Page 109 of The Warrior
Five days later, my mother gathered me and Khan. With eyes full of tears, she sat us down and told us what had happened. “There was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” Khan asked.
“It’s Dina. She fell out a window.”
I stiffened and my pulse raced. “Is she okay?”
Erika’s shoulders jerked up and down as she hid her face in her hands, crying.
“Mom, is Dina okay?” I had to know.
“She died last night.” The words came out in a sob but I heard them and my whole world stopped.
“No,” Khan said beside me. “That’s not possible. It can’t be.”
“I’m afraid so. She fell out of an attic window.”
I wanted to scream that it was a lie! Dina would have never been that careless. She was smart and knew about danger. She had always watched me like a hawk, warning me not to get too close to cliffs, fires, windows, or anything that could harm me. I could recall being scolded at least five times by her for hanging out the window. There was no way she had fallen by accident.
An iron band tightened around my throat, and I jerked back when my mom reached for me. It was like my body was burning and I couldn’t stand her touching me. I wanted to run as fast as I could and find Dina. We would laugh together that she’d pulled a prank like this.
Nothing would happen to Dina. I’d promised her that much.
“What was she doing in the attic?” Khan asked our mom.
“I don’t know. Your father has gone to investigate.”
The words registered with me, but I refused to believe they were true. This was just another game of hide and seek.
“Magni, stop,” my mom called out when I knocked my chair over and stormed out of the room. I sprinted through the house, searching my room, Dina’s room, the kitchen, the library, and every one of the places I could remember her hiding in the past. When she wasn’t there, I searched the garden. My voice was hoarse from calling out her name, and after hours of searching, I collapsed in the far end of the park where no one would hear me sob.
She was never spoken about again. It was like Dina had never lived.
Except she had lived!
She had sung to me, read to me, kissed away my tears, and held me. She had played with me, been my best friend, and slept in my bed often.
My dad ordered all pictures of her removed to spare my mother the pain of seeing constant reminders. Dina’s old room was converted into a bathroom and walk-in closet for one of the guest rooms. The Gray Mansion was purged of evidence that Dina had lived here for fifteen years. The few times I dared bring up Dina’s name at dinner, my father flat-out ignored me and changed the subject.
After that, I began questioning if Dina had been real or an imaginary friend from my childhood.
That’s when I made a last attempt to find some evidence of my sister’s existence, and discovered a picture in my parents’ room under my mother’s bed.
Dina was younger than I remembered her. A pretty girl around ten or eleven with the long blond hair, blue eyes, and cute dimples that I had loved so much.
I took the picture and slept with it under my pillow for months, brooding over all my unanswered questions and my guilt for not having protected Dina like I’d promised her.
At twelve and a half, I was huge for my age and strong beyond my years. My nine years of intense fight training was showing and my father praised me, saying that the world had never seen a more exceptional talent than me. With my strength and speed, I’d be the best fighter the world had ever seen.
His words empowered me to ask him the question that was burning in my chest.
“Dad, what happened to Dina?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said and turned his back on me.
His disrespectful dismissal of Dina’s life made me explode. I destroyed everything within my reach and servants fled in fright as glasses and cutlery went flying through the air. My father had to physically restrain me with the help of two from his security unit, and after that, I was sent to live at a school. There was no talking things through. No apologies or explanations. I was a twelve-year-old with a shitload of grief and unanswered questions, who hated the world.
After our father died, I’d searched for pictures of Dina from media events in the past. I only found her wedding photos and they were too painful to keep.
