Lies of My Monster (Monster Trilogy #2) by Rina Kent

A doctor straps an oxygen mask to his face, and then all of us are running down the depressing white hall.

“He has two gunshot wounds to the chest,” I tell them in a clear voice I don’t recognize. “He also fell down a hill and lost a lot of blood.”

The doctor shouts some instructions at the nurses, then jumps onto the stretcher, straddling him, and cuts Kirill’s coat open.

My throat closes at the view of the two bullet holes gushing with blood. One is higher than the other. One has more blood around it than the other and causes red to stain his abs and tattoos.

Oh, God.

Is that…where his heart is?

I try to go with them all the way, but the nurses forbid it and ask me to wait outside. The moment the emergency room door closes, I slide to the floor, tears and blood dripping onto the white tiles.

I lift my red hands and stare at their harsh contrast against the fluorescent lights. They look blurry through my tears, and this state—the fact that I’m losing my grip on reality—feels so final, it’s crippling.

While staring at my bloodied hands, I see the last time I talked to Kirill. In the car. When he dropped me off at the airport.

I can still taste his lips on mine when he kissed me like he never had before. When he set my world ablaze and nearly had me confessing every twisted feeling I have for him.

If I could go back in time, to that moment when he asked me not to go, I’d stay.

I’d do things differently.

But I can’t, and the damning fact remains…Kirill is fighting death because of me. He has a hole in his heart because I stupidly thought I was here for Babushka and that I could actually avoid being tracked by him.

I’m the reason he’s in there, and that breaks the heart that, before him, I thought was long dead.

A heart that was overlooked in my conquest for revenge, ignored and considered irrelevant in my current life. Kirill is the one who brought it back to life and nurtured it to its current state.

And the fact that I indirectly put two bullets in his chest as repayment makes me want to claw my skin off and scream until my lungs give out.

“Care to explain what you think you’re doing, Sasha?”

My uncle’s clipped question wrenches me out of my gloomy state. I wipe my tears with the back of my hand, stand up, then whirl around to face him.

He’s still in his combat clothes, but there’s no weapon—none that’s visible, at least—and he removed the balaclava. “Why don’t you explain what you were doing, Uncle? How could you use me to get Kirill here?”

“Would you have come if I’d told you the plan?”

“No!”

“That’s your reason, then. You’re getting close to Morozov, and while that’s good, not protecting your own feelings isn’t. Anyone who goes undercover should be extra careful not to allow the subject they’re spying on to affect them. Needless to say, you failed, Sasha.”

“I don’t give a fuck!” This is the first time I’ve cursed in front of my uncle, but I don’t give a flying fuck about that either. “How could you… How did you know he’d follow me?”

“I didn’t for certain. Until he boarded his private plane right after yours took off. It’s not a coincidence, and a man like Kirill doesn’t do things arbitrarily.”

“You…have spies in New York?”

“I have spies everywhere.”

“Just…what do you do, Uncle? Who were all those men from earlier? What’s going on?”

“I told you what’s going on. We’re taking revenge on the people who annihilated our family. Or we were in the middle of doing that before you took him to the hospital and threatened that one of us would die if I intervened.”

“That’s because you’re not making any sense!” My arms and legs are taut with tension as I get in his face. “How could Kirill be responsible for the massacre? It was his father who came to our house!”

“And it was Kirill who devised the plan to wipe us out.”

My feet falter, and I shake my head slowly. “That’s not true. Kirill…was in the army at the time of the attack.”

“Our family’s demise was his last mission before enlisting.”

“Do you have proof?”

“Not yet, but I don’t need it. In the beginning, I thought Roman had come up with the entire plan, but things didn’t add up. He wasn’t that cunning. Besides, weren’t you the one who told me that Kirill was the mastermind behind his father’s success before he left for the army? That’s when I started to dig deeper and found out that he was indeed behind every successful operation Roman conducted in the last ten years, whether in Russia or the States.”

I continue shaking my head, my heart beating fast and so damn loud, I can hear the roaring in my ears. “You’re projecting, Uncle. You’re just trying to find someone to blame, and Kirill happened to be in your path.”

“And you’re in denial, Sasha. You know, deep in your heart, that he is the one.”

“I said no!”

“Sasha…”

“He’s not. I’ll wait for him to wake up and ask him myself.”

“And reveal your identity?”

“I don’t care!” Uncle doesn’t know that Kirill already found out about my gender, and I’m keeping it that way.