Читать книгу Black Widow - Cliff Ryder - Страница 2

They’d been given the name because their husbands had been killed fighting the Russian army. Some said that the shahidka were cursed, born into trouble and bad luck, and death to any man who took their hand in marriage.

Of course, there was no way anyone could tell if a woman was shahidka. There was no test, and they weren’t marked by God until after they’d lost their husbands.

Women in Chechnya married young, sometimes as early as thirteen or fourteen. The men they married weren’t much older, and they became soldiers the instant someone thrust a rifle into their hands.

Unable to afford mercy to the young troops, the Russian military often killed them. Those deaths doomed the women as well. In their culture, a woman belonged to a man. When a woman’s husband died, she became the property of her husband’s family. She could be separated from her children, have her house taken and be left out on the street—or sold to another.

Or she could end up a Black Widow.