Page 51 of Broken Embers

I stare at her. “So it’s all true, then? You and Dad are really Mariya and Leonid Zorin?”

“We are,” she nods. “I’m guessing you met my sister, Yelena?”

“Oh yes,” I mutter. “What an absolute delight she is.”

My mother snorts, and then her face becomes serious.“Rina, she doesn’t know about you, does she?” Worry resonates in her eyes. “About how gifted you are?”

“Nope.” I shake my head. “I realized that all Dad’s helping us to dumb down so we could live normal lives was actually how to survive being caught and shoved into an RMSAD detention center techniques.” I sigh. “I’m afraid your sister thinks I’m the shame of the Novikov-Morozovs.”

Carla’s eyes blaze. “She’s a fucking snob, sweetheart. Don’t let her get in your head. She always hated living in our mother’s shadow. She’s always wanted to be the next Anya Novikov.”

“She may be smart and cunning, but Yelena is no Anya Novikov,” I say softly.

“No,” Carla agrees. “She’s not. She’s not even close. And believe me… she knows it.”

“It’s one of her biggest weaknesses, trying to prove she’s the smartest person in the room,” I look down. “So it’s true then. The RMSAD is the true reason Dad taught us to play dumb?”

“To protect you,” Carla says. Her eyes shine. “Because we couldn’t risk the RMSAD finding out what you could do. Their reach extends far beyond Russia, and they have scouts constantly on the lookout for exceptional people like you.”

“Awesome,” I say.

“We couldn’t risk them ever being alerted to you, especially, sweetheart,” she tells me, her voice wobbling slightly with emotion. “Not after what they did to Tara.”

I look up sharply. “What did they do to her?”

“They used a treatment I co-developed,” she admits. “While Tara was still in the womb.”

My blood runs cold.

“I warned Yelena it was too unstable,” Carla continues. “It made lab rats violent. Strong, yes, and increased their mental acuity.”

It sounds so strange to hear my usually absent-minded mother saying things like increased mental acuity and looking at me with sharp, laser-focused eyes. Fuck, maybe I was just blind to it.

“But it also made them mentally unstable. It was nowhere near ready to be tested on an adult human, let alone a newborn baby or fetus.”

I lean forward. “Mikhail Erogrov… he was given that same treatment?”

My mother’s eyes widen in shock. “He was the first newborn I was forced to treat.” She nods grimly. “I was going to give him a placebo to tank the experiment, but my sister was there, right beside me, as if she knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to leave after that, but I couldn’t. Not only did I have an airtight contract that basically said the RMSAD owned me, there were rumors of others who’d left and were never heard from again.”

“Nice place to work.” I shake my head, feeling ill. “Why even join it in the first place?”

Her jaw clenches. “They threatened your grandmother, who at the time was ill.”

“I guess extortion is just a drop in the hat to a division that has so many human rights violations it should never be running,” I say in disgust. My brow furrows. “I’ve seen firsthand what Mikhail Ergorov was like.”

My mother looks at me, startled. “Yes, Syd told me.” Her eyes darken. “I’m so sorry you went through that.”

“It’s not me you need to apologize to,” I tell her with a spurt of anger rushing through my veins. “It’s his sister and mother the fucker abused all of their lives.”

“Even after he brutally stabbed a puppy because it licked him, when he was three, nothing was done about him,” my mother tells us. “I warned them. But they kept the program going and wouldn’t take any of my advice on how to fix it.”

“But it didn’t affect Tara that way,” I point out.

“Oh, sweetheart, you don’t remember,” my mother says, and I feel cold fingers creeping up my spine. “Tara hurt you on more than one occasion during one of her violent outbursts. Eventually, I tried to keep the two of you separated until I perfected the cure.”

I blink. “What?”

“On this one occasion, your father had bought each of you a doll. She chose the one with the blonde hair, and your father gave you the one with the red hair.” She sits back in the chair. “While the two of you were playing, she suddenly decided she wanted the red-haired one. You wouldn’t give it to her, and she attacked you, beating you with her doll.”

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