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No one knew of this room’s existence except the people who’d built it for me, and I’d paid them handsomely never to reveal its secrets.
The room housed my collection. Treasures I’d collected over the years and kept hidden from everyone, but most especially from my father. He hadn’t liked us to have attachments to anything, even inanimate objects. No toys or books or games No friends. No pets. Even our mother had been taken from us when we were young, having died after going for a walk along a local trail in the mountains, her body later found at the bottom of a cliff.
My mother hadn’t liked hiking—that I remembered about her. So God only knew what she’d been doing on that trail. I’d had my suspicions, but I’d never voiced them. And there had been no point thinking about it. My father had ruled with an iron fist, and fighting him had been a lesson in futility.
A lesson Valentin had never learned, but I’d had to.
I’d had no other option.
The room was blessedly quiet, the non-directional lighting giving it a relaxing glow. Spotlights illuminated special pieces I’d had mounted in climate-controlled cases, plus other, less sensitive items that were no less important.
This wasmyplace.Mythings. And I could be as possessive of them as I liked because there was no one to observe me, no one to note how important they were to me and no one to take them away.
Here, in this room, I could allow myself to feel.
I stopped in front of one shelf, looking down at the small green plastic toy soldier illuminated by the spotlight shining on it. An insignificant piece of plastic. Worth nothing.
It had been the first and only toy I’d ever had. A housekeeper, taking pity on me, had given it to me and I’d loved it. I’d played with it every day. Valentin had told me to be careful and not to let our father see, but somehow Papa had found out anyway. He’d tried to force me to throw it in the fire, but Valentin had got hold of it and run away with it, throwing it up onto the roof of our house, where Papa couldn’t get it. He’d earned a beating for that.
Valentin had never understood that sometimes it wasn’t about the battle but the war. And it had been a war, my childhood.Ourchildhood.
That night I’d had to listen to him trying not to cry in pain, his body bruised from the beating. I’d been so furious with him—that he’d been hurt and all for a ridiculous piece of plastic.
But of course I’d known who’d really been at fault and it hadn’t been Valentin.
He was my older brother by a couple of minutes, and he’d only been trying to protect me. But the fault had been mine. If I hadn’t taken that toy from the housekeeper, if I hadn’t let my father see me playing with it, then Valentin wouldn’t have got hurt.
That was the night I’d decided there was only one way for us both to survive Domingo’s parenting, and it hadn’t been to rebel against him the way Valentin did. It had been to learn his lessons. Cut off the source of pain. Our feelings had been weaponised by our father to hurt us, so the best thing to do was not feel them.
Nothing could matter to me, not even my own brother.
Eventually I’d retrieved the toy solider and hidden it under a loose floorboard in my bedroom. I never played with it again.
‘Con?’
The voice that came from behind me was feminine, light and clear and sweet.
For a moment it felt as if I’d been wandering in a dark maze, unable to find my out, and suddenly a light had flickered into life, shining through the darkness, showing me the way.
My Jenny was here. My Jenny had found me.
Then reality flooded back in—the reality of where I was and what it meant that she was here.
She’d not only come to the cottage, after I’d expressly forbidden her to, she’d come into my secret collection room.
An instinctive territorial anger swept through me, so strong that for a second I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to get angry with her, she didn’t know how private these things were, how personal, because I’d never told her about my childhood, not any of it. Yet I still felt like an animal whose safe and secret den had been invaded. A dragon whose hoard had been discovered.
She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be seeing this. All these things were mine andonlymine.
My hands clenched as I tried to leash the rage, freeze it solid and not let any of it escape, but I could feel it trickling through my fingers.
I needed to get her out of here before I said something I regretted.
I turned sharply.
She stood in the doorway in one of the dresses I’d bought her, this one fitting closely around her breasts before flowing out around her in a waterfall of dusky pink. It was flattering to her curvy figure, the colour warming her skin and making her eyes seem darker and more liquid. Her hair was loose in glossy waves over her shoulders. She’d taken it to wearing it like that because I’d told her I preferred it that way.
The morning sunlight streamed through the windows behind her, catching threads of caramel and toffee in her hair and shining through the material of her dress, illuminating her luscious figure.
