Risen From the Ashes

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I woke up with a splitting headache on the floor of my throne room. I sat up, not sure what I was doing on the floor until I saw Ke'aysha, kneeling next to my body as her hand laid on my chest. I started to sit up and almost all of my muscles were sore, but my side hurt the most. I examined it by pulling up my shirt and I saw two metal inserts that would have come from a taser. Memories of getting tased came back to me and I reached down to pull them both out. It hurt a little, but not as bad as the skin around the puncture wounds. 

Ke'aysha wasn't saying anything, staying silent and looking down at her hands in discontent. I looked around the throne room and I realized Jazmyne wasn't in the room. I sat up and immediately started to panic, "Where's Jaz?" I demanded. Ke'aysha didn't make eye contact with. Her eyes were glued to her hands in her lap, scared to look up at me. Something was wrong. I repeated myself, just in case she didn't hear me the first time. Maybe my voice was too creaky to understand what I said, "Where is Jazmyne?" 

She finally broke eye contact with her hands and brought them up to mine, they were watery and puffy from past crying. I turned towards Key and sat up on my knees to force myself into her line of sight. 

"Ke'asyha." She wasn't telling me something and it was bothering me. She's usually never quiet with me, but this time she wasn't speaking up. Something's wrong. "Where is our daughter?" 

She sniffled and wiped her eyes to stop rolling tears from streaming down, "The Council took her." 

My fists clenched together as my imagination ran through all the possibilities how they took my precious little thing away from me. "Took her where?" 

I watched her sigh, looking longingly at the door, "I don't know." 

I was going to kill them. How dare they take her away from me! "We have to get her back!" I demanded. How was she so calm about it right now? 

"The Council said it was collateral for you to show up on the trail Friday." She explained to me. 

I read the Indoctrine and I knew what it said, but they shouldn't have to take my daughter. The least they could have done was take me. "Was it my father that gave her away? He's dead to me!" 

She raised her hand to stop me from talking. I was allowed to be angry right now, "I let The Council take her." 

I heard the words that she was saying, but it was not registering into a sentence I could understand. They were simply just words, "What?"

"I let The Council take her. She's safer with them than she is with us." A quick fuse blew. 

"What do you mean she's safe with them?! That's my fucking daughter those strangers have!" I yelled. The anger burst me to my feet even though I was still in pain. Ke'aysha was quick to follow suit, her tears of sadness coming back to throw as anger. 

"Don't you yell at me! I did what I thought was right!" fresh tears replaced the old ones. "What the hell was I suppose to do? You went and got yourself knocked out! It was just me and her left!" 

I scoffed at her, "At least I tried to protect her! And what did you do?!" 

The array of emotions that had overwhelmed her pushed the tears forward as she screamed at me, "I did everything you were supposed to do! You brought them here in the first place with your sick killings!"

I couldn't believe she was actually bringing this back even though we had put it in the past years ago. "Are we really going back almost a decade ago? Putting all the blame on me?" 

"You weren't scared to take the blame when you sent your mercenaries to do it!"She reminded me. 

I was frustrated going all the way back to a conversation we had already had before. "I already asked for your forgiveness and you forgave me, you can't just go back on your forgiveness." 

"This isn't about forgiveness anymore is it?!" 

"You're right! It's about our daughter being taken against her will as property!"

I watched Ke'aysha's warm brown eyes draw black. Not as black as mine, but a considerably dark color. "Newsflash, asshole! My family's name is on those accused charges! The Moore family!" I couldn't believe she would think I would forget what I had done to her and her family. A small pain in my abdomen stabbed me and I doubled-over. As loving and caring as Ke'aysha was, she was not in this moment. "I'm the last surviving member of any of those three packs! I'm the last victim you caused! I lost my family because of you!" The end of her sentence broke off into cries as her eyes blurred over into past memories all those years ago. 

The pain that I had caused her was back and my guilt from it reminded me what a piece of shit I knew I was already was. I was no longer yelling like she was, I brought my voice down to an empathetic whimper to her, "You said everyone deserves a second chance..." 

Her sadness dissipated from her and she stepped to my chest, looking up at me with the anger she had been bubbling down all those years. She gritted teeth at me, "My family deserves more of a second chance than I ever gave you, but you took that away from them. They deserved mercy." 

The yelling had gotten us nowhere, but her talking to me calmly made me feel worse about myself than I already had. "I didn't know..." 

She shook her head at me, disappointed, "Whatever helps you sleep at night." She punctuated her sentence by walking out of the throne room and leaving me by myself in the darkness of my own depression. I tried to fix this one, and I thought I have, but obviously I didn't do a good job at it, she just got better at hiding from me. 

I wanted to run after her, make her forgive me and handle everything this Council was throwing at us together, but we weren't. She was probably going to help her family get justice from a monster like me. I was the bad guy and there was no matter how old the picture was, it was still who I am. I couldn't make the picture people saw me in becoming anything else other than a killer. Not The Council. Not my father. Not Ke'aysha. 

I looked around the throne room, expecting anybody. Ke'aysha to come back. But she wasn't. My daughter to come running into my arms. But she wasn't. I'd even be fine with my father around. If he was genuine in trying to be a better man, then I wanted to know how to do it. But he wasn't. No one was. The room was quiet and empty with nothing, but my own breathing and a heaviness that suffocated me. 

I was completely alone.