The Widow's Daughter ✔︎

Chapter Twenty-One

"Yes," Tina said softly, not meeting my eyes. She let out a long breath and said, "I was the one who wiped Evie's memory."

Everyone exploded, like they'd done with Himara. I was tempted to stand up on the couch and scream about big red buttons again, but I didn't have to, because Ben did it for me. "Of course she did!" he yelled at the top of his small lungs. "My mummy's a secret agent! Agent Valentine!"

"Agent Valentine?" Peter breathed. He looked at me. "Did you know about this?"

I shrugged. "I suspected."

"Of course," Tony said. "Agent Valentine. You... look very different."

Tina let out a shaky laugh. "I wanted to start over, just like Himara did. We changed our faces, our accents. We moved to different countries and fell in love with our respective spouses, started families, had things that we'd never had before. Himara had Jeanne and the entire Akiro gang, I had little Ben and my husband, Dimitri." She paused. "He died of cancer when Ben was two."

"We're sorry to hear that," Bruce said sympathetically.

"Thank you," Tina nodded. "When Ben was a few weeks shy of six, I got a call from Himara, saying that she had a parcel she needed to deliver. I met up with her in Sokovia a few days later."

"That was the time you sent me to be babysat by Aunt Melinda!" Ben piped up. "Her house smelt of mothballs." He made a face and Steve ruffled his hair.

"Yes, it was," Tina said. "And don't say that about Aunt Melinda. She's a lovely darling who..." she caught the looks of the faces of the Avengers. "Never mind. I met up with Himara in Sokovia. Little did I know that the parcel she was delivering was, in fact, a young girl. Evie."

Everybody gasped. Tina continued: "Himara said that there were two: Kira, whom she had taken to live with her, and Evelina, whom she thought I would benefit from having. They were both ten and came with matching lockets, and they didn't seem to remember anything about their past other than they both had a best friend, Tori, who gave them these lockets before dying in Surgery at age seven. Himara said that she had wiped both of their memories about Ivan and HYDRA, replacing them with false memories about a made-up place called the Bardasen Orphanage in London, hence their British accents. She told me that once they reached the age of fifteen, they would receive a message from Tori in their lockets."

Evie and I looked at each other.

Tina took a deep breath and continued saying, "Once the lockets are joined together, they will find the truth about everything... about their parents, about the Project, about their gifts."

"The Project being... Project Evelina," Natasha said softly. She let go of my hand.

"Yes," Tina said. "The key word being 'their.'"

"So... Evie and Kira... are sisters," said Tony slowly.

"Oh my god," Wanda breathed.

"They're twins," exclaimed Steve.

"Wowsers," Peter said, grinning.

"I KNEW IT!" crowed Bruce.

Everybody turned to look at him.

"What?" he spluttered. "I knew it all along. That Kira was part of Project Evelina, anyway. I mean, look at the kid! She's the spitting image of Natasha! She's got super strength, can lift Thor's hammer, can change the probability of things and harness shadows. She's also a genius, if anybody hasn't already known. And Evie looks just like her. Of course they're twins. It all makes sense!" He laughed joyfully. "The Project worked!"

"You can change probability too?" asked Evie softly. 

I nodded. "Yeah. Wait... you can as well?"

She smiled. "Yup. I always thought I was crazy whenever I changed my F- to A+ on a test, but now I know that you're crazy with me."

"That's what sisters are for," I quipped, earning a giggle from her.

Natasha wouldn't meet my eyes as she said quietly, "I think I knew too."

I felt sadness pang across my heartstrings. It took all of my willpower not to reach across and take her hand. "How?"

"It was the shoes," she said. "The little red ballet shoes that the Matron made you wear in the first memory. She said that they were your mother's when she was a girl. They were mine."

There was a deep silence that lasted a while after that, broken only by the whistling of the wind and the whizzing of the cars below.

"What's a bird and a spider mixed together?" I asked.

Everyone looked at me, even Natasha, who up until then had been staring out the window. "Kira, you might wanna sit down," Peter said gently, reaching for my arm. 

I shrugged him off and reached for the two lockets. "What's a bird and a spider?" I repeated my question. "Bruce, you said it yourself, I'm a genius. You guys have to trust me, OK? Tori called me 'little bird' and Evie 'little spider'. Does anybody know what a bird spider is?"

The whole room was quiet, until Ben piped up, "I dunno about a bird spider, but there is a bird-eating spider. It's called the Goliath Birdeater. It's a tarantula found in South America." He sighed. "It's a stupid idea. Sorry."

He looked so heartbroken when he sat down that I just had to try it, my stomach dropping at the thought of what a bird-eating spider might imply in terms of me and Evie. I clutched the two combined lockets to my chest, then threw them into the kitchen, saying, "маленький Голиаф птица-людоед паук!"

Evie and I hurried over to the kitchen faster than anybody else, minus Natasha and Ben, of course. We gasped as the hologram of Tori, basked in blue light, rose out of the lockets like an ethereal ghost, and said: 

"Hello, sisters. I see you've figured it out."