I turn to Lucas and take his hand while I walk to the other room, alongside the journal from my bed. We reach the living room, and I sit on the sofa, pointing to Lucas to sit next to me, then I hand him the journal.
“Read the last entry. Then… you’llmeetAnora,” I say, looking at Lucas and Blake, who is standing in the door frame.
Lucas nods and opens the journal at the bloody mark, already surrounded by emotions he doesn’t wanna let out at the moment.
?
“It all started when I was around ten years old,” I start by telling, surrounded by my dreadful memories.
All four of us are sitting at the table in the living room. Meanwhile, Paul woke up shaken by Lucas, and now the three brothers are waiting for me to tell them about Anora.
Your long-lost sister.
I’m aware that Lucas knows about her existence, but I don’t think he knows her whole story.
“At the beginning, there were some distant voices. I ignored them. They weren’t saying anything coherent enough to be worthy of studying for a small child. But, when Lucas almost killed Omar, all of those voices turned out to be one, which became clearer over some time.”
I stop for a second, remembering Omar’s image. The boy who was beaten for a small childish act, but who was punished too harshly for his age.
I found out his name when I visited him in the hospital with my grandparents, wanting to apologise in Lucas’s name for what happened to him. I remember I brought him a cake with fresh strawberries straight from the garden that I made with my grandma’s help. The smile he had when he saw the cake erased the memory of a boy beaten close to death. It only remains the one of a boy with olive skin, beautiful Arabic features, and lovely dark hair, who loved to smile just from simple things, like the moment when he lifted my pink skirt. Same smile,pureand simple.
I push aside my memories and continue my story.
“I thought I created a conscience that I could talk to about anything in my head. Sometimes, I even responded to her out loud by mistake. When I was doing that, and my grandma was close, she was always asking me who I was talking to,” I say, laughing softly when remembering the person I loved the most in this universe.
The one who was gone way too soon.
“It was funny for a while. I thought I found some company when I was alone and I was getting bored. I didn’t even realise she made me do strange things. She was the one who told me to steal a necklace from an antique store when I was 12. I did it, and I got caught by the seller when I tried to hide it under my trench coat. Uh, I even remember the argument from that night. At one point, my grandma asked me where I got the idea of stealing. I froze. I didn’t know what to say to her or how to tell her about the imaginary friend in my head. I just told her that I wanted to see if I could do that. Being a child, she just made me go to my room and think about what I did, and not think about illegalstuff anymore. What she didn’t know was that she got me a date withher.”
“Was it because of me?” Lucas interrupts me, looking worried.
“No. That’s what I thought, until my grandma told me a story about… my twin sister, whom I absorbed when we were in our mom’s belly,” I say, making the three brothers widen their eyes.
“At that moment, I didn’t know whether to associate the voice in my head with the fact that I swallowed her whole. That was until I heard how she needed to be called. The same way she presented herself.Anora. I don’t remember if I saw her name somewhere around her house or if my subconscious created her, but I know one thing for sure: she’s lethal. Lucas knows what I’m talking about.”
And you didn’t even see what I’m really capable of, sis.
All gazes turn to Lucas, and he only nods.
“How did you figure out I know?” he asks with a small smile.
“You were pretty obvious when you stopped me from hitting Marshall. You knew that was a trigger for her. But I don’t knowhowyou know about Anora.”
“Because I was the one who found you full of your boyfriend’s blood,” he says in a serious voice, blowing my mind.
Silence settles around us. I can hear Paul’s gulp, and Blake’s shock, who is staying with his eyes widened, already intrigued by the story.
“I told you before that I was following you, and I was close to you a couple of times. It was strange that what started as a normal candlelight dinner date in the apartment you were staying in continued into the woods near your house. I thought you just wanted to have fun, and I let you be. I didn’t wanna watch who you were having sex, even if it would’ve been fun,” helaughs softly, making me roll my eyes while still keeping a small smile on my face.
“Until I heard some screams that weren’t yours, and all my senses were activated. I don’t know how much I ran in that forest, how far you could’ve gone. All I know is that when I found you, you were passed out next to the body of your boyfriend from that time. He had his hands and legs twisted so…” he stops for a second, gulping before continuing.
I shiver only thinking about the frightening image. From when I retook over my body and vision. The first and only victim of Anora. It would’ve been more, but I learned to control her.
“I don’t know why you did that, but I handled the body before anybody found us, then took you home safely. I wanted to wash you of all the blood that wasn’t yours, but then you started to wake up, and I ran before you could see me. I didn’t wanna make it worse if I was there too.”
I don’t know how to process what he told me. Yes, I remember bits of that event. How I was screaming inside for Anora to stop, to not kill him. How I passed out when I regained control over my body, after she did her job.
She lied to me. She said she wanted to feel him, too. That I killed her, and she had the right to physical action too, not just to stay and watch.
