Chapter 28
Old revenge
Lucas is the only one who can act rationally. He exhales with ease when he sees she’s still alive.
“How…” I start by saying, but I don’t get to continue.
My body starts tingling, and my voice is losing itself. The control of my own body is slipping through my fingers, and I feel captive all of a sudden. I’m not even allowed to move a finger.
And it only means one bloody thing.
“How the hell does this little bitch know about me?” my nervous voice says, a sign that Anora appeared, and everybody will get to know her.
Unfortunately, earlier than expected.
Oh, no, don’t fucking do anything stupid. I swear that I will find a way to make sure you don’t continue to exist if you do something reckless!
“No, Anmara, I won’t kill them or her. I just want to find out how she knows my name. Before this adventure, only you knew,” Anora’s voice says out loud, looking at the ceiling.
I notice how the others keep staring at us, not knowing how to react.
“Ok, puppies, will you wake her up nicely or will you let me do the honours?” my voice asks the boys.
We will all fucking die this way.
Amazing.
My impatient body keeps moving my right leg continuously, while the brothers keep their mouths shut. It even annoys the hell out of me inside of her. I try to retake control of my own body, but the motherfucker regained her strength and pushed me aside too easily this time.
“Ok, then I’ll do it myself,” Anora says and gets up, but she doesn’t manage to move too close to Clara, being caught by Lucas and Blake. “Let go of me! I won’t kill her as long as she cooperates and takes me to whom I want,” my voice says, and I feel a smirk forming on my lips.
I hate that I can see and feel everything she does, but my control is limited to that. Like that night, but now I can see it all clearly.
“You really think we’ll trust you after what Anmara told us about you?” Blake asks.
“I think it’s better this way than to pretend that I’m Anmara and kill each one of you from behind, don’t you think?” Anora spits.
“Well, that’s a valid point,” Blake exhales, stressed, repeatedly shaking his head.
“All that you wanna do needs to come by us first, so shoot,” Lucas says, making my face smile sweetly at him.
“Oh, dear Lucas, I don’t know what Anmara sees in you. You’re too naive. You’re sexy, and you have an amazing body, and my God, how many things I wanna do to you… but it’s not about that now,” she says when Lucas frowns at us. “I just wanna wake her up!” Anora screams nervously.
She manages to get out of their hold and slap Clara so hard that she automatically opens her eyes and looks at me.
“How do you know about me? How do you know my name?” Anmara screams directly in her face, making Clara look confused in the eyes I’m sharing with my crazy sister.
“What do you mean? What’s going on here?” She says, pushing us aside and screaming in pain.
She looks at her bandaged hands, then her legs, and I can tell she’s panicking.
“What’s happening here, and why does my body hurt this badly? What…” she starts by saying, and then looks at each one of the brothers. “But… you were dead,” her small and lost voice says. “I’ve been to your funeral.”
“You were dead,” Blake says. “We all thought you were the one who died. We have been to your funeral.”
“As you can see, I’m alive. But I’ve been so many times at your graves with Kevin, wha…”
“Who’s Kevin?” My voice asks.
Nothing makes any sense anymore. Absolutely nothing. At the surface, Anora is furious, but inside, I am boiling with confusion and anger. The body we are sharing is too saturated by our powerful emotions, which we have together and separately. I feel like I’m suffocating, and I need air.
“Ok, let’s calm down and take it from the top,” Paul says.
Blake has to stop my body from getting too close to Paul. He would’ve ended up with a broken nose.
Knock it off!
Anora growls and crosses her hands at her chest, trying to be patient. All these stories bore her to tears. She wants action.
That’s what she’s living for.
“So, who’s Kevin?” Lucas asks, satisfying Anora.
“Kevin was the one who saved me,” she says with her eyes on the bandages that surrounded her hands.
Her affirmation freezes us all, making us share confused glares with one another. Even Anora copied the gestures I was thinking about.
“Save you from what?” Anora asks.
“He was the one who took care of me…”
“You meant the one who put nails in your hands and legs?”
“I… what?” Clara’s eyes go wide. “Nails… no, no, it can’t be. He couldn’t. He looked after me, he told me he’ll be my protector and that my family died, and he was always next to me until…”
“Clara,” Lucas distracts her attention. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
She thinks for a moment. When she starts talking, Anora almost jumps at her neck.
“I was at a cafe with Bianca.”
“I knew that the psychopath had to be responsible,” Anora says, held by Lucas and Blake again, even angrier than before. “I hope it’s clear that I’ll kill her when I see her.”
“What? Why? What’s her connection with the fact that I have my hands and legs bandaged?”
“I bet that she orchestrated everything and that she works for this Kevin.”
I notice Clara’s eyes getting wet before she talks.
“Kevin has been dead for two years, Anora.”
“How the hell do you know my name?”
“That’s not your name? When I told Bianca what I remembered from my childhood, she said that she knew you. I didn’t really remember your name. I had a few holes in my memory, and that was one of them. I recognised you in a photo you were in with Bianca, and she told me your name.”
“But she didn’t tell her about me,” Anora says, more confused than ever.
Because it is absolutely true. I never talked to Bianca about Anora, nor about that unfortunate accident. I only kept her for myself. I always hide my journals in a safe box, and nobody knows about it except for me. But…
Damn it! The book I started. My main character is called Anora. I wrote her story. I had to keep her under control, and that was the easiest way, until I didn’t manage to continue it. Until I had to come to Tamwine to solve this fucking mystery, which transformed into the most twisted living hell.
I don’t know how Bianca put the pieces together and figured it all out, but I can’t believe how everything suddenly became more chaotic.
I feel like Anora is giving up control, being too lost in her own thoughts to realise that she is slowly slipping back inside of me.
My body goes numb for a couple of seconds. After that, I can finally feel like I can breathe again, that I can move my eyes. How I slowly regain each sense, and every move is mine again.
I hope you’ll come back when I need you, Anora.
I’ll return when I need to kill someone. I hate emotional stuff. They’re your specialty.
“What do you mean by her?” Clara brings me back to reality.
“My name is Anmara. Anora was my twin sister,” I say in a calm tone, which confuses the boys, but makes them realise only from my voice that I am myself again.
?
“Wow,” Clara says after I tell her briefly about Anora, keeping the spicy details for the boys. “How are you holding up?”
“Better than in the beginning, but, as you’ve seen, I can’t always resist her. I also have a question for you, and it’s not just from me: how could we trust that you aren’t working with Bianca and that everything you told us is not just one big fat lie?”
She lifts her gaze to mine and sighs.
“I don’t even trust myself,” she softly smiles.
“How do you know Bianca?” Paul asks.
He was the quietest, but I can feel that he is boiling inside, also from the acidity in his voice, and especially when he says her name. The woman he loved. The one who broke his heart. The woman that he wanted to take his revenge on from the bottom of his soul. He wanted to see her suffer.
At least, that’s what I want, but I don’t think it’s way too different for him.
“Through Kevin’s son, Alex, who was like a father to her when she was abandoned at the hospital.”
That’s the last straw. What the fuck?
“I didn’t know she was adopted,” I say.
To be fair, she told me that her family lived far away and that she wasn’t on good terms with them. I didn’t insist on asking her to tell me more about them.
“Neither did I,” Paul says. “She told me that I would meet her parents and brothers at the wedding.”
“Bianca doesn’t have any blood relatives,” Clara says. “At least, that’s what I know. She only grew up with the other two kids of Alex and me. I knew she had a fiancé, but she never told me more about him.”
“Yeah, because she didn’t wanna tell you that I’m your brother to not break her fucking plan of kidnapping me,” Paul says in an acidic voice, making Clara lose her words.
“By any chance, is one of his kids a redhead?” Lucas asks what I thought about, too.
“It’s a girl, but no. Why?”
At least that.
“Clara, dear, what’s the name of the other child?” Blake asks, and I have a feeling it wouldn’t be the best answer.
“Omar.”
His name feels like a faraway echo, and everything starts to make much more sense now.
The pieces of the puzzle begin to settle into place.
That alone makes my state of mind even worse.
The blood starts flowing faster through my veins, and my heartbeat accelerates when I realise the biggest problem we would’ve never thought of.
I think their whole family wants to get revenge on Lucas and me for everything that happened to Alex’s son. For what happened too long ago. For the actions of some fucking brainless children.
It makes no sense otherwise. I may be wrong, but what’s the real reason?
Actually, the better question is: how long have they been following us and how much have they been involved in our lives?