HEART OF MY MONSTER

21

“Do it, damn it!” Maksim staggers to his feet using the wall for balance and clutches Anton by the collar of his shirt. “Kill me. Death is better than seeing your true f*****g face.”

My chest aches at the reminder of the feelings that ripped my chest open when I discovered Kirill’s betrayal. Maksim must be experiencing feelings similar to that.

He genuinely liked Yuri, but he found out that it was Anton all along.

And while Yuri and Anton share the same silent personality, they’re entirely different in everything else.

My brother was always the heir to the Ivanov empire, and that turned him into an emotionless person at a young age.

The m******e made his negative traits worse.

Even now, he looks at Maksim with cold eyes, as if he can’t feel any of the rage that’s targeted toward him. But he grabs Maksim by the hair, his fingers pulling back until it looks painful.

I stand up and carefully but firmly break them apart. Maksim sags against the wall, and my brother briefly closes his eyes and breathes deeply before opening them again.

“I think we could all use a break,” I say softly.

“Are you going to let me go?” Maksim asks in a nonnegotiable tone.

“I told you, I don’t want to fight you, Maks.” I pat his shoulder. “I think it’s better you stay here. At least for now.”

“So the sadistic asshole can torture me some more?”

“I’m going to knock your f*****g teeth out,” Anton growls, slowly but surely losing his patience.

“There will be no torture,” I announce.

“And how will you make sure of that? The moment you turn your back, your dear f*****g brother will go back to his favorite hobby of marking my skin.”

“I will stay here.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Anton says.

“Maks is right. I also can’t trust you not to torture him just because you can.”

“You’re not staying alone with him,” Anton enunciates each word.

Maksim grins with an edge. “What? Afraid Sasha likes me more than she likes you?”

“You f*****g—”

“You can stay, too, Anton. But if we leave, we do it together. That way, neither of us is with him on our own at any given time.”

I can tell Anton doesn’t like this plan; however, he has no choice but to accept it. One, I’m not leaving. Two, he’s also not leaving.

This is a complication I never considered, but for some reason, I’m happy for any event that manages to distract me from the bloody mess in my chest.

Even if temporarily.

SASHA

T

o say the atmosphere has been strained would be an understatement.

It’s been two weeks since I followed my brother and found him torturing Maksim after oddly buying his favorite food.

That was the detail that made me think that Anton’s position on this might be skewed. I thought he was unfeeling and couldn’t care less about what happened to Maksim. He certainly could win an Oscar for the performance he gave back in the military and in New York.

However, after the time the three of us have spent holed up in here, I’m starting to change my perspective.

One, Anton caught Maks when he was in hiding after Uncle Albert sent mercenaries after him, but he didn’t tell my uncle.

He kept him here so that he’s out of Uncle and Babushka’s reach. He said it was because he wanted to extract the answers from him, but I think he wanted to protect him.

Two, he put him in a very well-heated place that’s adequate to fight Siberia’s freezing cold and snow in late October.

Still, I can’t trust him since he actually tortured him.

The first few days, I stayed around most of the day, because Maksim was ill. He had a fever and needed constant attention.

However, whenever I attempted to wipe his body with a cold rag for the fever, Anton would push me aside and do it himself. He said I’m still his sister, and he doesn’t like me touching men. I tried to explain that Maks is my friend and I don’t think of him that way, but Anton shut me up with, “No. I still don’t want to think about whatever you were doing with Kirill every time he kicked us out.”

If my heart wasn’t already too broken to feel, I’d be embarrassed at the prospect that my brother knew about Kirill and me all along.

He probably didn’t intervene because: A) he would’ve looked suspicious, and B) he thought all of that was part of my elaborate plan.

A plan whose result is to be broken to pieces, maybe. But I had no damn plan, and that’s the saddest thing about this.

Despite my attempts, Anton didn’t let me touch Maksim and was the one who singlehandedly took care of him while I started repairs upstairs.

But I did have to come back down to check that he wasn’t killing him when I wasn’t there. Then he helped me with repairs, or more like, did whatever I told him to. Anton is surprisingly good with handiwork, a fact I didn’t know before. Maybe it’s because we grew up wealthy, so we never really had to work for ourselves.

But then again, Anton has had to enlist in the army and work in the mafia. Even though he did an excellent job at pretending he was a weakling combat-wise, in reality, he’s not.

For two weeks, we come here in the morning and leave by sunset. Uncle, Babushka, and Mike think we’re doing special training, so they never suspect anything.

Maksim gave us the silent treatment at first, so I brought cards and board games and tried to get him to talk.

Considering he’s a hopeless extrovert, it didn’t take him long to talk to me. Anton, however, is a different story. The only time they speak to each other is when they’re ready to rip each other’s hearts out.