Page 165 of Monstrous Urges
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.