could do about it. I made sure that my cousin would be with you the whole day. Huda is my best friend, and I was sure she could make you feel as welcome as possible, better than anyone else. I then made sure that at least half of the princesses in the kingdom were there beside you instead of being with me because I didn’t want you to be alone at your own wedding.
“I tried, Marie. I really tried. I wanted to do anything to make you happy. I had no idea that you were just about to get that destroyed. And all because of me. God! I’m so sorry,” she cried. It seemed like her tears would never dry.
My heart ached for her. Her words, her kindness and her actions…it all made it so easy to see why my brother was head over heels about her. She was so easy to fall in love with.
An angel.
My hand reached out and touched the back of hers. “Stop it with that, Janna.” I told her gently. “No more apologizing, I’ve already told you I forgive you.”
Another sad smile that reminded me a lot of her brother’s. “Thank you,” she whispered, and after a pause of silence she spoke again,
“When he came back after handing the sheet to my maid the morning after the wedding sporting a black eye, he told me he fell.” She chuckled humorlessly. “His lies didn’t stop even after the wedding; it hurts me even more.”
I shook my head slightly. No wonder the prince was calmer when he came back yesterday: he had taken his rage out on my brother.
Served him right. I wasn’t even slightly upset about it.
“Why did you need to give them a sheet, anyway? Your family already knew that you weren’t a virgin!”
“Um, yeah. Only my brothers, father and stepmother, but not the rest of the family. God forbid they know!”
“So, you had fake evidence of a virginity loss on your sheet, as well,” I sighed.
Janna looked at me with a questioning look in her eyes. I knew she wanted to ask something; it was very clear in her eyes. But instead, she only bit her bottom lip and looked down again.
“Yeah. Thank God ‘common deflowering’ is no longer practiced nowadays, as it was before. Or I would’ve been dead by now when they practiced it on me,” she said, her face paling as she spoke the words.
What the heck is ‘common deflowering’?
“Common deflowering?” I questioned.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” she said, shuddering slightly.
“No, really, tell me,” I insisted.
Janna sighed. “It’s a very old custom that some had practiced forever. On someone’s wedding night, they would bring some women from the families of both the bride and the groom, and they would, uh…” She bit her lip, her already-flushed cheeked reddening even more.
“What?”
“They would pin the bride down roughly while one of them took her virginity with her...uh, her white-cloth-covered finger while the groom watched, as well as the rest of the women obviously.”
My eyes widened and my jaw dropped to the floor. “That’s freaking disgusting!”
“I know! It’s horrible.” Janna shook her head. “If the bride turned out not to be a virgin, they’d kill her on the spot and considered her as if she had never been born.”
My God!
“But, thank God it’s fading away with time; you hardly hear about it anymore other than with the Bedouins who still practice it to this day. It hasn’t happened in the royal family in decades, though.”
“It should never happen at all,” I told her, disgust filling my voice.
“True,” Janna said. “Islam promises whoever does something as horrible as that towards a woman with hellfire, but I guess religion is not their priority when it comes to honor, just like the killing itself if it’s proven the bride wasn’t a virgin. It’s a grave sin.”
“That’s really sad,” I said. If their religion wasn’t supportive of it, why couldn’t they obey it? Nothing in the whole world justified killing another soul. Let alone for a mistake or a moment of weakness.
“It is.”
“They should make a law against those who do that, it’s not right!” I said.
“Oh, Marie. I wish,” Janna said sincerely.
It was like I had forgotten everything the two of us were going through at the mention of this subject matter. It was such a terrible thing to do, and I couldn’t believe that some people still practiced it.
“If it has nothing to do with the religion, how did it start, then?”
“I don’t know.