The Collection- Harry Styles

{Et In Ius} i: help comes to those who ask

People say women always end up marrying men either totally like their father or the exact opposite. For Y/N, the former is true. Jonah is exactly like her father in every way.

Looking back, she's not sure how she wound up where she is. If predestination were a belief of hers, she would have laughed at the nature of her marrying a man who could have been her dad's carbon copy clone. The universe playing a sick joke on her by forcing her to grow up under the iron rule of a cold man and then marrying her off to a cruel man with bloodied knuckles. But she doesn't believe in that.

She believes in God. And He has to be the one she looks too and blames in this tragic play called her life.

He was the one who saddled her with a God-fearing, Bible-thumping preacher of a father. The kind of father who never took his belt off for a whipping, but instead preferred the age-old method of forcing her to pick out a switch in the backyard to be whipped with. The kind of father who forced three hours of silent Bible reading before nighttime prayer every night, didn't allow a television in the house. Any skirt or dress above the knee was a sign that she was a certain woman of the night. Makeup put her on the same level as a tramp. Y/N loved her father, but she learned at thirteen why her mother killed herself. Funnily, her father never said he missed his late wife, only that suicide was a sin therefore they'd never meet in Heaven.

God was the one who saddled her with a God-fearing, Bible-thumping, hands-on disciplinarian of a husband. Like her father in that the Word was Law and any transgression is grounds for punishment. Like her father in that he is the incarnate of Hell on Earth. It's evident in the darkness that swallows his eyes when he's angry, in the heat of his touch when he smacks her. The thunder of his footsteps. The quake of his voice when enraged.

Y/N ran right from the belly of the wolf into the jowls of the wildebeest.

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Y/N's eyes are deadlocked on the weathered Bible that decorates her night table. If she were to open it to the dedication page, she would find her mother's name printed in neat writing. There would be no underlined verses for times of trouble (her father believed writing in the Good Book was blasphemy in itself and grounds for immediate expulsion to the fires of Hell. In truth, there aren't many things her father thinks are actually good.

The world is full of evil. The Devil's temptation lies everyone, Y/N, and you must be smart enough to avoid it all.

And yet, he had pushed her straight into the arms of the snake of Eden.

Her husband lay asleep next to her. Easily the creator of the worst two years of her life, he only seems to get worse every day. If the calloused print of his hand isn't been stained to the skin of her cheek, it's the sting of his shouts in her ear. And once a week, on Monday's, he shares a bed with her.

She's grateful they only sleep together once a week. It's her heavenly (and wifely) duty to lie with him, but she knows other women who have carnal relations almost every night with their husbands.

Thank the good Lord that isn't her fate.

Y/N peeks over at Jonah as he snores and rolls away from her. It isn't Christian to hope that he falls out of bed and bangs his head so hard he never wakes up. Or he dies. Then again, she doesn't think it's Christian to smack your wife around. But does anyone really know the will of God?

"Lord," she whispers, "thank you for this day and the breaths you have given. Your love and your light. Heavenly Father, I ask again tonight for a deliverance from this life. I know it's shameful to be ungrateful, but I can't believe I have ever sinned enough to have deserved this." She takes a shaking breath before continuing. "Father I ask for you to show me a way to something better, the life I know I'm meant to have. And if...if Jonah should perish for it, so be it."