OVERTHROWN QUEEN • N. MIKAELSON [2]

Chapter 20

• • •

When you were supposed to be dead and you suddenly woke up in a ruined church with an old friend and a dying stranger, mild confusion was an understatement to what I was feeling.

"Katerina?" I walked over to her confusedly. A sharp taking breath snapped my attention from a dumbfounded Katerina to a dying stranger. I quickly rushed to her inspecting her wound.

"Press this wound tightly while I searched for first aid kit." Her hand gripped mine before I had the chance to get up. "No need. I may not have much time." She said stopping me.

"I am Anya Chevlenko." I stared at her in shock.

That was real? Mother? Father? Alex? Oh God!

"I wish I could fill you in, teach you, be there with you, Talia..." She nodded at my surprised expression at her calling me by my real name. "But I guess fate says otherwise, huh?" She chuckled humourlessly, coughing blood in the process.

"Which is why I had told Katerina all you need to know right now." She stared at me deeply as if she was in a trance, but it was not me who she saw. "Thank you, Tatiana. For giving me a chance to repay your kindness all this time." She breathed her last breath.

I was still in so much shock and slowly turned to Katerina who already recovered from her dumbstruck phase.

"What now?"

• • •

After an hour of us sharing information, Katerina from Anya and me from my mother and catching up, of course, we were still overwhelmed by the situation as we sipped our champagne in the five-star hotel we currently reside.

"So aunty Kat, huh?" I teased her, still not believing she was my family.

I mean, sure she was one of my closest friends I got that I trust since we had spent some time together before and Kol and I had helped her at one point, but family was... another level of relationship.

Katerina herself was still yet to come to terms that I was her relative, alive. After the others, minus my mother was slaughtered by Nik.

Nik... Oh God!

"You really are Tatiana's daughter?" Katerina breathed as she still stared at me with what I detected was guilt and remorse, snapping me out of thoughts of Nik that I had earlier.

Katerina told me my mother played a huge role in her escapees all these years. Even after having me. My mother was the only one she trusted with her life. She told me that some witches were conspiring against her that led her to her death. That was why she left me. I could tell she was feeling guilty for it.

I sighed. "Kat, her death is not your fault." Grabbing her hand pulling her into a hug. "Ние сме семейство, скъпа Кат. [We are family, dear Kat.]" I tell her genuinely in Bulgarian, mother's mother-tongue language.