42. Liana
FORTY-TWO
LIANA
I t felt like old times.
Both of us sitting on the bed, legs crisscrossed as I typed frantically on my laptop while Lou chewed on the tip of a pencil, studying her drawing critically. Surprise, surprise, it was a drawing of Kingston. Apparently she was obsessed with the man’s face even now.
After I left Amara with her parents, I checked into a hotel, and somehow it didn’t surprise me to find Lou knocking on my door a mere thirty minutes later. Kingston was in the room next door, their adoptive daughter Lara in the adjoining suite.
“Do you ever draw anything else?” I asked her, my eyes locked on the laptop screen as I corresponded back and forth with José, who was insisting I return to Venezuela where he could keep me safe.
“What do you mean?”
I typed my last response to José then shut the laptop before he could come back with anything else and raised my head to meet Lou’s eyes.
“I mean that even when we were kids, all you drew was Kingston’s face.” I wasn’t jealous that she got her happily-ever-after. I really wasn’t, but it did make the sting of my loss slightly bitter. “Do you ever draw anything else?”
She chuckled. “Well, I guess I could try and draw his dick.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I drew you.” Surprise flared through me. “When I thought you were dead and I believed I was actually you, I kept drawing your face.”
“Maybe you were drawing yours? After all, our faces are the same.” I tried to make a joke, but my voice still cracked.
“No, it was yours.” She watched me, almost as if debating whether to ask me something. I waited, letting her make up her mind until she finally did. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
I shrugged. “I was… broken. I needed time to get Amara better, for me to get better. Besides, I thought you were happy with Kingston for all those years, and I just wasn’t ready to see it.”
“Because you were mad?”
I shrugged, glancing down at my missing finger.
“More like disappointed. Jealous. Bitter.”
“What happened to your finger, Lia?” Her voice was cautious, almost as if she were dealing with an unpredictable animal. “Why did it end up with Kingston?”
I cleared my throat.
“After Amara and I escaped Perez, I tried to be”—I searched for the right words before settling on the only one I knew—“normal. Away from everything I knew. I was a maid at this resort, then one day I heard the name Royce Ashford.” I twisted my hands, knowing how crazy I’d sound. “I wasn’t in a good place mentally at that time. So out of some crazy despair, I sliced my left pinky finger and left it in Royce Ashford’s room with a note, hoping it would make its way to Kingston and…” I shrugged, knowing how ludicrous it all sounded when uttered aloud. “I don’t know. I guess I thought he’d come and save me.”
Kingston Ashford.
There wasn’t a time when he and Lou didn’t love each other. At first it was a childish kind of affection, until he became my sister’s lover.
“Why the left?” she questioned.
“Because you’re left-handed. I thought maybe he’d think it was you and against all odds, Kingston would get the message and save Amara and me.”
He didn’t.
Since then I learned to keep my expectations in check without letting treacherous hope take over. But hope always found a way to flicker to light, just like it did back then—that someone would come along and save my daughter and me—but the idea died as fast it hatched, along with a piece of me. Until there was nothing left.
“Like I said, it was stupid,” I concluded. I deserved to suffer anyhow considering all the suffering I’d caused. “I wasn’t in a good place, even contemplating ending my life, but Amara needed me. So see, she really did save me. If I didn’t have her, I would have been dead.”
Lou nodded in understanding and silence reigned for several heartbeats.
“What’s done is done. I love you, Lia. No matter what, right or wrong, I will always stand by you. You know that, right?”
My heart tripped, realizing it was time to come clean. “Don’t be so sure, Lou.”
She tilted her chin. “But I am, and there’s nothing you can do or say that would make me betray you.”
I swallowed, pushing the next words past my lips.
“When I pretended I was you and married Santiago, things weren’t good, but they were tolerable.” My eyes darted to the hotel window, staring at the New York City lights that flickered like stars. I closed my eyes, that old pain throbbing in my chest. “Then I lost a baby. No, my baby was ripped from me and murdered. Things were bad after that. Santiago deemed me, and my womb, worthless.” My sister’s soft gasp filled the air, and I opened my eyes to see whether my next words would shatter my world all over again. “Then Amara came into my world. It was my chance at having someone who would love me unconditionally. But it was also a chance for Santiago to use my affection for her against me. In my mind, I thought if I created something big, I’d be invaluable to him and his circle of evil, so I came up with an improvement of the Marabella Agreements.”
I waited and waited for Lou’s face to turn from compassion to disgust and disappointment.
She reached out and took her hand in mine. “You were trying to protect a baby and survive. Do you honestly think I’d hold that against you?”
“But Lara, your own adoptive daughter?—”
“Mother used her,” she cut me off. “She’s Perez’s daughter, and she used her, along with many other children, to get back at those she hated. Whether she used Marabella as an excuse, it doesn’t matter. Even if that concept wasn’t around, Sofia Volkov would have gotten her hands on Lara and made her life hell.”
Those words should have made me feel better, but they didn’t. Maybe my guilty conscience was my harshest critic.
“Lou, it wasn’t just Lara,” I whispered. “There were so many.”
“And you think that all of it is on your shoulders?” she spat. “No, it’s not, so don’t you dare put it all on yourself. We all did shit to survive. We all have sins to atone for.”
My lips curved up in some resemblance of a smile. “I guess some things never change.”
This time she smiled too. “You have my back, I have yours. Someone wants to come after you, I’ll go after them. It’s what we’re all about.”
“Maybe Mother did one thing right,” I murmured pensively.
She scoffed, bitterness flashing across her expression. “What’s that?”
“She taught us to have each other’s backs. Although, she was wrong about you.”
“What do you mean?” she questioned.
“She trained me to protect us both, thinking your soft heart was your weakness, when in fact, it was your strongest attribute.” She shot me a questioning look, so I explained, “When we were younger, she’d pull me for extra training and push me harder. She worried this world would swallow you whole, and look at you. You’re thriving.”
She struggled to find words, and I let her process what she just learned. It wasn’t for several minutes that she found her voice.
“She hated that you were taken and not me,” she murmured. “You give her too much credit because even as she faced the barrel of my gun, she thought me weak.”
I stilled. “You killed Mother?”
“I did.” She met my eyes with an unspoken challenge, and I smiled.
Mother was definitely wrong about my twin.
“One less evil roaming this earth,” I finally said. “Although, it was cruel men who made her.”
Lou nodded. “I agree, but she took it too far.”
“Agreed.”
My phone rang and for a moment, I debated ignoring it before I decided against it.
“This better be good, whatever it is,” I answered, assuming it was José.
“It’s Cristiano.” I stiffened. Giovanni’s youngest brother shouldn’t have a reason to call me. “It’s Giovanni. My mother kidnapped him.”
I shot off the bed. “Tell me everything.”