[Viewers Discretion Is Advised.]
"I've earned some trust with him and I don't wanna ruin it. If I play this out peacefully then we can go back to how we normally were. We can hang out and whatever else like we used to do." I hit send and then I looked back up at the door.
"Do you even hear yourself!" Crystal was straightforward. "What about my cousin Orlando? He loves you and we all know you love him. Just cut the act and come back home to us."
"You know I can't do that!" I typed back fastly. "I'm married to Kai and we all know none of us can change that! So please stop guilting me out when you know I have no control over anything that happened and I get it, it's my fault!"
With one hand, I wiped away many thick amounts of tears before they dripped on the keyboard. For a minute, Crystal's chat bubble didn't move. Until I saw the three lines waving to indicate she was typing now.
"I'm sorry," Crystal typed and added another sad face. "None of us are saying this is your fault and we know you're scared. Will take it slow. Please just stay in contact with me without Kai knowing about it. And maybe we can quote on quote, accidentally run into each other at the mall or somewhere to hang out without any of them knowing."
"Okay, but I need to go in case Kai comes into the bedroom," I send.
"I'll talk with you soon and Orlando said he loves you," Crystal replies before I log off, shocked to read that. I understood it meant Orlando was with her the whole time we were chatting.
I dried many tears and decided to check out the file that I labeled expedition. I opened it up and it was the format I was working on in Egypt. It has photos and journal logged notes in it.
One at a time, I started to wipe each teardrop away as it rolled down my cheeks. I had many pictures of my team and other teams digging up the site.
Donny and I took a selfie together with some ruins behind us that were once a statue. I had Susie digging up the sandy dirt. With a huge smile at me, taking this picture of her. I got us on our lunch break and I even got a few of Tom either walking by in the background or he was talking to another team member. Despite Tom backstabbing me. There were plenty of good memories and I made so many friends.
I sniffled and wiped up the remainder of my tears when Kai entered the bedroom. He crawled up on the bed and laid on his side next to me. He scrutinized the screen in his silence as I scrolled down through more pictures.
I wiped up more tears when Kai softly asked me like he was puzzled, "Why are you crying?"
"It's still hard to come to terms that they're dead," I said when I stared at a group photo of us that another team took for me.
Surprisingly, enough Tom even willingly joined in on the group photo for some good memories.
"If it makes you sad then just ease the photos and forget about them," Kai said neutrally as I turned my face shocked at what I heard.
He was serious in a gentle expression. It's like he didn't have any understanding of death. Perhaps Kai suffers from some kinda personality disorder. Maybe feeling remorseful isn't an emotion he can acknowledge. He could fall under the lines of being a narcissist, sociopath, or possibly a psychopath. If that's the case it would explain his possessiveness and why he is so controlling.
"These are the only photos I have of them. If I erase them then they're forever gone," I tried my best to rationalize but Kai didn't seem to understand it.
He looked at me and then at the photo of me and my team members that are all dead.
"I just feel you should let go of them," Kai softly said.
He wasn't rude about it and I could tell he was trying to understand. But he just wasn't getting it. Therefore, I dropped the conversation and scrolled down to more photos as he looked at them quietly beside me.
Soon I found the mummy of the young pregnant 22-year-old girl that Pharaoh killed. I had forgotten I even snuck back during my lunch break and took a few detailed photos of her. Especially in the area of her neck that seemed crushed from those pointed teeth marks embedded in her bone. Still to this day, I don't understand how the Pharaoh killed her and the baby she carried.
'You've woken the blood-sucking monster!' Suddenly her haunting voice echoed in my memory from that day she reappeared to me on my honeymoon in Rio.
"Blood-sucking monster," I muttered so lowly I could barely hear myself.
"What did you say?" Kai asked and I snapped out of my thoughts.
I had completely forgotten he was still laying beside me.
"Nothing..." I lied and surprisingly Kai didn't pry to know what I said.
So I scrolled down more and found that stone wall of those hieroglyphs. Where I discovered the first clue. That led to many other clues in finding the Pharaoh's body. Unexpectedly, I felt Kai's body moving up to get a closer look. Out of all those pictures. These were the only ones he seemed interested in. Beneath his breath, I heard a brief chuckle.
"What's so funny?" I asked, staring at him again as he made eye contact with me.
"Nothing, I'm just surprised something so old is still standing," Kai said before smiling amused and knowing something more.
But what? Just when I mentally asked that unanswered question. Kai's agate color eyes began to vanish. The room went dark until I found myself in a completely different room. The lights were flashing and fading in and out within the darkness.
Emitting cries started piecing my ears as I wandered my eyes about within the flickering darkness. Barely six feet away from where I stood, was Donny's battered and bloodstained dead body.
"Aaaaah!" I heard many people screaming and shouting for help.
"Please, someone get us out of here!" I heard Susie cry as her fist pounded on the locked door a little ways across from my standpoint.
Until something I couldn't see through the flickering dimly lit room; snatched her ankle and dragged her away across the floor. I looked around in every direction within the flashing lights but couldn't find her. In the flashing darkness, she screamed this terrifying gagging screech until she was silenced.