The scene starts in slow motion, but then it’s too fast. Too raw.
Too…surreal.
It’s strange how some events overlap in a completely different rhythm while they happen in real time.
For a moment, I think I’m dreaming. Maybe this is another one of my cruel nightmares where I keep losing the people I care about the most.
That’s a plausible explanation…right?
The person who’s rolling in the snow after being shot for the second time cannot be Kirill.
He just can’t.
When his huge body comes to a halt at the bottom of the hill, my heart nearly does the same. Then, within a fraction of a second, it roars back to life and almost explodes out of its confinements.
This is not a nightmare or a cruel play of my imagination. This situation is happening.
Right now.
Right in front of me.
Uncle Albert raises his rifle, but before he can take the lethal shot, I jump in front of him.
My limbs tremble and the only thing that plays in a loop through my mind is: what makes you think the first or the second shots weren’t the lethal ones?
Kirill is probably dead—
No. I kick that thought out of my head as I remove my face covering and throw it down, my upper lip unconsciously lifting in a snarl.
“Get out of the way, Sasha,” my uncle orders in a foreign voice. Papa was the one who spoke in this authoritarian tone—not to us, but to the people who worked for him. Uncle Albert would never.
It feels like I’m seeing him through new eyes. As if maybe he’s not the same uncle I’ve known for my twenty-one years of life.
He starts to push me aside, but I push back as hard as I can and actually manage to make him stumble in the snow.
“Stop it!” I scream, my raw voice echoing in the emptiness surrounding us.
“What do you mean by stop it?” Uncle Albert steps forward. “He’s the man behind our family’s death, Sasha.”
I shake my head more times than needed. “I don’t believe that.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t you?”
“I just don’t!” I jut a finger at his chest. “I’m going to get him medical help, and if you try to stop me, I don’t know how I will react. I’m warning you. Unless you want one of us to die today, do not stop me, Uncle.”
I don’t wait for his reply as I run through the snow. My boots get stuck and I fall to my knees, but I lift myself up and rush to Kirill. I expect Uncle Albert to try to clutch my hand or forbid me from getting on with my mission, but neither happens.
I run the fastest I ever have and that includes training, military missions, and high-speed exercising. A foreign energy grips hold of me until all I can focus on is reaching Kirill.
It takes me more time than I have to finally get within touching distance. His large body is sprawled out on the snow facedown. Splashes of blood surround him and leave trails of red in the snow. Nausea rises in my throat and my heart shreds to pieces.
This feeling is no different than when I realized my cousins were dead on top of me four years ago. For a moment, I’m frozen in place, unable to move. My nostrils fill with the metallic tang of blood, and my heart all but spills out and crawls up beside Kirill’s inert body.
Falling to my knees beside him, I grasp his shoulder, then turn him over. A small gasp leaves my lips when I see the huge hole in the middle of his chest and his white coat that’s soaked with red. The stubble covering his cheeks looks too black and harsh against his paling skin. My trembling fingers gently touch the blood that’s gushed out of his mouth.
Did he…vomit blood?
Oh, God. Oh, no.
Please no.
I reach my shaky hand beneath his nose and my breath catches as I wait for a sign of life from him.
In the grand scheme of things, the amount of time I wait is insignificant, but it feels like years. The longer I don’t feel any breaths, the harder my heart beats.
I taste salt, and it’s then I realize I’m bawling my eyes out. My hand is a trembling mess, and the sight of blood makes me want to throw my guts up. It’s not because I’m squeamish, but it’s the fact that it’s Kirill’s blood.
He’s lost so much blood.
Faintly, almost as if it’s not there, I feel a fraction of a breath. It’s not much, but it’s all I need. I rip a piece of my shirt and put pressure on the wound in a hopeless attempt to stop the bleeding. Then I contemplate lifting him and carrying him to the snowmobile that’s stuck on the middle of the hill, but I’m scared about aggravating his injuries.
So I sit him up and crouch behind him so that his back is against mine. Then I hook my arms through his and start to lift up.
I fall right back down.
It’s impossible.
Not only is he way bigger than me, but he’s also unconscious, so he feels much heavier.
If I do it this way, I’ll never be able to get him help in time.
I abandon the idea of lifting him and lay him on his back. Then I grab his feet and start to drag him across the snow. This way, I won’t aggravate his injuries. It’s still hard, though. Not only is he literally made of muscles, but the hill is so steep, my legs burn and shake, nearly giving out from beneath me.
But I don’t stop or pause—except to ensure that I’m not hitting his head on any bumps. The moment I reach the snowmobile, I release him and gently lay his feet on the snow. Then I use whatever inhuman strength I have to flip the vehicle and drag it to where he is.
My heart squeezes and shatters at the sight of the huge wound on his chest, but I don’t allow myself to get stuck in that loop.
I’m the only one who can get him help.
I have to save him.
Those thoughts fill me with renewed energy that allows me to pull him onto the snowmobile.
I try to keep him upright as I sit down in front of him, draping his body around mine for more security, and then strap him to me with my jacket tied around our middles. I’m going to go as fast as possible, and I can’t have him falling in the middle of the trip.
Once I make sure he’s secured, I search the GPS for the closest hospital, then drive the snowmobile at supersonic speed. I ignore the sound of other snowmobiles following me. Probably Uncle Albert and the mysterious men he brought with him.
I don’t give a fuck, because I meant it. If he so much as tries to stop me from getting Kirill help, this situation will get really ugly really fast.
It takes me thirty minutes to reach the hospital, and that’s only because I actually drove at the snowmobile’s highest speed, while leaning forward so that Kirill had good support and wouldn’t fall.
I’m ready to drive the thing through the hospital door, but a few nurses come out of the building with their equipment. I try to help them lift Kirill onto the stretcher, but I step back when they push me away since they know how to do it properly.
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.
“Your grandmother won’t like this,” he says with an aggravated tone. “She’s waiting to hear about his death, and if she knows you stopped it, she will…”
“What? Punish me? She can do whatever she wants, and it’ll mean nothing to me anymore. I went through hell for this family, but you and Babushka chose to use me. I’m going to bet she’s not sick at all and all of this was a setup.”
“Sashenka—” He reaches a hand for me, but I step away.
“I’m not your Sashenka when you fucking used me, Uncle. You forced me to indirectly put two bullets in the chest of the man who saved me when I was on the brink of death. You weren’t there when I nearly died on that mission, but he was, Uncle! He carried me and got me medical care. He saved me.”
“After he killed your entire family.”
“I told you I don’t believe that!”
“You’re being unreasonable right now, but that’s fine. We’ll talk about it. Come back to see Mother and Mike with me.”
“Not now.” I stare at the emergency room door. “I’m not leaving until I know Kirill is all right.”
“What is this fixation you have on Kirill?” He narrows his eyes. “Is there something I need to know?”
“No.” I point at the exit. “Now, go, Uncle. I don’t want you here.”
He purses his lips, probably irritated at how I spoke to him, but that’s the last thing on my mind.
After he leaves, I stand in place, staring at the door, unmoving.
Three whole hours pass before the doctor finally emerges, his face worn out and his posture defeated.
My legs barely carry me, and my eyes blur with tears as I ask in a voice so low, I think he doesn’t hear me, “How…”
The doctor speaks in a rural accent, “We were able to remove the bullets, but some fragments hit the heart and caused damage to the fine arteries. He also lost a lot of blood. We did our best, but the rest is up to him now. We’re moving him to the ICU. The next twenty-four hours will determine whether or not he survives or slips into a coma.”
He talks about the cause of the incident and how he’s obliged by law to call the authorities, but I’m not listening. Once he’s out of sight, I fall against the wall and sob so loud that my heart feels like it’s bleeding along with Kirill’s.
What have I done?
