Twenty-Two Unforgettable Hours (Barrington Billionaires Book 22) by Jeannette Winters

Author:Jeannette Winters [Winters, Jeannette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jeannette Winters LLC
Published: 2024-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Niko

It felt so strange to be here in Trye’s home. I knew his work and that he was a man who loved his family. That was all. For me, it was all I needed. I didn’t need to know about his personal life. Maybe it was because I didn’t want anyone to know about mine.

Ovi said she was going to shower and change into something more comfortable, and I was standing in her living room, surrounded by photos of what once was a happy family. They were laughing and hugging, and you could see the love between them all. It explained why Ovi was fighting so hard for her father. It's what families do or are supposed to do, for each other.

How could one not be jealous? I wish I could relate. My parents weren’t loving people like Ovi’s. Did they love me? Probably. They never said it. I guess the way they showed it was by making sure no one knew I existed. And if they did know me, they never knew I was their child.

That was a good thing. It wasn’t something to be proud of. But besides that, they weren’t kind. I had no memories of us on picnics or outings. I wasn’t a prisoner in my own house, but I was rarely allowed to leave or have friends. For males, that was odd. Back then, it was just females who had lived in fear and males got to go to school and live a normal life. Nothing was normal for me. I hated my life back then. But I had spent my time reading and teaching myself a variety of things about how the rest of the world functioned. It showed me how dysfunctional Tabiq was and only made me want to get out of it even more.

I shuddered thinking back to those times. It was the part of my heritage that I was ashamed of. If the world knew what Tabiq was before, and how the women were treated and violated, no one would ever want to visit or do business with us. It was our deep dark disgusting secret that the outside world could never learn. One thing about Tabiqians, we are damn good at hiding our failures, our feelings, even when we shouldn’t. Maybe if the world had known, someone would’ve come and put a stop to it long ago, and so many women wouldn’t have suffered through such horrendous acts.

Maybe we could’ve been raised like normal happy and loving families.

Ovi was about ten years younger than I was, so she most likely didn’t have the same experiences or memories of those times as I did, which was a good thing. She knew Tabiq’s history but hadn’t lived through the violence of it all like many others had.

My gut twisted in a knot just thinking that if she was just ten years older, how she would’ve been taken and sold to the highest bidder like many women my age. Ovi was strong, smart, and kind but she was also sensitive to others' needs and pain.

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