Chapter 12: Jhinga Biryani

Allie had made her decision over a monumentally dreadful container of takeaway Jhinga Biryani.

It wasn't a long car trip from the airport to Lucas and Will's house, but when she'd looked out the window and noticed the Bukhara Indian Bistro, Lucas had insisted on stopping. He'd asked her what she liked best, and she was suddenly starving so she told him everything.

So he'd handed the menu to cashier and requested one of everything.

The cashier had encouraged him to narrow it down a bit—how many curries did they really need?—but they'd still left with three huge bags of food. Allie had reached for the Jhinga Biryani because it was the easiest to eat in the car, but she gagged as soon as the rice touched her lips.

"Are you all right?" asked Abby.

"It's—" unable to summon words to describe the situation Allie handed the container to Abby.

Abby tasted it. "I think it's okay. It's not what you'd get in London. The best Indian food that isn't in India is in London, because, well, you know why."

Allie felt a thrill of indignation at Abby's veiled reference to England's colonial past, as if Abby was somehow implying that the Americans hadn't bunked up the whole superpower thing far worse than the English ever had.

Then she remembered that she had always known that her mother was American, and now it turned out that her father was, too. She wasn't sure that she had ever been a legal resident of the United Kingdom. At present, though, politics and citizenship were far less important than the truly abysmal quality of the Indian takeaway.

"So there isn't any good Indian food in this whole country?"

"Maybe you should try more than one bite before you decide that it's all inedible," Abby suggested. By then, they were nearly to the house (much humbler than the townhouse in London, but of a comparable size). Once there, they spread the containers out across the kitchen table and Allie tasted all of the dishes. Some were better than others. None were as bad as the first shocking mouthful.

"Have you always liked Indian food?" Lucas asked.

Allie nodded, not answering aloud because her mouth was full.

"Me too," he told her. "You must get that from me, because your mom couldn't stand it. It was like she was allergic to it. The smell of curry sent her running in the other direction."

Allie was so startled by this revelation that she unthinkingly reached for the Jhinga Biryani once more. A wave of comfort washed over her with the awful taste. Her mum hated Indian food; her father liked it, and was thrilled that she liked it, too. This was exactly the sort of conversation she would not have had with her guardian. No matter what it was like here, she reasoned, it could not be worse than what had happened on the other side of the ocean. She was going to throw herself into her life here. She was going to listen to everything Lucas had to say, and give him a fair chance to be her dad.

That worked for a couple of hours, until he asked her where her brother was.

She cocked her head in puzzlement. Lucas should have a much better idea of where Will was than she did. "Didn't he say he was going to the hospital to run DNA tests?"

The next three words hit her like three punches to the stomach. "Not Will. Johnny."

"Johnny. Johnny DiMera? My guardian's son?"

"Your brother," Lucas repeated with an earnestness that left Allie in no doubt that it was true. On some level, she must have known all along. She'd always loved Johnny. He'd always been kind to her. Before he'd left for school, they'd shared a connection that couldn't have come simply from being the same age and living in the same house.

"Johnny and I are the same age. We'd have to be—to be tw—"

"Twins, yes," said Lucas with the smallest of humorless smiles. "He wasn't born two minutes before you."

"But if you're my dad, and he's Johnny's dad, and we're twins…" Allie grimaced. "Two days ago I didn't know anything about my mum. Now I know that she didn't like Indian food, and that she was a slut."

Lucas' face hardened with anger, but Allie didn't flinch. This was nothing like the uncontrolled rages to which her guardian had been prone. Besides, Allie knew enough about biology to know that it was almost impossible for a woman to conceive twins with different fathers. She wouldn't have had time to wash the sheets in between. The mother who had been on a pedestal in her mind for ten long years came crashing down to earth.

"Alice," Lucas said at last, "your mother was not a slut and I wish you wouldn't use that word."

"Was she cheating on you or on him?"

Lucas sighed, as if the question was causing him great pain. "She wasn't cheating on anyone."

"Did you have an open relationship? Was she a prostitute? Was—"

"No. No! He raped her, all right? He raped her!"

An electric shock coursed through Allie, and she jumped to her feet. "What did you say?" she demanded.

Before Lucas could answer, the door swung open to admit two women. One was Abby; one was a slightly heavy, dark-haired woman about Abby's age. "Everything okay?" Abby asked.

Allie was an expert at controlling her emotions. There had always been a lot to hide from her guardian. "Everything's fine," she told Abby smoothly. "I apologize if I startled you." Abby looked skeptical. "Please, go back to whatever it was that you were doing," Allie pressed, and Abby and her friend accepted their dismissal.

Lucas stared at Allie with a mixture of disbelief and admiration. "You certainly know how to use your manners when you want to."

Allie shrugged. "He raped her?" she whispered. The memory of EJ DiMera's hands skimming her own breasts came back to her with painful clarity. He'd raped her mother, and she looked like her mother, and his whole body had seemed so hard and taught when he'd pinned her arms and kissed her…

"She—she submitted to it to save my life. There was a snowstorm, and a beam collapsed on top of me. She couldn't lift it. He said he would only help her if she—"

"All right! That's enough," Allie interrupted, truly sick to her stomach, and not from the subpar takeaway.

"I didn't want to tell you that, but I couldn't let you think—"

"I know, I asked for it." She rushed on before Lucas could say anything more. "You asked where Johnny is. He's at school. I don't know which one for sure. He started at Eton, of course."

"Of course," said Lucas, with a mocking caricature of an English accent.

"And then his father switched him. I don't know where or why. The last time I saw Johnny, he was still at Eton. Do you think there's any way to find out where?"

"If we can manage to find you, I think we can find Johnny. There's only so many schools EJ would be willing to send him, right?"

"He might have sent him somewhere on the continent."

"There's a limited number of schools even on the continent."

"Could he come visit here?" she asked eagerly, the words jumbling as they tumbled over one another. "Could I call him, or email him, or text him, or write to him, or— he doesn't even know we're twins! There's no way he could have known that and not told me. So if his mum was my mum and my mum was his mum, he has family here, too, doesn't he? Wouldn't they want to meet him, too? Oh, but he loves his father. He might not like hearing what his father would—well should I even tell him that he only exists because—what if he doesn't like the idea of me being his sister? He was always nice, but maybe it was because he was Master Johnny and I was the poor ward and he felt sorry for me? Not that they really treated me as a poor relation, I had the same tutors he did and neither of us did many chores and if I wanted a toy, I got it. But everyone knew he was the DiMera heir and I was the stepchild who was there because my mum had died—is my mum really dead? I'm not even sure, if you can believe that. I just remember her being there and then not, but I was so young and it was so fuzzy. I think I was sick. I know she was stroking my head like I had a fever, or maybe I only think I know that. If she's dead, where did they bury her? Could Johnny and I go visit? You don't think Johnny already knows, do you?"

When she ran out of breath, she stopped talking. "That's a lot of questions," Lucas told her.

"Are you going to answer any of them?"

"Are you sure that you're up to it now? You've had a lot to deal with."

"So none of it's good? I can't see Johnny ever again?" Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. As soon as she'd made the decision to leave the DiMera house with Theo, she'd known that she might never meet Johnny again. But sitting here, thousands of miles away, talking about Johnny made her realize the full impact of that decision.

"Hey. I didn't say that." Lucas put one finger under Allie's chin. She flinched in response. It felt too much like EJ putting his hands on her face because he wanted her mother who might or might not be dead.

Lucas pulled away from her.

"Now," he said, when Allie had blinked back the tears, "I want you and Johnny to see each other as much as you want. When we find out where he is and when we've proven that you're my daughter, I hope you get to spend a lot of time with him."

"Do you hate Johnny because of why—how—what happened?"

"No," said Lucas so firmly that Allie felt genuinely reassured. "I always thought that Johnny should have been mine. When he was born, I thought he was mine. And after that, when you and he were babies, I took care of you both. I always loved how strong he seemed, like he came into this world to protect all of us."

Allie smiled. "Yeah."

"What if you get to ask one more question before bed, and the others we can get to another time?"

"I'm not tired," said Allie, even though her body was vibrating with a numb confusion.

"You can read a book or play a video game or listen to music. But I think you should lie down and try to recover for a few hours. You'll want to be able to focus tomorrow."

"What's tomorrow?"

"Is that your one question?"

"No! Er, is my mum dead and if so where is she buried, and if not where is she?"

"I think you got more than one question in there. I like that. But you didn't choose an easy question."

"It seems rather simple to me. Dead or alive?"

"She's in a long term care facility in London. She's unconscious most of the time, and when she is conscious she isn't lucid."

"Is there any chance she'll ever recover?" Allie asked, not caring that this violated the one-question rule. If this man was her father, he couldn't possibly refuse to tell her.

"I've been around long enough to know that anything is possible. But I don't want you to get your hopes up, because it isn't probable. She's been there for years, and we think she's been in this… state longer. Do you remember when she left? Do you remember if she was hurt?"

"I think I was about three."

"That fits with what the doctors think."

"I don't know what happened. I think I was sick, and for a while I think I thought she was sick too and that was why I didn't see her, but she never came back."

"I'm sure she wanted to."

"So am I." Suddenly, Allie was glad that she had agreed to the one question rule. She was too raw to keep talking to a virtual stranger, and she welcomed the idea of time alone.

Half an hour later, she lay in a bed she didn't know in a room she didn't know and tried to force her agitated mind to rest. Her mind was having none of it.

Johnny was her brother; that was easy to accept, and she was sure that some part of her had always known.

Lucas Horton was her father. She'd always known that Johnny's father wasn't her father, and anyone was an improvement. She thought she could like him. This was something she could handle.

Her mother was alive, but not. That wasn't really a surprise. It made some of the things Johnny's father has said over the years make more sense.

Johnny's father had raped their mother.

Johnny's father had raped their mother, and she looked like their mother, and he had wanted to rape her too. She was sure of it. He had touched her that way because he couldn't touch her mother that way. He had groped her and it wasn't even about her, even though it made her very uneasy.

Somehow, that made it worse. If someone was going to do that to her, it should at least have been about her. But she wasn't even worth that much, even though she was worth the security and the bodyguards and the windows that didn't open and the hired men with their chloroform and the private jet across the ocean.

She had a new life now, and she should be able to shed the skin of her old life and forget his beard against her neck and his hands on her breasts and his lips leaving a trail of saliva across her face.

She gagged, and tried to find a happy thought—Johnny is my brother, Johnny is my brother—to stop the bile rising in her throat.

It worked. "Johnny is my brother," she whispered aloud in the darkness. "Johnny is my brother. Johnny is my brother."

It was a prayer and a thank you.

TBC