Page 5

5

SAbrINA

My head spins as I stare at the pictures in front of me. Part of me knew—the minute Yelena said her name, the minute she slid that fucking folder across the table—I knew. Deep down, I knew. The birth certificate Tara had hidden all those months ago wasn’t a mistake or a lie. It was a warning. A breadcrumb she left behind because some part of her must have known the past would come looking for us one day.

My eyes fall on the photo of my father—young, proud, and heartbreakingly familiar—and my throat tightens painfully.

“So what you’re saying is that Tara is yours and my father’s daughter?” I manage, my voice sounding like it’s coming from somewhere outside myself.

Yelena gives a slow, almost indulgent nod, as if she’s humoring a particularly dense toddler.

“And that I’m the daughter of my father… and my mother...” I trail off, waiting for her to correct me, to say anything that might make this nightmare unravel. But she just nods again, solemn and composed, like she’s delivering some divine truth.

“And you’re related to my mother,” I press, though the words taste like ashes.

“Your mother is my younger sister,” Yelena confirms, her hands folding neatly in her lap.

I let out a hollow, bitter laugh and shake my head. “You both married Leonid Zorin?”

Yelena’s lips twitch, an attempt at humor so dry it almost scratches the air between us. “Obviously not at the same time. Even here in Russia, that is illegal. I was married to him first.”

My fingers tighten on the edge of the table as my mind spins, trying to piece together this twisted family tree. “So that makes my sister also my cousin,” I say, my brows lifting. “That’s… kind of fucked up.”

Yelena’s face hardens instantly. “I cannot believe my sister would tolerate such language from you or your sister,” she says, her voice dripping with disdain.

“My mother uses the same language, I assure you,” I shoot back dryly, loving the way disbelief flashes in her cold blue eyes.

“Never,” Yelena denies, shaking her head sharply. “My sister was a lady.”

“Then we’re really not talking about the same woman,” I murmur under my breath.

I lean back in the chair, the white scrubs feeling too tight around my shoulders. “Why did they leave Russia? Change their names? Was it because they allegedly stole Tara from you? Did you and my father have some vicious custody battle or something?”

Yelena’s hands fold more tightly, the knuckles whitening. “They fled to protect you and Lidiya. They fled because I told my sister what was about to happen… on the day you were born.”

“Me?” I echo, my heart thudding hard against my ribs.

She nods again—that fucking nod I’m already starting to hate—so calm, so certain.

Some twisted part of me wants her to shake her head just once, to tell me this is all a mistake. That someone’s going to jump out from behind a two-way mirror and yell, you’ve been punked! But the air is heavy with the kind of truth that can’t be unsaid.

“Okay,” I say, folding my arms. “I’ll bite. What was going to happen to me?”

Yelena leans forward slightly, her gaze sharpening. “We were working on a project,” she says carefully. “Your mother and I. A project that Lidiya was part of… from before birth.”

Cold spreads through my veins like black ice. “What kind of project?”

Her lips curve ever so slightly. “We’re geneticists working in a black ops site, Sabina. What kind do you think?”

“Mad scientist shit,” I say flatly, feeling my blood start to run cold.

“Breakthrough research,” Yelena corrects smoothly, “that could change the lives of many people.” She tilts her head, studying me. “And Lidiya was part of that… until Leonid and Carla stole her. They stole my Jewel.”

“How deeply was my sister involved in all this?” I ask, the bile rising thick in my throat.

“From the moment she was conceived,” Yelena says, her eyes softening slightly, as if remembering something precious. “She was perfect. Everything about her from the very beginning. She excelled at every developmental milestone. I knew… she was destined to become the new Jewel of Russia.”

My stomach turns over.

“Are you trying to make another Anya Novikov?” I ask, disbelief lacing my words. “The Jewel of Russia? The woman they call the most intelligent mind in the world?” I think my jaw must be hitting the floor right about now. “You’re trying to make a superhuman? You are a fucking mad scientist.”

Yelena’s face darkens. “She is not the jewel—she is not the jewel anymore,” she snaps, her control slipping for the first time. “Anya is washed up. My Jewel… My Lidiya… she is far greater.”

I sit back, stunned by the venom in her voice. Fuck, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was looking into the face of Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter.

“You must have witnessed it firsthand,” Yelena says, pulling the file from the bottom of her pile and opening it shuffling through papers that I can tell as school and college transcripts. Tara’s transcripts. “I couldn’t retrieve all of Lidiya’s records, but her grades. All a-pluses. Her debates, all the clubs she resided over, show how she was being so held back.” She turns some more pages before looking at me. “Didn’t your parents know she needed a school for the gifted. One that could push her to her full potential?”

“Tara didn’t want to go to a special school,” I say carefully, watching Yelena’s reaction. “She wanted to be normal. Have normal friends.”

“There is nothing normal about my Lidiya,” Yelena breathes, her face alight with an unsettling fervor. She flips open another folder and taps a document. “I just couldn’t find anything on her sports participation.” She looks at me questioningly. “What was she like at sports?”

“Tara didn’t do sports,” I tell her. “She hated them. I mean she does jogging, hiking, and Pilates to stay in shape but not team or any other sports you have to compete in.”

Yelena blinks, genuinely thrown. “I don’t understand.” Her brows knitted tightly together. “She was supposed to excel in every area of life,” she says, and I’m not sure if she is speaking to me or herself.

“She loved music,” I add, feeling a little thrown by how rattled the cool, poised Yelena is getting over Tara’s lack of physical prowess when it came to sport.

“She danced?” Yelena asks hopefully and is not amused when I snort at the thought of my sister dancing.

I love Tara but, fuck, that girl has no coordination and no want to even try and correct it.

“Hell no!” I shake my head. “Tara is as uncoordinated as a drunk elephant and about as destructive too.”

“That is not a nice thing to say,” Yelena says, indignantly. “Maybe she just never wanted to show how superior she was.”

“Nooo.” Sabrina shakes her head. “She was a terrible dancer.” I smile. “But, Tara, is so musically gifted. She can pick up any instrument and just… play.”

“What instruments did she train with?” Yelena asks.

“The better question is which ones she didn’t.” I smile remembering my sister’s love of music and the way she could pick up and play an… my eyes widen. Fuck. Was she genetically modified? Is that why Tara is so good with instruments? I don’t know anyone to have ever won a debate against Tara, and she was phenomenal with math and the sciences. Like me Tara has a photographic memory. I shake the thought off continuing. “She loved the piano and cello the most though.”

“Really?” Yelena says.

I nod. “I was six and Tara nine when we went to a restaurant for my mother’s birthday. She wanted to go to this fancy ass place. They had a pianist there and she was playing while we ate and then he played some Beethoven song that really struck Tara. She hummed it the whole way home. The following day she demanded my parents take her to a music store. I had to get dragged with it.” I roll my eyes. I’m not going to tell her I was the one who encouraged Tara to make my parents take her. “She found a piano. She said it called to her when my father asked why that one.” I sigh. “Tara sat down at it and played the song she’d heard at the restaurant the night before. Much to the delight of the store owner who was even more shocked and delighted upon learning Tara had never touched a musical instrument in her life.”

“What song?” Yelena demands, leaning forward. “What Beethoven song?”

“Some Beethoven crap,” I mutter, keeping my voice light, waving my hand in the air. “I don’t know. I’m not a fucking musician and I can’t stand that classical shit.”

I know exactly what it was. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29 in B–flat major, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’. One of the hardest fucking piano pieces in existence.

But I’m not about to hand that little tidbit over. Not here. Not now, when I suspect my sister was a guinea pig in some freaky genetic experiment. I have to stop my hand from going instinctively to my stomach. What would she say if she found out about me? Another thought leaves me cold—holy fuck.

Yelena said my mother and father fled Russia to protect me from becoming part of the same experiment Tara was a part of. Fuck! I have to try and control my breathing as panic starts to claw at my throat and the horrible thought swirls through my mind— am I like I am because I’m also genetically modified? Maybe my mother was being experimented on without even knowing. I swallow. If I am, then that would mean my baby… I block the thought from my mind. Stop it Sabrina. You’re being paranoid. Yelena already as much as clarified that my mother and father left Russia before I became a human guinea pig for these mad fucked up geneticist.

When I get out of here, I’m going to expose this fucking hellhole.

“Beethoven crap?” Yelena repeats, her accent thickening around the words as she yanks me from my panic-inducing thoughts. Her eyes blaze. “Beethoven is not… crap! His work is not easy to play, especially since some of his pieces are the most challenging piano pieces. And for a child to just…” She swallows. “Incredible. That is incredible. I need to know what piece it was.”

“Didn’t he write that ‘Chopsticks’ song they teach kids?” I say, deadpan.

Yelena’s face freezes in open horror. “That was Chopin,” she hisses, like I’ve just insulted her firstborn—I guess if she’s not lying about being Tara’s biological mother in a way I did.

She flips open another folder and shoves it toward me. “I guess I cannot expect much from a student who never got an A-plus in her life.”

“I did,” I say outraged. “I got an A-plus for participation once. I have a few B pluses too. Those must all be in there if those are my transcripts,” I say brightly, biting back laughter.

I watch her eyebrows twitch as she scans my records. I can see how she’s judging me, thinking I’m nothing and that I’m not as bright as she or my sister. Or my mother… Fuck how did I not see that. Although I have always felt my mother had so much more potential than just being a dancer.

And I always wondered why my father, with his superior military skills, never joined the US Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force. I know now. It also explains my mother’s aversion to traveling anywhere that needed a passport—they were hiding.

“You were good at ballet,” she mutters. “Gymnastics, basketball, baseball...”

“And soccer,” I add. “I can ice skate, too.” I purse my lips. “I was pretty good at ice skating, but I wanted to play ice hockey. My parents refused to let me play, so I quit skating.”

Yelena frowns. “You wanted to play hockey? That barbaric sport?”

“You’re a geneticist working in a secret black site experimenting on kids,” I shoot back. “What you do is probably even more barbaric than playing ice hockey.”

She sniffs, clearly unimpressed. “I am enhancing human potential. That sport seeks to destroy it.”

“Only if you get body-checked into the boards,” I quip.

Her mouth tightens. “Leonid must have tried to turn you into the son he always wanted.”

“Nope,” I say, shaking my head. “But he loved that I was a tomboy and loved my dolls just as much as I did hunting, fishing, and learning how to gut, skin, or scale them.”

Yelena’s lips curl in distaste. “You must have been oxygen deprived at birth. It would explain why you are… not as remarkable as your sister, mother, or grandparents.”

“Thanks,” I say dryly. “Always nice to hear a compliment and from someone claiming to be my family.”

“I am telling you like it is, Sabina,” Yelena says. “I don’t believe in giving a child false hope about their future. Let’s face it, you’re a…” She glances through what I take to be my file. “A headline dancer at a Casino.”

“It’s a top five-star hotel and casino,” I say proudly. “And I’m the lead dancer.”

I have to bite down on my lip to stop from bursting into laughter at her expression. Now I truly know what flabbergasted looks like.

“Didn’t you go to college?” Yelena asks.

“I did,” I say, nodding, leaning forward to try to see the file. “Surely it has my community college, I went to. I studied to be a life coach.” Oh God, oh God! That look on her face is fucking priceless.

“I’m so sorry, Sabina,” Yelena says softly, with what I take as her form of compassion. “That illness you had when you were born must’ve somehow hurt your brain.”

“Hurt my brain?” I look at her curiously.

“It’s the only way I know how to tell you that you may have suffered a bit of brain damage,” Yelena tells me. “As no one in our family’s lineage has ever…” She pauses as if looking for a way to tell me I’m dumb without saying it straight out. “It’s a shame really, because it would have been amazing to have another natural intellect like your grandmother.”

“My grandmother was an intellect as well?” I ask, unable to keep my curiosity about my family at bay anymore.

Yelena nods, her fingers flick through the photos still in front of her, and then she pulls one out and slides it toward me. “These are your grandparents.”

The world tilts.

Standing together are two people I’ve seen only in history books: a tall, stunning woman with glacial eyes and a man in full dress military uniform. Anya Novikov. General Timofey Morozov.

“Wait… what?” I whisper, staring at the photo. “You’re fucking joking, right?”

“Your mother and I,” Yelena says, her voice like ice cracking over a river, “are the daughters of Anya Novikov-Morozov and General Timofey Morozov—your grandparents.”

And just like that, the last thread tethering me to the life I thought I knew snaps.