The Boy Before the File: Researching Fin

When I started writing Fin, I knew who he was as a special operator before I knew who he was as a person. That's a problem when you're trying to write a love story and not a case file.

So, I did what I usually do when a character won't sit still for me: I went looking for the parts of his life nobody was going to read about on the page. Not the version of Fin who shows up in Off the Record with a Royal already fully formed — buttoned up, unreadable, six moves ahead of everyone in the room. The version before that. The kid who became him.

My husband — a combat veteran himself — ended up being the person I leaned on most for this one. Not for the plot mechanics, but for the smaller, truer things: what actually gets written down in a service record and what doesn't. What an after-action report sounds like when the person filing it is trying very hard to sound like nothing happened. Fin's file in the Vault includes a couple of those reports, including the one behind his knee injury — and getting the tone of that document right mattered more to me than almost anything else in his backstory. It had to read like a man protecting himself from his own words.

Somewhere in the middle of all that research, I ended up with something I hadn't planned on: a whole progression of images tracking Fin from childhood into his first deployment. I wasn't trying to build a gallery. I was trying to understand what "before" looked like, so I'd know what I was writing him away from.

Prince Fineas Gratiani, Age 10 Captured in a moment of unrestrained laughter in the garden of the Palazzo Reale di Miraval.

I'm not showing you the whole thing today — some of it belongs to a bigger reveal I'm still building toward. But this one felt like the right place to start: old enough that you can already see the person he's going to become, young enough that none of it has cost him anything yet.

If you want to go further into Fin's world — the after-action reports, the Founder's Cross, the rest of what's tucked into his corner of the Vault — that's all live now for Book 3 readers. Your key to unlock it? Same as always: the code's in the back of the book.