Nina was afraid and was desperately trying to figure a way out of this mess.
“Something kept bothering me. You know how I am about loose ends, and I finally figured it out. Remember when you kept yelling at me to call him. Tell him you weren’t Jules? You wanted me to call Javier Ramirez. He was one of the clients you stole millions from. You thought I tipped him off. You weren’t worried about the feds. You were worried about him. Did you honestly believe it was smart to rip off one of the biggest drug lords in South America?”
I could see fear and panic in her face through the review mirror. “It wasn’t me. It was Lawrence. Those accounts were already set up before I married him.”
“Ramirez doesn’t care about that. You knew about them, and because you were so concerned with your way of life not only did you go along with his schemes but in some instances, you helped. Then, when the heat got too hot, you ran like a little bitch back to Guilin, thinking you could take everything from me—even putting Cecily in danger. Lord forbid, you try your hand at working hard to make a living.”
“I was never really going to hurt her.”
“You don’t think your actions hurt her?! You’re an idiot and your stupid little boy toy is an idiot too. He can’t make inquiries about me and not think it won’t get back. You could never pretend to be me. Laurette always said, there was no one like me.”
Nina pressed her lips together.
“I won’t live with the threat of you constantly trying to assume my identity because you screwed yours up so badly or that you would hurt Cecily to hurt me.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that. It was Jonah’s idea to assume your identity.”
Tsk, tsk, tsk. “Always blame someone else huh? That’s your excuse? Even if I believed you, which I don’t, but even if I believed that you were willing to let bygones be bygones, and we could live our days out as sisters, the Family Council has limits, Nina. They would never have protected you from Ramirez. So, like a good sister, I convinced him to remove the bounty off of your head. Me. The sister who loved you more than her own life paid your bounty and reimbursed him for your crimes.”
“What!? You did that for me? Why?”
“Because I wanted the privilege of killing you myself.”
My voice was sad, remorseful. “How could you have done this to me? To Cecily? You were my one pure love, Nina.”
“Your one pure love? Do you know how hard it was to live up to Chang’s and Laurette’s standards? I could never do it.” Nina’s voice dripped with hate. “I could never be you!”
“Be like me? For God’s sake, Laurette loved us both equally for who we were. And, Chang? Chang was a monster. After all these years, you let this garbage fester in your head when the Lee-Xiou sisters could have run the world.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Gina. You were their favorite. Let’s not pretend that I wouldn’t have always been the Robin to your Batman. I’m nobody’s Robin.”
“That’s crazy talk. You were my sister, Nina. Equals. My twin. My other half. Had you come to me fifteen years ago, or even in the last year, WE could have figured out how to get you untangled from all of your messes.”
Nina hissed. Her fear was replaced with a flash of anger. “I didn’t want your help! Don’t you understand that?”
I saw the unbridled and naked hate in her eyes. I whispered. “When did you stop seeing me as your sister?”
Nina seemed to ponder the question. Apparently, she’d thought about it quite a bit lately. “I honestly can’t pin that one down. It’s a shame really. Sisters are supposed to love one another, but you ruined that.”
“Me. Okay.” I sighed. “If you don’t know that means you’ve hated me for a long time. Sad, because I loved you and Joseph used you. By helping to fake your death, it only made his path to power, easier. You put your trust in him, and he would have stopped your heart just like he planned to do with Cecily. But, you don’t care about that because you only care about yourself. My dearest sister, I hope you know he kept quiet about you as an ace up his sleeve to use against me if he ever had to. Even Joseph knew how important you were to me.
When you died, my heart broke into a million pieces. After I found out about Chang’s plan to hurt the only part I had left of you, Cecily, I murdered him. He went to his grave thinking he killed you, and I put him there in part because of it.”
“I suspected you killed Chang, but you can stop pretending it was for me.”
“I’m willfully choosing to remember the love I had for who I believed you to be. That Nina Lee-Xiou died fifteen years ago.”
“I guess she did.”
“Yes, that was a time when my feelings for you weren’t tainted. I will do my best to hold on to those memories so that I don’t completely slip into the dark side of myself.”
Nina stared straight ahead. “So, this is how it ends.”
“I think we’ve both known for a very long time the ending to this story. Goodbye, Nina. Tell Chang I said, hello.”
I put on my dark glasses and
