Page 166 of Monstrous Urges
…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.
EPILOGUE
DRAZEN
I used to exist for revenge. It was the fuel that drove me and churned through me like molten lead. I was savage and brutal. Ruthless and unflinching. I had a single-minded approach to life and treated each day like it was a dragon I had to slay.