“Then why did you do it?” he clips.
“I was making a point.”
“I gathered that much. What was the point?”
I walk up behind him to make him aware that he can turn around now. “They need to know they can trust me. How can I expect them to open up to me, disclose the terror and darkness in their lives, and let me help them if I’m an outsider?”
He has the face of a priest and a studious librarian, calm and curious.
“That’s an extreme point to make.” He furrows his brow in concentration.
“These are extreme cases.”
And before we leave, I could swear that the sparkle in his eye is pride.
~
I step into Niles’s room likean exposed nerve. Naked. Wearing my fear and trauma around my neck like a noose. And I know he sees it too.
“I am so sorry. You have to endure that daily, and I only had to do itonce. I—I am so sorry.” I refrain from calling him Niles because I know he doesn’t like it. But I can’t take calling himYour Graceseriously right now, so I don’t use a name at all.
“I can’t believe you did that for me.” His eyes are still shiny and moist from the tears that once fled freely from his lids.
“I’ll do it again… If that’s what it takes.”
“Why are you here?” His eyes narrow and crinkle at the corners.
“I’ve come to save you. I want to end the cruelty here.”
“Why?”
“Do you remember an assistant named Scarlett?” Her name still pokes an unhealed ache in my chest.
“The girl who looked like you.”
I nod.
“They say you murdered her.” He studies me as if we’ve switched roles.
“When she was alive, she found a purpose in life, and that was to stop the treatments here. She wanted the people here to be treated humanely. And when she died, I’m certain that was her dying wish. It’s something Ihaveto do.”
His hands twist in his lap as if he’s wringing out a wet towel. I’ve only seen his body language display confidence, never nerves.
“You want me to tell you the ugly moments in my life. The pieces people often judge. But I don’t like being judged, you see. Judgment is quite the opposite from love.”
But he tells me anyway.
He shares how his family lived on the outskirts of the city, his father being in lumbering, and his mother mangled from an accident with the ax. But eventually, his father left them, and they had no means of obtaining food or money. Niles had two other siblings and his disabled mother to care for.
At this point in his story, he glances up at me with caution pooling in the pits of his pupils. “I could be quietly executed for speaking of this next chapter,” he tells me with a warning embedded in his meaning.
I assure him that this may not be a safe place—but I am safe.
Niles was never taught to take up lumbering with his father, so he went searching for work in the city and was collected almost immediately for being dressed like a wild child. The people who ushered him off of the streets and out of the public eye offered him work. But this type of work is not spoken of out loud. In fact, most pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s a mansion in the city, with a glorious view of the castle, and a respectable owner—but under its weight and under its acres of land, children of all ages run a successful wheel of work. Their services are their bodies, and their consumers are adults. A special kind of adult—the kind that has a rare appetite that is frowned upon and never spoken out loud in the ear of society.
“As a child, I was taught how to lie with an adult. Both men and women. I was shown the ways of pleasure and quenching their appetites. It’s a trade that is taught for a plethora of preferences.”
Beads of sweat purge from the pores on the back of my neck, tickling my skin as they snake down my back like tiny spiders being hatched and stretching their new legs to race for food.
