CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT – HATTIE
Everything about him is tender.
The way he talks, the way he touches, even the very way he breathes around me seems to be with such a gentle edge that it’s somehow keeping me grounded.
I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know why he does it.
No, I do. That’s a lie.
He does it because he loves me.
He loves me.
I can’t believe he loves me. Now that is something I don’t understand—I’ve done nothing but cause trouble since I showed up in front of him, and on the brink of the biggest drama yet, he doesn’t run. He holds me closer than ever and tells me he loves me.
Maybe he’s not right in the head.
Maybe he needs the therapist, not me.
Finn sits me on the bed and turns to the walk-in wardrobe. He returns with some underwear and a fresh pair of pyjamas, and wordlessly, he sets about drying me off and getting me dressed. He finishes off by rolling some fluffy socks onto my feet, then turns his attention to my hair.
He brushes it out, squeezes out the excess water, then pulls it back into a plait. He drapes my dressing gown over my shoulders, then kneels in front of me, resting his hands on my knees.
“Better?” His eyes shine as he looks up at me.
I nod.
“Good.”
“You’re wet,” I mutter. “You’ll get a chill.”
He looks down at his own body as if it hadn’t occurred to him. “Give me a minute.” He disappears back into the wardrobe and comes back out a few minutes later wearing a fresh t-shirt and grey pyjama bottoms.
He sits next to me on the bed and sighs, then reaches over and links his fingers through mine. Warmth radiates up my arm from our connected palms. My gaze lands on a drawer knob on the vanity, and I trace the circular handle over and over.
“Oscar is working with his dad, Rowan, and the legal team to file an emergency order with the courts for a hearing. We’re going to ask the judge to rule that the source of this story should be named,” he says quietly.
“Alec has gone on a slightly more unhinged rampage. He commandeered your laptop, by the way, so don’t mind the internet search history when you get it back. ”
If I could, I’d smile at that.
“He’s determined to find out who the source is and who put them up to it. He’s as angry as I’ve ever seen him, if I’m being honest with you. I don’t know how you charmed the uncharmable man, but here we are.”
I think it’s more a healthy fear than charm, but whatever.
“The major media outlets are working with us. They won’t report until they have a response from the palace. Partly because they know how serious the allegations are, but also because if they fuck this up, they’ll never get access to us again. That’s probably a good thing for some of them.”
No kidding.
“I’m sorry, Hattie.”
I turn my head. He’s looking at our clasped hands.
“I know what I just said in the bathroom, and I meant it. You mean more to me than any of this.” He motions around the room with his free hand.
“I told you at the hotel that you wouldn’t be able to escape this life, but it’s not too late.
If this is all too much for you to deal with, I understand if you want to leave. ”
“No.”
He raises his gaze to mine. “Hattie—”
“No. I don’t want to leave. I feel that I should, but I don’t want to.” I swallow. “This is the only place that’s ever felt like home.”
His grip on my hand tightens. “Then don’t. This is your home, Hattie.”
I lean into him and rest my head on his shoulder. Those are words I’ve heard a thousand times referring to the house the Sinclairs live in, but they’ve never struck a chord with me.
How strange that here, in this expansive palace, with more empty rooms than anyone could ever feasibly need, there’s more warmth than anywhere else I’ve ever been.
Everything here is a choice. Everyone here cares because they choose to. I’m here because Finn chose me. Even now when this story could cause the Royal Family no end of problems, they’re all choosing me.
“Can I tell you what it was like? When I was younger?”
His breath hitches. “When you were kidnapped?”
I nod. “The stories are believable because while they aren’t true for me, it was the case for others. I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess you could say.”
“Are you sure? If it’s too hard for you…”
“No. I want to.”
“Okay.” He tilts his head and kisses my hair. “I’ll listen to whatever you feel like you can say, baby.”
I swallow. “The kidnappers were traffickers. I didn’t learn that until I was around twelve, and even then, it took another older girl on the island to tell me what that really meant.
They were small fish in a huge operation.
My memories aren’t complete, especially of during the actual kidnapping, but I remember being passed off to other people before we got to the island.
Then we were sent to what they called a ‘safe house,’ but it was really just another pit stop.
“That was Sayana’s house. She was a bit like us—forced into a situation she had no control over.
She owed a lot of people a lot of money, and being the safe house for the trafficked kids was how she was paying back some of her debts.
The most dangerous ones, anyway. She was tasked with caring for us and making sure we were presentable for whenever they came back to get us.
Nobody knew when that would be, and not all the kids made it.
“She had her own connections, though, and every now and then, she’d take a kid from a group and say they died.
Nobody ever questioned it. We weren’t exactly well looked after on the road, and kids dying was more normal than it had any right to be.
Sayana was good at telling the ‘value’ of a child based on their appearance, and that was what saved me, I guess.
I remember being shoved in her secret basement with the other kids who weren’t supposed to be there whenever the group showed up.
There was a lot of fighting about me—I think they’d already sold me to someone, so when I allegedly died, it was a huge issue.
“They gave up in the end, though, when we couldn’t be found.
Living with her was pretty safe. I learnt from one of the older girls there that she tended to raise children until they reached around sixteen to eighteen then sold them as wives to local leaders.
Everyone knew what was going on, but nobody wanted to get involved because of the money behind it all.
The local people on the island benefitted from Sayana’s activities, so they turned a blind eye to her cheating the group. Ironically.
“That’s where I met Ryan. We watched hundreds, if not thousands, of kids pass through her house during the years we were there.
He almost got sold by her a few times, but he was too good at making money for her to bear to part with him in the end.
When I was around eleven, I realised that I stood a chance at making it longer if I proved myself just as useful.
That’s when I learnt photography. One of Sayana’s creditors threw an old camera at me, showed me how to use it, and I started to make money by taking photos and selling postcards of them.
“It was hard. Outside of tourist season, there weren’t many ways to make money.
She was an abusive drunk, and we were often left to look after the little kids.
I can’t tell you how many terrified little ones we comforted over the years knowing their fate.
There was nothing else we could do. We had no communication with anyone off the island, and even if we’d told anyone who we were and what was happening, there was no guarantee anything would happen.
We learnt that the first time we tried. People just don’t care. ”
Finn squeezes my hand tightly.
“Even Valentina’s family didn’t. I don’t know how her dad found her out there, but he had a chance to save us, and he didn’t.
He could have stopped the whole thing and blown it apart, but he took her and ran.
We knew she was rescued because Sayana taunted us with it—saying if our families really cared, they’d have done what Valentina’s father did.
Found us at all costs. After a while, we just gave up hope of ever being saved, and decided our best chance was to save ourselves.
“It was impossible, though. We could barely speak the language, we had no way to hide money, and Sayana had people who kept an eye on us and reported our every move back to her. The only time we were ever given money was the weekly visit to the island shaman. Sayana would make us visit to get her blessings, get guidance for her, that sort of thing. The shaman was the only person on the island we had any kind of real relationship with, and she’d often sneak us food when we were there.
“Honestly, I’m not even sure she did the blessings sometimes and just lied so we’d be safe.
One time a reading was bad, and Sayana beat Ryan so badly he broke his arm.
After that, she allowed us to keep some of our earnings, although it was barely enough to buy bread on a daily basis, and that was before we paid the shaman.
That was the trade-off—we could keep some of our earnings if we paid the weekly fee.
“It was all like that. Surviving on the bare minimum, comforting kids we knew were going to a worse place than us and hiding so we wouldn’t join them.
For some reason, though, Sayana couldn’t part with us.
She said it was just because we made the most money so were the most useful, but I think she cared about us in her own weird way. ”
I press my lips together. That’s the most I’ve ever spoken about what my life was like away from Askurg, and it doesn’t even cover what I know he wants to know the most: how we escaped.
Still, he doesn’t say anything. There’s no pressure for me to elaborate, and so I just sit in silence for a moment.
“It was a couple of years after that that we managed to get away. There were periods where not many kids went through the house, probably so they didn’t get caught, and it was one of those quiet times when she needed us the most. It wasn’t the tourist season, so money was thin, and we overheard her making plans to sell me.
Ryan was still the better moneymaker, and I had more value as a bride than he did as anything else.
She was going to sell me as a wife for a local leader’s son. ”
Finn tenses.
“It wouldn’t have been the end of the world, honestly.
The leader and his son were scumbags, but he was only a couple of years older than we were.
It was by far the best deal I could have asked for, having seen what kind of things she’d subjected others to for money.
Ryan was furious, though. And…” I hesitate.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. She died, and it was our one chance to get out. ”
“Did he kill her?”
I say nothing.
He nods as if he doesn’t need me to. “How did you get out?”
I tell him the same story I told Valentina. How the shaman knew everything, how she gave us our money and her sister helped us off the island. How we contacted Ryan’s dad once we got to the mainland and he got us, and how he basically adopted me and helped me get on my feet.
“I was complicit, in a sense,” I say after a moment of silence. “I knew what was happening. I knew where those children were going. I knew what was going to happen to them. I didn’t do a thing about it.”
“No.” He raises our clasped hands and kisses my fingers. “No, Hattie. You were a victim.”
“Victims can be complicit.”
“Victims can be coerced into believing they’re complicit,” Finn says softly, yet there’s a firmness to this tone. “What could you have done? Who could you have told? Who would have done anything about it?”
I open my mouth to reply, but no words come out.
He’s right. Of all the people on that island who knew what was going on, Ryan and I were the least responsible for it. We were children. We were victims.
There was nothing I could have done.
“You were probably the only kindness those children received,” Finn continues. “In a situation where you could do nothing, you did something anyway. You gave them comfort when they needed it most. I’m sure they carried your kindness with them.”
My breath hitches, and the trembling control I’ve held over my emotions until now shatters. Tears spill down my cheeks, and I bury my face in my hands as Finn envelops me in his arms.
And I cry.
I cry in that gut-wrenchingly raw way one does when they can no longer hold it together. Years of guilt and regret and fear come tumbling out of me in choking sobs that make my chest tight.
All of it.
Everything.
Hatred. Rage. Bitterness. Terror. Grief. Repulsion. Remorse.
All the negativity that’s pulsed through my veins for twenty years finally has an outlet. The emotions that have held me together, that have fuelled me, that have kept me pushing past the trauma and looking to the future finally have a safe space to dissipate into.
Finn.
His arms.
His palace.
My home.
He says nothing apart from hushed whispers that it’s okay, he’s got me, I’m fine, it’s all right. I can’t speak. My throat is too swollen, and even if it weren’t, I’m not sure my brain could string any words together anyway.
All I know is that nothing has felt as therapeutic as this cry. It truly is as if the floodgates have opened, as if I’m both accepting and addressing everything that happened to me. Hearing him validate my lack of actions is something I didn’t know I needed.
Still, I think I’ll always carry that guilt. I’ll never truly accept that I did all I could. Survivor’s guilt is a very real thing, and I will forever wonder, “what if?”
That’s my burden to bear. Not everything can be healed, and the eyes and cries of the children who passed through Sayana’s house are memories that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
By the time my tears slow, we’re no longer sitting. We’re lying back on the bed with my head on Finn’s chest and his arms wrapped around me. He drags his fingertip across my back, tracing lazy circles across the fabric.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For listening.”
He kisses my hair. “Thank you for telling me. I know that wasn’t easy for you.”
I shake my head and press my face into his chest. It wasn’t. It was by far the most difficult conversation I’ve had, and I didn’t even cover the half of it. He still doesn’t know the worst of it, and honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever tell him truly everything.
He doesn’t need to know everything.
Perhaps not even I know everything anymore.
“Finn?”
“Yeah, baby?”
I grip his t-shirt in my fist. “I love you, too.”
I feel his smile before the tightening of his arms.
“I love you,” he murmurs, pressing another kiss to the top of my head. “And we’ll get through this, Hattie. I promise you. I won’t let anybody take your home away from you again.”
I squeeze my eyes shut tightly.
I want to believe him.
I just don’t know if I can.