I Became a Prostitute for the First Time in My Life—But That Same Night, I Walked Into a Hotel Room and Found a Deadly Snake Waiting for Me Instead of the Man Who Paid Me

Chapter 10

The news spread quickly.

A big businessman, a wealthy man everyone had known, had been exposed as a ritualist — a man who used the wombs of young women to renew his terrible sacrifices. The police found things in that house that I will not describe. They found photographs. They found names. They found evidence of years and years of stolen lives.

And in the days that followed, I learned the rest of the truth.

The man had not just been using me. He had been using women for years — women brought to him by people like Beatrice, who had never known what they were delivering them into. The green snake, the eggs, the miscarriages — it was all part of an old, terrible ritual that had been feeding for decades.

“And now it was over.

The old woman’s medicine had done what no prayer, no moving house, no amount of running had been able to do. It had broken the curse at its source. It had brought the monster out into the light, where he could be seen and stopped.

But I did not find out the whole story until after my daughter was born.”

—

I learned, too, what had become of Beatrice.

She was arrested a week after the man. The police traced everything back to her — the introductions, the phone calls, the girls she had delivered into that world, night after night, year after year. She had told herself, I think, that she was only a matchmaker, only a friend, only a girl having fun. But the young women whose names appeared in the photographs on that mansion’s walls were not her friends. They were inventory. And the ones who disappeared from the city without a trace were not her problem.

The court did not see it her way.

When I heard the verdict, I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, turning my wedding ring around my finger. Part of me felt nothing. Part of me wanted to feel sorry for her — she had been young once too, she had been lured just as I had been lured, and the only difference between us was that I had found my way out and she had built a business out of staying in.

But I remembered the nest in my room, and the way she had laughed and dropped it in the dustbin. I remembered the thumbs-up across a crowded room, the smile that had sold me to a monster. And I could not find the pity.

I never went to see her. I never called. Some doors, I have learned, should stay shut forever. That one, I locked myself.

—

Two months later, I was in the labor room.

My mother was beside me, praying. Jude was at the door, pacing, his face pale, his hands clasped so hard his knuckles were white. The nurses moved around me, speaking in calm voices, but all I could hear was the beating of my own heart.

I was afraid.

All through those long months, I had been afraid. Every time I felt a cramp, every time I woke in the night, I had held my breath and waited for the cold presence, the green eyes, the blood.

But the snake never came.

Not once.

The room stayed warm. The air stayed clean. The only eyes on me were the kind eyes of my husband and my mother and the nurses who held my hands and told me to push.

And when the first cry split the air — small, angry, alive — I broke down in tears.

A girl.

She was perfect. Tiny fingers, tiny toes, a face like a little wrinkled flower. The nurses placed her on my chest, warm and wet and screaming, and I held her, and I could not stop crying.

Jude kissed my forehead. His eyes were wet.

“She’s here, Helen,” he whispered. “She’s here.”

I looked down at my daughter. Her little hand curled around my finger. Her eyes — dark, brand new, full of the whole world — blinked up at me.

And in that moment, I understood something I had spent years running from.

The old Helen — the girl who had walked into a hotel room for money, who had hidden her past behind new clothes and loud parties — she had been running. Running from the truth of what she had done, from the choices she had made, from the shame she could not face.

But running had never saved her.

The snake had followed me everywhere — through the hotel, through the university, through the first house and the second, through every city I fled to. Because I had never stopped running. I had never stopped hiding. I had never once stood still and faced the truth.

It was only when I told the truth — to Jude, to my mother, to the old woman with the red eyes — that the curse finally began to break.

It was only when I stopped hiding that I was finally free.