Life Sentence

Chapter 22

~Warning~
Grab your tissues and hold off from killing the author......this is the reason i didn't update for a year🤧🤧

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Yusuf still used that same earthy perfume he’d always used. Kubra realized that the second she was in a car with him. She hated it. The smell that used to turn her on made her skin crawl. It reminded her of all the things that had been taken from her.

“Come on, now. Stop frowning. Hopefully, we won’t ever see Yusuf again after this,” Huma said from the passenger seat, looking at her in the rearview mirror.”

Kubra hated that she knew Yusuf had just rolled his eyes with the way his head tilted upwards. “I’ve been getting reassured of this for quite a while now, yet he always keeps popping up.”

She heard him sigh. Again, she hated herself for catching onto the longing, hurt, and self-disappointment in his voice when he asked, “What would it take for you to forgive me, Kubra? I’d do anyt-”

“Can you give me back those four years? Make the clock reverse and bring me back what once was mine?” As a child, she’d always loved these lines from Tangled. Life really had the cruelest humor sometimes.

He swallowed. “No. But I can spend the rest of my life trying to make you forget it.”

The grip on her throat that she was just beginning to forget returned and gripped her in the claws of the horrid past again. I will spend the rest of my days making you feel like the most beautiful girl in the world that you are. Such empty words he used to throw around with such sincerity that the wisest of all could’ve believed them.

But you were not wise, were you? The voice she was trying to keep at bay but was always lurking somewhere in her subconscious spoke. You were the most idiot girl in town. That’s why you’re in this whole mess, aren’t you?

No! She screamed in her mind. Or was she actually yelling? Her breath came in short puffs. But she was easier to reach now. Her best friend’s voice consoled her through the fog.

“Breathe now, Kubra. You’re here. You’re free. Everything else is beneath you now. You hold the power.”

And after blinking a few times and breaking the haze, she could see the worried faces again. She used to hate it and get annoyed by all the worries. But she’d come to terms that with her, they were inevitable. How they were driving in a straight line was beyond her.

“Then do me a favor, Yusuf, and just stop trying to fix things that you broke! Just come to terms with the fact that just as I suffered and Saad suffered and all my loved ones did? This is your suffering now. Even if everyone else you wronged forgives you, I cannot, and I will not! You can roam free around but I hope and I pray that your own conscience be your prison.”

Tears glistened in Huma’s eyes but she stayed silent. Her heart broke for her friend, but she couldn’t help but feel a little pity for Yusuf. He looked like a man who had lost something he could never hope to find. And in all meanings, he really did.

But Huma could not help but wonder if somehow she ever found herself in such a position as Yusuf, could she be forgiven? But she could not ponder upon this question for long for the heavy silence fell upon the car that was so loud, it drowned out the noise of one’s own thoughts. It was even louder than the one that befell the court moments before the judge ruled out the sentence.

And in way, a sentence had been ruled here. The cruelest one Huma had ever witnessed. And this time, the judge hammering down the gavel was Kubra.

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