Chapter 3 #2
When she woke, she was in the hospital. Her arm was in a cast, and her body felt like it had been run over several times.
There were officers outside her door and a lady cop in the room with her.
They never spoke, even though she had tried a couple of times.
Wanting her mom in the worst sort of way, she started sobbing when she came into the room with her.
“My baby girl. I knew that you’d get away.” She held her mom tightly and told her how much she loved her. “I love you too, my darling child. Forever more.”
She never asked her who had taken her, and she didn’t care at that time.
Wanting to go home but knowing on some level that she wasn’t going to be able to right away, she held onto her mom while her dad sat in the corner of the room and cried.
It was more than she could handle at the time, and when they asked her if she wanted more for the pain, she took the drugs so that she could hurt less.
She was in and out of pain meds over the next few days.
The police would come in and ask her if she could tell them anything, but no one ever asked her who had taken her.
She was able to tell them that she’d been in the basement of a barn, but she couldn’t take them there, so she didn’t know what help that was going to be.
As soon as she was able to sit up in a chair by herself, she knew that she was going to be getting better.
However, her nightmare was just beginning, and she didn’t know how much longer she was going to be able to hide away from the truth of who had taken her.
Finally, when she was getting better enough to walk around a little bit, a police officer came into her room without her mom.
She didn’t answer his questions that he put to her, but he was pissed off about how she couldn’t talk to him.
When her dad showed up, he ran the man off with threats, and she was able to sit with her daddy for a little while.
He told her that he loved her no matter what the newspaper said.
He let her have a copy of it while her mom was gone.
It took her three months to leave the hospital.
Much of the delay, she believed, was due to the severe injuries she had suffered during her captivity.
Doctors told her the wounds were severe, and healing would take time.
Nearly two weeks after she was admitted, they finally asked whether she knew who had done this to her.
“You expect us to believe that Mr. Winchester kidnapped you and took you by force? He’s an upstanding member of society, and you’re just a kid.
” She told them that she knew who it was because she’d seen his picture around town.
“That’s how you know it was him? Because of a few billboards around town.
You’re not going to be able to work a day in this town if you keep telling lies like you are. ”
That went on for several days at a time. They’d come in, ask her who had taken her, and she’d tell them. Then they would get angry with her when she told them who it had been. She never changed her story, nor did she say anything about how he was planning to kill her when she’d gotten away.
“By the time I was ready to leave the hospital, I was a mess. There were no drugs that could make it so that I could sleep at night. I had nightmares for years, sometimes even today, about the week-long captivity I was in. No one would believe me until I got a lawyer to sue the man. By the time I was ready to leave the hospital, I was already three months pregnant with his child.” Sidney said he was sorry.
“So was I, but my mom convinced me to keep the baby, so I’d have proof of what he’d done to me.
I’m so glad every day that I kept my baby.
I don’t know what I’d do if not for my son. ”
“You’re very brave. And smart.” She said she’d never had anyone tell her that before but her dad. “I’d like to meet him and your mother. They sound like a couple that I could really get to love.”
“Sadly, they’re both gone. When I was in court, my father had a massive stroke.
My mother joined him several days later when she said that she couldn’t handle life without him.
At seventeen, I was left alone with a toddler and no means of supporting myself.
” She asked him what he thought. “No one is going to hold you to your being my mate. I will be all right, for as much as I’ve been since it all happened.
I have a good job, a great son, and someone that I can love till my dying days. Thatcher is my world.”
“I’m going to love you until the day we decide to die.
” She thought he might mean it too, but there was still more to tell.
She would get to it sooner rather than later and tell him about how she’d nearly ended up in prison for taking Winchester to court.
He and his money were no match for the evidence that she had on him.
~*~
Sidney’s heart broke for Olivia. Every time he thought about her, it would break just a little bit more.
He knew there was more to the story; he remembered reading about it in the newspaper.
It was hard for him to equate the little girl from the newspaper to the grown woman who had become his mate.
No matter what had happened to her, he knew that he was going to love her forever.
The newspaper had made her out to be this wanton woman when she’d not even been a teenager. He hadn’t gone to the courtroom to watch the trial, but he had kept up with it every day that it was going on in the paper.
He remembered that she’d gotten the child’s DNA before it had been born, something that was unheard of back then, and had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the child belonged to Winchester.
When the boy was born, once again, the child was subject to DNA testing, and it came back the same.
There was a near one-hundred percent chance that the child was a Winchester.
He tried to say that she had lured him into her bed, but once the barn had been found and the location put in the paper, it was hard for him to dispute her claims about him taking her from her front yard to the barn he’d planned on taking another little girl to.
Toby Lea had been saved by the quick action of Olivia, and that was hard for anyone to get over.
“There were complications, too.” He looked around and saw his faerie there that had been with him for a while now, Tiger.
“When she delivered the child, there had been complications for her. She can no longer have a child because she was too young to be having a child of her own. Some of us, me included, would go to the courtroom to hear her testimony and that of the monster. The faerie queen sent us to clean up the area that had been used for the girl while imprisoned, and we did the best that we could after she was rescued. The soil around the area was never the same, no matter what we did to make it different. Too much in the way of violence was there.”
“The child won the case, however.” He said that he remembered Winchester killing himself soon after. “Yes, he didn’t want to go to prison. They might well have killed him in there had he gone.”
“No doubt.” He looked at the clippings that he’d saved from the trial and read the headlines. “It says here that she won a large settlement. They even gave her child support for both her and her son.”
“That’s right. They said that he was to pay ten thousand dollars a month for each of them.
She was nothing more than a child herself.
And then they awarded damages of ten million dollars.
I wonder what she did with all that money?
” He figured that she’d never gotten paid.
“Oh, but she did. It was the first thing that came out of the estate when he was dead.”
“She doesn’t have much. I’m wondering if she invested poorly or something.
” He reached out to her mind and found that she had never spent a dime of the money awarded to her.
She was saving it for Thatcher so that he could have a good life and go to the college of his dreams. He was even more impressed with her than he’d been before.
“She’s one smart woman, my mate. I can’t believe that she’s all mine. ”
“You both are very lucky.” He read over the headlines of the paper, going over them one by one.
When it got to the part where she testified, he read over the accounting and could see the little girl that she’d been sitting up there trying to get through this all.
The story that she had told him was the exact story that she’d told in the courtroom.
Never in all these years had her testimony changed at all, and he was more believing of her than before.
She must have been having nightmares nightly because of all of this. He knew that he would have.
It took him most of the night to look over the clippings.
He knew that she was telling the truth about what had happened to her, but he still could see no reason why she thought that she wasn’t good enough for him.
She was his mate, and he was going to do everything in his power to make sure she was loved and pampered for the rest of their long lives together.