ALEXEI #4
He takes a step back. He glances at me before picking up the untouched glass of whiskey from the table and downing it.
“I have to admit, you surprised me,” he says with a frown, sliding his fingers along the rim of the glass, fitting it back into the wet circle it had left on the wood. “I’ve never been recruited like this before.”
“A first time for everything, isn’t there?”
Maybe he’s pondering if he’ll hunt me down one day. Maybe he’s already decided. I realize that, for some reason, I am tense too.
I don’t usually feel this.
“For me, yes,” he says.
He turns and walks out without looking back. I’m left alone in the silence of my office. The tightness in my chest does not ease.
My eyes fix on the bloodstain on my Tabriz rug. The mark he left.
It’s a stain that will never come out, and I know this for a fact because I feel no desire whatsoever to call for it to be cleaned.
Some investments require you to accept the loss. And, in this case, perhaps the loss is the asset itself.
This city, at night and through the window of this temporary apartment, is ugly—a myriad of dead lights.
The office was on the thirtieth floor of the most anodyne building imaginable, with a beige marble facade and a stainless steel elevator.
Perfect for someone who needed to disappear among the numbers of others.
A knock on the door: three taps, as arranged. Kirill Denisov. The man who, hours before, was just a pixelated face in Griffin’s dossier, now trembles in the flesh in my office. His blazer is wrinkled, stained with sweat under the arms. His loose collar is the beginning of a downfall.
Kirill enters. He avoids my gaze, preferring to analyze the walls, the furniture arrangement, even the generic paintings on the walls. With every second, the distance between his pose of self-sufficiency and his real desperation grew.
“Sit down, Kirill,” I say, pointing to the old armchair in front of me. He hesitates.
“I’d rather stand,” he says, forcing dignity.
“As you wish.”
I pour myself a whiskey, purposefully not offering him any.
The trick is simple: if he asks for one, he’s trying to seem less vulnerable; if he refuses, he’s trying to show self-control.
He chooses the latter, with his arms crossed and one foot slightly behind the other, ready to flee. But without the courage.
“Who are you? Were you the one who called? The one who warned me about Ivan’s man?”
I drink slowly, in no hurry to answer. “I’m the reason you’re still breathing,” I say. “Isn’t that enough for now?”
He lets out a nervous laugh. “Nothing is enough when you have a price on your head.”
“If I wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be talking,” I continue, enjoying how he swallows his pride in silence. “I would have let Ivan settle your debts the old-fashioned way.”
Sweat drips down his temple. “What do you want, then? Money? I don’t have—“
“I know exactly how much you have,” I cut in, before he could try any bargaining. “Vasily Malakov paid for your silence after the disaster in Odessa. Which leads me to the question that must be keeping you up at night.”
I watch Kirill squirm, a man so used to lying that he no longer notices when he’s being manipulated in return.
“Why would they send an animal to slit your throat, if Vasily had already paid you to disappear?”
He has no answer. His pupils dilate. His nostrils flare, searching for air. The panic is genuine, but what really disarms him is the doubt: do I know more about his own fate than he does?
“You don’t know, do you?” I continued. “It’s because you don’t understand how my family works. Ivan is an idiot, Vasily is a traitor. You were just an unlucky bastard caught in the middle of this fight.”
“I don’t know about any betrayal,” he tries, but his tone betrays the failure even to someone who has never heard him lie before. “The deal in Odessa went wrong. It happens. There was a federal informant.”
“Vasily doesn’t make that kind of mistake. That was deliberate sabotage.”
He takes a step back, finally sitting down. His whole body is shrunk, his eyes trying to identify in me the source of his death sentence.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he mutters, “they already paid me. Why eliminate me?”
I omit that this is my fault. Instead of telling him it’s because I started a story about a declared enemy of the family planning to question him, I say, “Who knows. Vasily might have changed his mind. Decided he couldn’t take a risk with you.”
He narrows his eyes, trying to find some logic. Finally, he just says, “What do you want from me?”
“Proof. The middleman’s name. The money trail. What really happened that night.”
The battle happens inside him: loyalty suppressed by fear, hope replaced by the instinct for survival. “I don’t know who the middleman was,” he tries, but he knows it won’t stick.
I stand up, walk slowly to the bar, and pour more whiskey. The sound of the ice hitting the glass is the timekeeper of this little torture. “There’s always a name, Kirill. Always someone to take the blame.”
He remains silent. He looks out the window, as if there were some comfort out there. He only finds the dead lights of Sacramento, reminding him that, here, no one is irreplaceable.
He wavers. “You won’t protect me if I talk.”
“You’re already dead to them,” I say, one of the only truths he’s entitled to know. “To me, you’re only useful if you talk.”
He doesn’t need much.
“I heard the name. I didn’t see the face. Seraphim. That’s what Vasily called him.”
The name carries an absurd gravity. Vasily dared to outsource things.
“The money trail?”
“Vasily used a shell company. The accounts are laundered through consulting contracts…”
“Did you keep copies? Information?”
“I wrote down an account number…”
“That’ll do.”
I take a burner phone from the drawer and slide it across the table to him, along with a small piece of paper. “Write. On the phone, there’s a pre-programmed number. They’ll give you an ID, a passport, and a one-way ticket,” I lie. “Don’t try to be clever. I’ll know.”
The man writes a sequence of numbers on the paper and takes the phone as if it were a sacred relic. His shoulders slump, and the entire survivor’s pose evaporates. He gets up, thanks me in a pathetic whisper, and leaves the office at a run.
He thinks he got away unscathed.
Vasily pretends to read Karpov’s drone route report, but I know the choreography of his eyes well: they go restlessly over the lines, hunting for flaws, searching for the exact point where they can insert the blade and twist.
“The profit projections for the southern route seem optimistic,” Vasily declares, sprinkled with false casualness. “Do you really trust Karpov’s ability to manage a 30% increase in volume without something... getting lost along the way?”
“The projections aren’t Karpov’s,” I say. “They’re mine. Based on the security and logistics updates I implemented last week. Karpov’s only function now is to make sure his thugs don’t trip over the new servers.”
Vasily smiles. The silence that follows is a passive denial, a protest by omission.
He hates to admit losing territory. He hates even more to admit that I was the one who dislodged him.
Before, Ivan ran this operation like an irascible drunk: with shouts, cheap testosterone, and promises of violence for anyone who crossed the line.
Now, with my intervention, everything runs with precision, and Vasily finds himself caged by processes he cannot corrupt.
He doesn’t like processes that he cannot corrupt.
He tries one last offensive, flipping through the report. “And what about the Volkovs? If they discover the routes, not even all your ‘efficiency’ will prevent the losses.”
“The paranoia is flattering, Vasily, but the Volkovs are too busy with their own territories to respond with attacks. And you know that. Don’t waste my time with unlikely scenarios,” I finish, placing the sheet back in the envelope in front of me.
After taking Odessa from us, the Volkovs have only been organizing their own operations. Although they were alert to possible retaliation from us, they are not part of my list of concerns—attacking again now is out of character for them.
His gaze narrows in a glimpse of the old Vasily—the man who once slit a Yakuza consultant’s throat with a bottle cap just to prove a point during a business dinner. But today, he has no more blades at hand, only logical arguments, and those have bled enough.
I want him to feel it. I want him to see that there’s no more room for his kind of subtlety. We are beyond that.
Before Vasily can try a new trick, the door is thrown open violently. Ivan bursts in, breathing heavily and wearing a freshly brewed rage.
He freezes when he sees Vasily.
“Ivan,” Vasily sings, forcing a cordial tone. “Don’t you know how to knock anymore?”
Ivan ignores Vasily and aims at me. “I need a word. Urgent.”
Vasily arches an eyebrow, curving a fake smile. “Whatever you have to say, Vania, you can say it in front of me.”
Ivan grinds his teeth. He wants to speak, but he can’t. Not while Vasily is here, turning every sentence into ammunition for the next round of internal politics.
I take advantage of the theater. I close my tablet and place it on the table with all the calm in the world. “Vasily,” I say simply. The message is an eviction notice.
For a moment, Vasily doesn’t move—he weighs responses, calculates repercussions, imagines how this gesture will be interpreted. When he finally stands, he adjusts his suit with a sharp tug and gives Ivan one last look. This affront will be remembered.
He leaves in silence. Ivan waits only the minimum necessary time before advancing to my desk, his hands clenched into fists and sweat gathering at his hairline. He’s on the edge between fear and fury.
“Vladimir’s gone,” he says.
I feign surprise. “What do you mean?”
“He hasn’t reported since last night. He went to check that lead on the Volkovs’ agent. The fighter.”
“The one with the mechanical arm,” I feign interest.
“Yes! I went to the hotel myself today. The room was clean. Spotless. As if no one had ever been there.” He pauses, and his eyes move quickly, trying to catch a reaction from me. “No trace. Nothing. No blood, no sign of a struggle. Even the bed was made, Alexei.”
I remain silent long enough to let him digest the helplessness of his own account.
It’s not just Vladimir who has disappeared, but Kirill too, though Ivan doesn’t yet know that I know who he is.
His panic must be escalating: acting behind Vasily’s back already sounded bad, let alone losing his best soldier and losing sight of a man who knew too much.
“This isn’t good, Vania,” I say. “This sounds like professional work.”
Ivan swallows hard. The anger on his face begins to fade, replaced by that primal fear, the certainty that he is dealing with a threat that surpasses him on every level. He realizes he wasn’t defeated by some random guy.
“We have to strike back,” he says, but the sentence comes out dead, without a pulse. “We have to find Karpov and find out where he found that fighter in the first place, and if Karpov is also—“
“No,” I interrupt. “It was recklessness that put you in this situation—and now, that’s what they’re betting on.”
I rise, pushing my chair back with rehearsed precision.
“Let me handle this. I’ll use Karpov to get to the fighter without raising suspicion. Until then, you do nothing that could expose us. Understood?”
Ivan hesitates. He has always hated taking orders—especially from me—but he knows he has no alternatives. Finally, he nods with a short, poisoned gesture.
This worked better than expected: Vasily is out of the picture, Ivan is terrified, and instead of being a risk, he has become a hostage of his own inefficiency. I just need to make sure to keep them isolated, feeding them different suspicions that all revolve around the same axis: me.
And I will make sure of it. Griffin will be my confirmation piece.
It’s a good move: turning the enemy’s knight into your own queen without anyone even noticing the difference.