Chapter 40: Chapter 40

I wince as I open the door and try to step out of the car.

“Let me help you.”

I grit my teeth, not waiting for her to come around to my side before I try again.

“Fuck,” I hiss, a dull ache shooting up my leg.

“I did say I would help you,” Annika mutters as she gets to me.

She slides an arm underneath mine and loops it around my back, supporting me as I climb out of the car.

“Have you always been this stubborn?”

I shrug, flashing her a grin. “You tell me.”

She smirks as she reaches into the car and retrieves my cane.

Yes… My cane.

I have to use it for the next month in conjunction with the walking cast on my leg. After that, and a million hours of physical therapy, I’ll have a second surgery so they can remove some of the pins currently holding together my shattered fibula from the bridge.

I fucking hate it.

Fumi was kind enough to tell me it made me look ‘distinguished”. Gabriel immediately observed it might help influence juries by appealing to their sense of compassion.

Alistair, the fucker, told me I should try out for the role of Tiny Tim in an amateur theatre production of A Christmas Carol.

But I push all of that aside for now as Annika and I slowly climb the hill to the grave.

“It’s right up here…” I grunt, wincing a little as I totter up the rocky footpath of the cemetery.

“I know.”

I roll my eyes as I glance at her sideways.

There’s a lot I’m learning about the sister that the fire and the explosion deleted from my memory.

There never was a car crash—well, not that I was in. No drunk driver. No secret CIA jobs that my parents couldn’t talk about.

Mihajlo and Justine Brancovich, my Serbian father and my American mother, were killed by bullets from guns carried by Vadik Belov’s men, pretending to be Krylov soldiers. They died in Serbia when I was eighteen, on the same night I lost my memory. Which was also the same night Belov’s men attacked and massacred Drazen’s family, dressed as mine.

And the same night Annika escaped the island only to go crashing into the ocean when Milos’ father blew the bridge as his last act of duty toward the Krylov family.

We’ve had a few weeks now for her to tell me her side of things.

After she landed in Greece, my twin slowly made her way back home to our family’s estate in Serbia. When she got there, she found nothing but death and horror: a half-burned home, our parents shot dead, and both me and our housekeeper presumed dead from the fire or bullets.

She picked what she could out of the wreckage of her life, and she did what she had to do.

She survived.

We haven’t really talked too much about that part yet. I know she moved around a lot, and worked some weird jobs. But when I mentioned that Kenzo Mori had been looking for her, she froze and shut down. And when I tried to lighten the mood by telling her that Fumi, whom Annika had already met twice by that point, happened to be Kenzo’s half-sister, she almost went catatonic.

She hasn’t told me what’s going on there, but I did sit down with her and Fumi together, where my friend swore she wouldn’t mention Annika to her half-brother, whom she’s really only just getting to know herself.

That seemed to satisfy Annika. For now.

But there’s no way I’m letting that go without more questions at some point soon.

Annika spent close to fifteen years thinking I was dead. I spent those years not even knowing she existed.  But then a few months ago, she saw me on international news, standing behind my best friend, co-managing partner, and new Governor-elect of New York, Gabriel Black.

She saw herself on that TV screen and immediately came to New York to investigate.

I haven’t been going crazy. The stresses of my life were never making me lose my mind or do crazy things in my sleep.

It wasn’t me at all.

It was my invisible friend.

It turns out, one of Annika’s several “weird jobs” is “professional thief”. She says she did it to survive when she was first on her own. But the ease and skill with which she does it suggests that’s not entirely the truth.

It was her who broke into my apartment at night, going through my taxes to see who the hell this “Taylor Crown” was who looked so much like her dead twin. It was her who slipped into my office at night to poke around.

And yes, it was her who made a sandwich in my kitchen one night while I slept and didn’t clean up afterward. That one, she claims, was a total oversight on her part.

I’ve asked her if the stolen yellow Lamborghini was an “oversight” as well.

…Still waiting for an answer on that one.

In a lot of ways, as I’ve gotten to know her again, I’ve realized how ridiculously alike we are. We think similarly. We have a lot of the same mannerisms and quirks.

But in a lot of ways, we’re very different people.

That said, she’s still my sister.

We finally get to the headstone at the top of the little hill. I grunt as I stoop to place the bouquet of flowers on Florence’s grave.

Florence wasn’t my great-aunt. She wasn’t my blood at all.

But in the end, she might have been closer than blood relations.

The woman who saved me from the fire and the violence the night our house was attacked had actually been our mother’s nanny and housekeeper when she was growing up. Justine Brancovich, née Michaels, was the only daughter of a congressman and his socialite wife.

Needless to say, they were appalled when their daughter informed them that she was going to be marrying the Serbian crime lord she’d fallen for while backpacking through Eastern Europe after college. They threatened to cut her off, she called their bluff, and they followed through, disowning her and deleting her entirely from their lives.

Her nanny didn’t.

Florence Crown, who’d raised our mother since she was a baby, came with her to Serbia. She found a new life in our father’s house, and helped our parents raise their twin girls.

When Vadik’s men attacked our house that night, she was the one who pulled me from my bed. She was trying to get me out through a side door, to escape to the woods, when a grenade went off, partially collapsing the room we’d been in and burying me under rubble and fire, knocking me out.

But Florence didn’t leave me. She dug me out with her bare hands, hauled me to the woods, and carried me to safety. She bribed a few officials at a local government office, declared me her great-niece, got me fake papers renaming me from Tatjana Brancovich to Taylor Crown, and then went to the US embassy, claiming we’d been victims of human trafficking.

The US government flew us back home, and Florence spent the next six months helping me remember how to live. She put the money that Annika had sent her into a trust in my name, and used the cash and jewelry she’d dug from the wreckage of our home to bribe school officials and anyone else she needed to bribe to get me into NYU without a transcript or any real background information.

When it became clear my memories weren’t coming back, she started the story about my spy parents to shield me from the horrible truth—especially since she thought Annika had died in the attack on the Krylov island.

None of this has “come back to me”. Whatever damage was done to my brain in that explosion during the escape is definitely permanent.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

What I know all comes from Annika. She’s pieced all of this together. And she’s the one who’s told me fun stories about our childhood, leaving out the bad parts.

My favorite so far has been about the first time I met Drazen.

As her.

She’d been betrothed to him by then, but they hadn’t actually met. We were playing in the pool house the day he came over with his father, and I went to go hide out in Ruslan’s cottage. But then, Annika apparently completely chickened out.

“I was terrified,” she explained. “I didn’t want to meet the scary dark-haired boy with the blue eyes and the vicious family name that I was going to have to marry one day.”

So she didn’t. She hid in the hedges while I pretended to be her.

That day, she played the invisible friend, and I got to play the princess.

I watch in silence as Annika places her own bouquet of flowers on Florence Crown’s grave.

“Thank you,” she whispers quietly. “Thank you for saving my sister. Thank you for everything that you did for her.”

My hand finds Annika’s. I squeeze, and she squeezes back.