Alexei #2
“Sixty percent,” I say, “and total control over data security. In return, I’ll finance your entry into the professional fighting circuit. You get money, status, and the chance to rub it in Sacramento’s face that you don’t bet on losers.”
He chews on the offer. Sweat shines on his forehead, despite the relatively cooler air up here. “Fifty-five,” he tries. “Fifty-five percent for you, and we have a deal.”
“Sixty,” I repeat, starting to put the stack of bills back into my suit’s inner pocket. “The offer expires in five seconds, Karpov. After that, you can go back to organizing bar brawls with your toothless champion.”
“Deal! Deal, goddammit!” he says, too quickly, extending his hand. “Sixty. It’s a deal.”
I don’t shake his hand. I extend the stack of money and tap his palm with it.
He grabs it like an addict. He thumbs through the bills, pressing the currency strap that holds the stack together.
“Find a real fighter,” I order. “I hope you learn to manage your own ring,” I say quietly.
My assistance should raise his level. It would be difficult to lower it at this point.
The primate in the suit nods, enchanted by the money.
I roll my eyes. “Consider that amount a courtesy. Send me the price for a decent fighter when you have one.”
Karpov has an orgasm, an epiphany of profiting for nothing. He becomes pliable. “Ah, Mr. Malakov, you truly are a very special man.”
He doesn’t call me mister except in moments like this, kissing my ass and hoping it will secure him more easy money.
He holds the stack with relish. I can see it from here: reddish stains on his hands, on his face, even on the tip of his nose. He shouldn’t wear corduroy in the heat.
My gaze drifts down to the ring. Cleanup crews are already there. Guys with buckets and mops, wiping the dark stains from the worn carpet. The cleaning efficiency is mediocre.
A psycho from the south, Karpov said. A nobody. He sees the world in easy labels. Champion, loser, cripple, psycho. He doesn’t see the architecture of violence.
This type of tool doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It’s unstable. Leaving it in Karpov’s hands is like giving a child plastic explosives. He will, inevitably, blow himself up.
I give a discreet nod to one of my men. He understands. There’s nothing more to be done here.
Karpov doesn’t even notice my departure. He’s still counting the money, the velvet absorbing the heat, and his own stupidity.
The sound of my shoes is the only organized thing in this place. The air grows thicker, dirtier, before I reach the exit.
A fucked-up stump with a grudge against the world, is what he said.
Perhaps.
I watch a grainy video: Sacramento, Los Angeles, Bakersfield… the opponents are always too big, too strong, too confident. And they always make the same mistake.
The metal arm draws attention like a polished diamond on the sidewalk, easy to snatch. His opponents always seem torn between seeing him as an inept brute with no brain, imagining the utility of that piece of metal is the same as a baseball bat.
There aren’t many fight records for the so-called Iron Arm. Most are buried in dark web forums, hidden from the eyes of authorities, and filmed with crappy cell phones and one-megapixel cameras.
His opponents ignore the left hand, the one of flesh and bone. It opens their guard, throws them off balance. That’s the whole point of using it in the first place.
I rewind the video. A fight in a warehouse. The opponent is a giant with tribal tattoos on his face.
Iron Arm takes a beating for two minutes. The audio is ridiculous, blown out. The crowd roars around them, grown men screaming like animals. I mute it. Whoever is filming pushes through the men in front, raises the camera above their heads, and gets a clearer view. He zooms in.
Iron Arm smiles, and he’s wearing that same silver medallion.
He’s bleeding, a split eyebrow drenched in carmine red.
Thick, black eyebrows. His hair is dyed a faded, lifeless blond that turns almost white under the cheap ring lights.
It sticks to his forehead in clumps of sweat and blood.
There’s no vanity there. The cut is uneven, and his dark roots are showing.
His facial bone structure is good, raw, but it’s covered by a map of mistakes: the scar tissue over his brow, the nose that’s clearly been broken more than once, and the eyes—one of them circled by an ugly, swollen, and recent layer of purpled skin.
Somehow, his irises maintain an ethereal clarity, devoid of malice or calculation.
It’s a contradiction. These underground fighters have a hateful glint in their eyes, an ugly, explicit, animalistic hunger.
They charge forward with blind confidence, sniffing out the green of dirty money paid for the quality of a second-rate circus show. But not him.
I rewind the video. The zoom on his face, even at 720p, is clear enough to make out his eyes. A clear, pale blue. Sickening the moment he breaks into a bloody smile. I see his teeth—uneven and sharp, with a distinctly crooked, asymmetrical canine.
He lets the man approach. I slow down the video. Rewind. Zoom. He smiles. Then, Iron Arm throws a left jab, a blur in the low quality. The giant’s chin snaps. His body freezes. And the metal arm comes down.
The immediate knockout shakes the camera. The footage blurs and becomes confusing, then it returns to him.
Why does he smile like that? A useless, illogical question. It hammers at me. He looks around the ring with a relaxed smile.
I instructed Karpov to find a professional in hand-to-hand combat, someone who could take opponents down and keep them on the ground. Iron Arm has trouble on the ground. I saw it, in the collection of footage I could find. I want to see if he’ll lose.
I find mentions on obscure dark web forums of an assault charge in Bakersfield that was mysteriously dropped.
Another mention confirms what Karpov told me—that he was “banned” from the Los Angeles circuit for “unnecessary brutality”.
What, in the hell of an underground fight, could be considered “unnecessary”?
They come for the blood. What did he do that even the primates who feed on this considered excessive?
I open Karpov’s proposal files. Sixty percent.
It’s all been settled for hours. I have no reason to stay locked in my office, much less to continue researching some random man.
I go back to a specific video. The bad camera, the zoom before the knockout. The smile.
For the first time, I feel the answer I’m looking for isn’t purely strategic.
There’s another question beneath it all, one I don’t dare formulate out loud.
And the answer is in that goddamn smile.
The door to my office opens without warning, flooding the room with the harsh light from the hallway. I close the laptop. Only two people are stupid enough to enter without knocking.
“Working late, Leshy?”
Ivan’s voice is loaded with the same old arrogance. He walks in, stopping in front of my desk. Without Vasily by his side, he seems larger, more direct. There’s no one to pull his leash, only Vladimir, his shadow, who would never dare question him.
“I’m finalizing the terms of the agreement with Karpov,” I lie, shuffling some papers that have nothing to do with it.
Ivan lets out a short, humorless laugh. “Karpov called me. Did you know?”
He stares at me, waiting for an explanation. As if I owe him one.
“And?”
The fake smile vanishes. “He said the great Alexei Malakov is going to turn his business into an empire.” He leans in, resting his knuckles on the polished wood of my desk.
“I thought it was strange, Lyosha,” he says, trying to invoke an intimacy he himself helped destroy.
“You called Karpov’s business a ‘glorified dog fight’.
Now you want to be the circus promoter?”
I remain silent, letting him lay out the line of reasoning that Vasily undoubtedly wove for him.
“Come on, I know you,” he continues, straightening up. There’s a genuine frustration in his voice. “You despise these people, Alexei.”
It’s the same expression he used to make at twelve when I’d explain the rules of a board game he didn’t understand, just before he flipped the table out of pure spite.
For an instant, I see the boy with whom I used to build pillow forts on our grandmother’s couch, before we became... this. Rivals orbiting the same black sun. A useless memory that appears uninvited, a fragment of a past that no longer has any use.
I crush it before it can soften anything inside me.
Vasily, no doubt, spent hours whispering in his ear, painting my sudden interest as a secret. As a betrayal.
“While you were satisfied with a handshake and a cheap beer, I secured a majority stake in an asset that can recover everything we lost in Odessa. The old man sent me there to make sure the intelligent part of the deal was handled, and that’s what I did.”
Ivan’s aggression wavers. He runs a hand over his face in a tired gesture that doesn’t suit him. The frustration in his voice returns, but the sharp edge is gone, leaving something more complex than simple, banal hatred.
“Right. You worked your magic,” he says, more quietly. Then he pauses. “Listen.”
I wait. There’s a clumsy attempt to extend a bridge over the abyss we dug between us.
It’s a trap. I just wait for him to set it.
“There are people... saying you’re enjoying your new project a little too much,” he begins, vaguely.
It’s obvious that “people” has a first and last name: Vasily Malakov.
“Saying you’re making solo plays, acting like you own the board.
” He studies me, and a crooked, condescending smile appears on his lips.
“I say that’s bullshit. You don’t have the stomach to be king.
You’re the brain. You wouldn’t last five minutes out there without some muscle to protect you. My muscle.”
There it is.
“So stop this shit of hiding in here,” he says, the tone now sounding like an order disguised as advice. “Act like part of the family. Prove those people wrong. Come with me to the first fight. See the show, stand by my side. Show everyone you still know who’s in charge.”
It’s much simpler than I expected—a public test of loyalty? He expects me to show up and bend the knee?
Perhaps, for a moment, his offer was genuine.
Perhaps there’s a part of Ivan that misses the old dynamic, the certainty of our past. But his genuineness is irrelevant.
Trust is the first bullet you point at your own head.
I don’t trust anyone’s goodwill, much less that of a man who has Vasily whispering in his ear.
Family is a treacherous word—people who know your weaknesses up close and hide them between the lines for the sole purpose of retrieving them later.
To look out for one’s own gain is inherent in a wretched man.
“I’ll consider your proposal,” I lie.
To Ivan’s ear, my lack of resistance sounds like submission. It’s exactly what I want him to hear. A smirk of superiority spreads across his face, and he gives me two pats on the shoulder from across the desk. It triggers an impulse of physical repulsion.
“That’s it, Leshy. I’ll bring some real man’s beers instead of that black shit you drink.”
He turns, walking toward the door. Before opening it, he stops and calls over his shoulder, “Vladimir.”
Vladimir pushes himself off the wall to follow. It’s Ivan’s final punctuation, a reminder that real power—the power to break bones—lies with him.
Then he leaves, closing the door.
Ivan is making a fundamental mistake: he doesn’t see me as a rival. A rival inspires caution. He sees me as a docile pet, just being put back in its place.
And that is the last thing I am.
I have a plan.