Page 91 of Twisted Fate
My heart is beating hard, thudding in my chest like a wild animal trying to escape a trap. I can see Konstantin’s face darkening as he puts the pieces of the puzzle together. And I?—
My knees give out as it hits me, what should have been obvious from the start of Yuri’s story, but my mind couldn’t process it at first. I, who’ve killed so many people, couldn’t fathom the horror of what Yuri was trying to tell me.
I drop to the couch, the color draining from my face, my knuckles turning white as I grip the edge of it. "Kane killed them."
Yuri nods, that hint of sympathy still in his eyes. "He ordered the hit, yeah. But here's where it gets interesting." He taps his fingers against the envelope he’s holding. "He never intended to kill you. The order was to bring you back alive."
A tremor runs through me, so slight I try to hide it. Everything I thought I knew about myself, about my life, is crumbling beneath me. "What? Was…were they not supposed to kill my father? Was I supposed to be leverage?"
It makes a sick kind of sense. A child hostage to ensure compliance. It’s not out of Kane’s wheelhouse, though a sick feeling spreads through me as it hits me that I’ve been workingfor a man like that, willingly, all my life. A man who I’m not surprised would take a child hostage to force a father to do terrible things.
"No," Yuri corrects me, his voice gentler than before. "The order was to kill your mother and father, and bring you back to him alive. His own personal project. Take the daughter of the man who betrayed him, raise her as a weapon, use her to do his dirty work. The ultimate revenge—turning your enemy's child into your most loyal soldier. But—" His mouth twists. “I guess the men he sent couldn’t find you. Not sure why they abandoned the search. It cost them their lives, failing him, making him have to hunt you down in the system. But I guess they panicked for some reason, and left the house before finding you.”
The words land like blows. I can't breathe, can't think. All these years, all these missions, all these deaths at my hands—they were never about justice for my parents, never about earning the name of the person who killed them. They were just the continued execution of Kane's revenge against a dead man. My closure, if Kane ever gave it to me, would have been?—
“What was he going to do if I ever demanded the name?” I croak. It feels like a sick joke, Kane holding that carrot out all these years, only to know that he was the one all along that was the culprit. It casts him in an entirely different light than the man I thought I knew, the man that I thought?—
That I thought, in his own strange way, loved me.
Yuri shakes his head. “That, I can’t say, Ms. Kane.” Hearing the name attached to mine feels like a physical blow. My head snaps up, and I see Konstantin’s jaw tighten.
“That’s Mrs. Abramov to you, Yuri,” he growls, and I look sharply at him, a flood of emotion constricting my chest.
“Mrs. Abramov. Sorry.” Yuri’s demeanor is as unflappable as it’s been since he walked into the room. “I can’t say what he would have done,” he continues. “But probably, he would havegiven you a fake name. Someone plausible that he wanted dead, and used you to get rid of yet another one of his enemies while covering his tracks.” He shrugs. “That’s just my guess.”
It makes sense. I look at Konstantin. “You trust him?” I ask, and my voice sounds strange, even to me. “You’d believe the information he brought you?”
Konstantin nods without hesitation. “He’s never failed me before. It’s why I called him.”
Yuri casts him a grateful look, one that hints at a friendship between the two of them, and I realize that Konstantin put everything he could into finding these answers for me. He called his best man, told him to make it a priority, clearly, since Yuri found all of it so quickly.
“For what it’s worth—” Yuri pauses, clearing his throat. “Far be it from me to tell you how to feel. But I’ve seen a lot of fucked-up shit, doing this job. What Kane did to you is a special kind of evil, Mrs. Abramov. And knowing the kind of woman you are, I’d say you’re going to answer it with a special kind of response.”
Yuri holds out the envelope to me, and I take it. I open it, sliding the papers out, and I stare down, for the first time in twenty years, at the faces of my mother and father.
I don’t cry. I don’t scream, or curse, or rage. I just sit very still, processing the complete dismantling of my identity. Every kill, every seduction, every lie—all in service to the man who murdered my family. The irony is so bitter I can taste it.
I flip through the pages of emails, calls, anything that Yuri dug up, one by one. I hear Konstantin thanking him and opening the door again, sending Yuri back out into the storm. If I was a better woman, I suppose, I’d tell Konstantin to have Yuri stay, but right now I want to be alone.
Well, almost alone.
I look up, the words coming out of my mouth before I can fully think them through. “I’m glad you’re here,” I croak, and Konstantin stops, turning to look at me with surprise.
“You are?” he asks quietly, and I nod.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to find this out alone.”
Konstantin crosses the room, slowly, and sits down next to me, close enough that I can feel the heat of his body but still not touching. He says nothing as I look through the papers again, the grief and hurt coalescing into a tight ball of rage in my chest.
Rage that I’ve felt all my life, since I was eight years old—but directed at someone new, now. At the man who was supposed to help me find an outlet for it. The man who was supposed tohelpme.
"He killed them," I say finally, my voice hollow. "He killed them, and then he made me into… this. His weapon. His revenge." I laugh, a broken sound that’s completely without humor. "All these years, I thought I was working toward avenging them. But I was just finishing what he started."
I can feel Konstantin's desire to reach for me, to comfort me, but he holds back. He must understand, somehow, that this isn't something he can shield me from. This is something I have to face and process in my own way.
"What do you want to do?" he asks instead, and I feel that rush of emotion again, of gratitude. He’s giving me the best thing he could right now—agency, a choice of my own.
It's a gift more precious than he knows—or maybe he does know, and that’s why he’s doing it. All my life, I've been controlled, manipulated, used. This simple question—what do you want to do?—feels revolutionary.
