The gasps in the room can be heard from miles away. No one dares let out a breath too loud or too intense.

“There,” she lays back. “You get what you paid for? That the confession you so desperately wanted, Michael? Well, congratulations. You got it.”

“He was supposed to go to college,” Michael screams.

“Guess what? So was I. It’s a little hard to do, however, when you are pregnant with a child, but you wouldn’t understand that.”

“He had dreams, Ezra, and you stole them from him.”

She nods.

“And you wanna know how much I regret that?”

She makes the letter O with her fingers.

“Zero.”

* * *

Ezra finally admitted it.

I don’t know why I’m shocked. I had a feeling.

There was just something so final about listening to her confess her actions to Michael. Hearing her recount Caleb’s sins. She barely even batted an eye. Never even let out a single tear.

And she has no regrets.

At least, that’s what she wants everyone to believe.

“Oh, pretty girl,” I whisper. “You don’t deserve this.”

I so badly want to be able to go over to her and run my fingers across her soft cheek. Lana is fast asleep in the corner, and everyone else has left, so it’s really just her and me.

But doing so might only make things worse for the both of us.

“It’s funny how quickly he shifted in my presence. He went from having all the power to being powerless.

“He kept begging me not to kill him, but I didn’t listen. Even when he pleaded for mercy. Or forgiveness, as he called it.

“I know I should hate myself for what I’ve done, and part of me does, but a sick and twisted part of me feels…relieved. Because there is one less person to take advantage of someone else.”

Ezra gazes up at me. “I killed the father of my child, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. But how am I supposed to explain that to Noah?”

Every tear that exits her eyelids feels like a knife is being plunged deeper and deeper into my chest. I wish that I can take all the pain away and transfer it into my own blood so that she never has to feel like this again.

She wipes her nose with the back of her hand.” What I did was selfish.”

“You did what you thought was best.”

“No,” Ezra shakes her head.

“Ez—”

“What I deserve is for Michael Santo to put a fucking bullet through my skull and then burn my body to ashes.”

“I will put a fucking bullet through his skull and burn his body to ashes before I ever let him put a hand on you again.”

Ezra closes her eyes, letting a single tear trickle from her eyelid and slide down her cheek.

“Y-you are not my savior,” she whispers before meeting my gaze.

“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t walk through fire to keep you safe.”

I would light the whole world on fire if it meant that nothing would happen to her. The world would burn before I let her feel any more pain.

“You really mean that?” she asks.

“With every bone in my body.”

Ezra lets out a smile, and thank God she does because I was going crazy for a hot minute.

“Joey, what the hell happens from here on out?”

“I don’t know, but whatever happens, we will figure it out. Together.”

She smiles.

“You’re killing me right now, you know that?” I try to ignore the hardness of my shaft pushing against the front of my pants. “You are making it far too difficult. I’m not going to survive in these chains.

“Welcome to my world.” Ezra rests in the corner of her cell, her back pressed up against the back of the wall. “Now why don’t you tell me a little something about yourself? It’s only fair since you know so much about me. What’s your family like, Joey Odeh?”

“Well,” I say, “Growing up, my family didn’t really have anything. Barely had any money. My father tried his best to secure a job, but he struggled to keep them with his raging temper. And my mother, well, she had kids to look after.”

I take a deep breath to collect my thoughts.

“My father was extremely violent. Being a kid and living under his roof was pure hell. He was an alcoholic who never sobered or controlled himself. He would scream, he would yell, he would demand things, but all of that my siblings and I could handle. It was the other stuff, like the hitting, and the whipping, and the kicking, that was harder to accept.

“My father never apologized afterward; never said he was sorry. Honestly, that was better because even if he did, I knew it wasn’t true and that all he was doing was lying right to my face. Even as a kid, I hated being lied to.

“I used to wonder why my mother stayed. After all, he was even shittier to her than he was to us. It used to make me angry that she didn’t have more respect for herself. But still, she loved him through all of it. Because, to my mother, my father was something she could fix. A long-term project. All she wanted to do was heal the wounds my father carried. She had this idea of the type of man he could be if he tried to be better.

“So many times, I watched as he disappointed her. He would put the bottle down for a day, maybe even curve the sides of his lips into his own version of a smile, half convincing my mother that he was capable of once again being the man she made vows to.

“After my sister died, my father grew worse. It didn’t seem possible. I mean, he was a monster to begin with, but he found a way. The smallest thing would send him over the edge and into a fit full of rage. He once bashed my mother’s head into the side of the kitchen island simply for asking him if he was okay. She wound up in the hospital for nearly a week with a brain bleed.”

“Joey,” Ezra says, a sympathetic gaze roaming my body.

“My father has never once been proud of me. Growing up, it stung really fucking badly, but as I have gotten older, I have accepted the fact that he will never give a shit about any of my successes. I’m no longer mad at him for that. I can’t be. Not anymore.”

My father made me hate myself. Made me feel like a monster. Probably even turned me into one.

That’s the world that I come from.

Ezra reaches out her hand for me to grab, but only the tips of our fingers brush one another. She looks at me with a gaze that fills my heart with a feeling I have never felt.

Love.

“Joey—”

“All I wanted was for him to be proud of me,” I whisper. “And yet he never was.”

“ I’m proud of you. And I know it’s not the same, but I am. I am so fucking proud of you, Joey Odeh.”

I look at her, shaking my head.

“I have done some horrible things, Ezra. Look at where we are?”

“Hey, I’m right here with you.”

“How can you stand to look at me?”

Ezra rubs the scar on the tip of her nose with the padding of her left pointer finger.

“Because I have done some horrible things too.”

I shake my head.

“It’s not the same.”

“It may not be. But if a broken, damaged person cannot stand to look at another broken, damaged person, then how can they stand to look at themself?”