War

Chapter Twenty-Five

A/N - HAPPY NEW YEAR‼️🫶🏾

How are we 25 chapters into this book?😭

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Marco
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Restless didn't dare touch the surface of how I was feeling right now.

Three days had passed now.

Three days of me dedicating all of my time trying to pin down the identity of the brave fucker who had dared to send those photos to Aniyah.

And in the past three days she'd received more photos, each message coming from a different phone number, each one containing a photograph of her out of the house at some point...dating all the way back to the night she went to Cairo with her friends.

I hadn't been this angry in years.

And to add fuel to the fire, my wife and I were barely on speaking terms, down to me of course.

I'd offended her when she came into my office those few days ago, I knew that much, but it appeared I wasn't saying the right things recently to make it any better.

I wasn't good with feelings, and it had become more and more evident in this situation.

I hadn't joined Aniyah in our bed at the usual time today, nor had I the past three nights, and instead had occupied myself with trying to map out every number my wife had received a message from.

The digits were making my temples throb, the more I stared at the sequences that made up the phone numbers the more I was driven to insanity. But I had to get to the bottom of this, for Aniyah's sake, and I wouldn't rest until the person behind this was no longer breathing.

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"And so three times three plus two is eleven?", the words that had just come out of Elijah's mouth sounded fucking foreign- but he was seven and I was sixteen, meaning I should've been able to understand it.

"Yeah", I nodded, not knowing if the answer he'd given me was correct or not; and I couldn't bring myself to count on my fingers in front of them.

They'd believe I'd well and truly lost it.

"You didn't even check it", Eli said before Ezekiel nudged him in the stomach, "oh. Sorry". I'd told the twins that something in my brain meant I wasn't as good at maths as they were, trying to dumb it down a little, and now they were apologising for my lack of understanding when it came to their homework.

"I'm the one who should be apologising", I shook my head, "can you explain to me how you got eleven?". Elijah nodded, seemingly in his element as he began to explain his thought process to me, out of all of us and despite only being seven, he excelled in this subject- unlike Zeke who preferred books.

"It's three times three, so you go 'three, three, three' and add them together, and that's nine. Then add two and it's eleven", he beamed proudly once he was finished, having used his small fingers to demonstrate.

"Do you get it now?", Zeke asked me, green eyes that mirrored mine wide as he looked up at me.

"I do", I nodded, not having the heart to tell them that had all gone in one ear and straight out of the other, "why don't we-,". I stiffened when the front door opened, my jaw clenching when the twins shuffled a little closer to each other in their seats to my left; this was the last thing we needed right now.