ALEXEI #3
He doesn’t need to explain. The name Malakov is more than a surname; it’s an ecosystem, a constellation of stories about loyalty and massacre, about war deals and alliances that last no longer than a pregnancy.
I am one of the few who managed to survive my own bloodline, and if Griffin thought he was facing some random operator, he now knows I am very far from it.
I pick up the tablet from the corner of the desk and light up the screen, opening a file with the most recent fight list from the Circuit.
I slide it within his reach. “Your victory over Ryan impressed the Circuit. There are already five offers for your next fight. Two sponsors are willing to double the previous purse.”
He looks at the tablet and then at me, perplexed.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” he asks, and there’s a resigned, reverent respect in his voice.
The doctor covers Griffin’s stump with a clean bandage and prepares an antibiotic injection. He administers the shot in Griffin’s arm and, without a word, gathers his materials, packs everything into his case, and empties the room without a sideways glance.
Griffin remains motionless, except for the slight tremor in his left—and only—arm. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t move.
His jaw is tight, eyes fixed on the door, but it’s obvious the doctor isn’t what haunts him. The name Malakov is still reverberating in his head.
I don’t press him. I take a glass from the silver tray, fill it with whiskey again, and let it rest before me, not offering it this time.
“The Sacramento circuit,” I say finally, “will soon be dependent on you. The fight purses will only increase, and you’ll have enough money to disappear, if you so choose. But you won’t. Because money was never the main point for you, was it?”
He remains silent, but his neck shortens, his shoulders hunch forward. Griffin has already realized I offer nothing for free.
“You will keep fighting,” I continue. “The challenges will become greater and greater. The audience will feed on your suffering, and you will give them the show they want.”
A humorless, crooked smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. “Weren’t we talking about killing your cousin?”
“We have many things to discuss, it seems.”
“Uh-huh,” he clears his throat, forcing a naturalness that isn’t there. “And what do you get from the fights, besides a private show? You have plenty of money.”
“Influence,” I admit. “Perhaps one day I can explain it better to you,” I lie. I don’t let anyone know anything. It’s a rule—a security measure. “For now, you maintain the facade. You have an agent—keep him. He’s a useful cover.”
He nods slowly, absorbing it. Griffin wasn’t trained for politics, but he senses the dangers in every conversation. “And if I lose?”
“Losing is not in your repertoire,” I say with conviction. “That’s why I bet on you. Just don’t kill anyone—not in the ring. You’re already a regular feature at the police stations, and I don’t need federal investigations in my way, Myrddin Griffin,” I test, for the first time, how the name sounds.
The reaction is immediate and visceral. Griffin’s body stiffens in the armchair. A muscle jumps in his jaw, and his gaze, previously just wary, is now a firing line. He hates the name.
“It’s just Griffin,” he warns, his voice low.
There it is. The given name was shredded in juvenile halls, on police reports, in the failed attempts of some social worker to reconstruct a family of junkies, and who knows what else. What’s left now is just the surname, and even that is already half-corroded.
The research I did while the doctor was treating him at the hotel was frustrating—nothing on the father, a health record for the mother who disappeared before he turned eight, no fixed address after twelve.
The surname Griffin appears as a scribble on his birth certificate, then as a code on rehab files, then as a synonym for disorderly conduct, brawling, or attempted murder.
The rest is dust. Whatever he was, it was ripped from him with methods so primitive that no one ever bothered to document them properly.
I allow myself a minimal smile of respect. “Griffin, then,” I repeat, confirming the code between us.
Perhaps that’s why I like him. There’s no nostalgia to appeal to, no emotional debt to manipulate.
“Outside the ring, I have a role for you,” I continue, and I try out his preferred name, “Griffin. There’s a loose end from an old family business that went terribly wrong.
This loose end was also the target of the man who tried to kill you.
He received an anonymous tip and fled before the killer arrived… ”
It may not seem like it, but Griffin is good at reading people. He narrows his eyes at me, and my poorly disguised lie becomes obvious.
“An anonymous tip from you?” he says, without hesitation.
I smile. Dealing with a presence that isn’t already entangled with the roots of Ivan and Vasily gives me the peculiar freedom to not lie about my own lies.
I couldn’t let Vladimir kill the witness before I questioned him, not now that I had found him.
And, at the same time, I needed to create concrete evidence that Griffin was close to him.
Saving his life—or acting as if I did—with a tip and escape assistance was a bonus; it would build trust that would be useful to me, just as giving Ivan the false information that Griffin works for the Volkovs would.
I only kept my loose end in the room next to Griffin’s long enough to convince Ivan.
Before Vladimir arrived, he was already in another neighborhood.
“You’re perceptive, Griffin. Excellent. All I will ask of you is to deal with this loose end. Cleanly. No mess,” I say, because I know he will make a mess. I’m counting on it. “I’ll have a conversation with him today, and tomorrow, while he thinks he escaped unscathed, you will work your magic.”
“You want me to… kill the guy?” he says, with a grimace.
“I want you to solve it.”
“On the street, that means killing. Why not send one of your guys in their pressed suits?”
He’s still suspicious. I lean back in my chair, observing him. “...You see that there is no one else here, not even a security guard. Just you and me. You’re smart, or you wouldn’t have survived this long. Does no justification cross your mind?”
Griffin studies me, trying to dissect my motivations.
He doesn’t seem uncomfortable, but he isn’t at ease either; he belongs to a lineage of people who are never at home anywhere, not even in their own bodies.
His nature is one of perpetual displacement, instant adaptation, survival by osmosis.
And yet, with every second that passes, I feel he has already understood half of what I am not saying.
I lean forward again, closing the distance between us. “My men in their pressed suits come with their own agendas, ambitions, debts to my family... they are rarely my men for anything beyond a possessive pronoun.”
Griffin, who knows the world from the bottom up, catches the subtext: loyalty is a sham, and violence is a resource like any other. His face softens by half a degree, in an almost imperceptible relief; I’m not bluffing, and he realizes it.
“If I send one of my own, the news of the death would reach the wrong ears before the body even cooled. The message would be distorted, misinterpreted. They would see my hand in it. But you have no baggage. You owe nothing to anyone here. Your loyalty, at the moment, is transactional. Simple.”
Of course, his violence is one of the definitive points. When he acts, I can paint whatever picture I want over it. I can make it look like the work of a rival, the cleanup of one of Ivan’s mistakes. The clean efficiency of my men would only give me another problem to manage.
Griffin reconstructs his own role. He doesn’t like it, but he understands. He understands as few do, in fact: everything that has survived this long has been useful to someone.
He finally clicks his tongue, looking at his own bandaged arm. “And what would the task be, in this case? Solving your loose ends?”
I pull up the tablet again, swipe to a hidden folder, and show him the image: a man in his early forties, hair tied back, sunglasses too dark for a cloudy day, and the expression of someone born tired.
“He goes by Kirill, but he’s used eight names.
He’s holed up in a condo in Arden, but he won’t last there. He never lasts long anywhere.”
He observes the image for a long time, as if wanting to draw the face from the inside out. “Is that all?”
“That’s all,” I confirm. “He’s not with anyone. Leaves no tracks. It’ll be quick and clean.”
Griffin seems disappointed.
He rises from the armchair slowly, testing the balance of his newly patched body. He looks at me one last time, and I think that, behind it all, there is a certain pride in him for reading the entire game without missing a single line.
I offer to shake his hand, and he hesitates.
Griffin stares at my hand for a long second.
It’s no surprise: men like him always expect every approach to be a trap, every cordial gesture a prelude to the next cruelty.
For a second, I imagine what goes on behind those half-closed eyelids: a literature of trauma, entire lines of distrust, encyclopedias of domestic violence, annotated in pencil behind his eyes. The handshake is a minimal ritual, but in the underworld Griffin came from, it’s profane.
When his hand finally meets mine, I feel the geography of his skin: scars crossing the back, a callus on the side that betrays knife training, a little finger that was, at some point, shattered and poorly reset. It’s a hand that has never held anything for very long—except, perhaps, rage.
He looks me in the eyes. Tries to gauge how many levels of lies exist behind my retinas.
“When?”
I release his hand slowly, but I don’t let him escape my gaze.
“Tomorrow night,” I say, and my own voice sounds a tone deeper. “I will be in touch.”
Me, not an intermediary. Myself.