GRIFFIN #2
“And what assurances did he give you?” I ask, moving closer to the door and leaning against the wall, blocking the exit. Kirill notices.
“He... said he would take care of everything. That I would be safe,” he stammers. The arrogance is gone, leaving only a poorly stitched thread of hope.
“Safe,” I repeat, without emotion. I take a sip of beer. “Funny. I haven’t felt very safe lately.”
The fear finally appears in his eyes. His pupils dilate, his breathing shortens. Now he gets it. Now he understands what’s happening.
“Leaving a lot behind?” I ask. “Got a family?”
His face shuts down. “Ah. No.”
“You sure? You sounded uncertain. What about that ring on your finger?”
His lip trembles. “...She has her own family.” Sensing he said the wrong thing, he tries to fix it, “Sometimes you have to be pragmatic, you understand? For the greater good. Some loose ends you have to cut yourself.”
He uses the same expression as Alexei. Loose end. Except he’s talking about his own wife.
Kirill really believes it. The mental gymnastics to turn cowardice into nobility. It’s an art form.
“I get it.”
He continues, “Some people are tools. Others are the hands that wield them. It’s the natural order of things.”
Seraphim.
I’m thinking of him again.
His voice in my head, the same fucked-up story about divine purpose and sacrifice. “This is a divine gift, Myrddin.” The same justification for his own thirst for power and control, dressed up as bar-stool philosophy. I believed him. Maybe I still do.
It’s true: it only sounds beautiful in his voice. It only sounds prophetic when spoken by angels.
Kirill is looking at me again. He tries to arrange his face into some semblance of composure, but every time I look away, he’s picking at the skin around his nails, chewing the cuticles until they bleed.
Some people just know, instinctively, when the air is about to crack with violence.
He’s not one of them, but his body is catching up to the idea.
I place the beer bottle on the counter. The sound of glass on Formica is the only real thing.
Kirill says, “So? Can we go? We’ve wasted enough time.”
I push myself off the counter. He takes a step back, instinctively. The atmosphere in the room has changed, and even an imbecile like him can feel it.
“You know, Kirill...” I begin, “...whether or not you were getting out of here alive was still under internal debate.”
His face contorts in confusion, then panic. “W-what? What are you talking about? We have a deal! Alexei...”
“I was really on the fence,” I continue, taking a step toward him. He stumbles backward, falling into the armchair. “I thought: maybe he’s just another piece of shit trying to survive. The world is full of them.”
I pull the knife from my ankle. The blade catches the dim light from the balcony. Kirill’s eyes widen, fixed on the metal.
“But then you opened your mouth,” I say, stopping in front of him. “To talk about purpose. But only a prophet can talk that shit. You understand?”
He doesn’t.
“No… wait,” he stammers, his eyes fixed on the tip of the blade. “That was just… a figure of speech. A metaphor.”
Seraphim would never use such a cheap word—metaphor. He didn’t have to. He lived the fucking metaphor.
I almost laugh.
Seraphim was patient zero, the prophet with eyes of fire who spat the gospel of violence as if it were the only truth. He made it sound beautiful.
“Fuck your metaphor,” I mutter, more to myself than to him. “Just don’t think I’m doing this solely because I was told to. Alexei doesn’t own me.”
Outside, a distant siren cries for some other poor bastard, in some other alley.
“Wait,” he tries. “We can negotiate! Whatever you want, money, information, I have it all. Just tell me what Alexei promised you, I’ll double the offer!”
“He didn’t promise me anything,” I say, the only truth I’ve told today.
The siren outside dies. Kirill has stopped shaking. He understands there’s no deal to be made.
I let the silence devour him. He fills it with everything he’s ever regretted, every betrayal and every time he stepped out of line.
Probably wishing he had run farther, or at least had drunk that whiskey, or maybe just called whoever wore the other half of that wedding ring.
The best part about endings is how they clarify what matters; in Kirill’s case, what matters is that no one is going to save him, not even Alexei.
Kirill is nothing. He’s just a bad echo of a voice I would give anything to forget. And I hate echoes.
I look at the distorted reflection of my face on the polished blade.
I don’t recognize myself. I see something else there, something older and uglier.
“This,” Seraphim once told me, with my blood on his face, “only we understand, Myrddin.”
The blade rises.
No mess, he said. That’s one part I have no intention of following.
I always have the same dream.
It’s always the same pieces shuffled in a shitty lottery: him, me, the smell of rain on the pavement, fresh blood in the air, and the feeling of floating a few inches from my own body.
Today the dream starts in Bakersfield, but not the real Bakersfield.
A dreamlike, saturated version, where the walls of our shitty apartment are made of cardiac muscle, pulsing with some anticipated anxiety.
It doesn’t really rain in Bakersfield, but here it does—a thick, constant rain, beating against the windows that never closed properly.
The scene is the same as always: Seraphim, at ease, sitting on the edge of the sofa torn by time and fights, his shirt open to his chest, the knuckles of his fingers still damp with blood.
The other guy, this time’s guy, is tied to an office chair, his legs trembling, half-dead with fear before he’s actually dead.
And me, as always, leaning against the doorframe, pretending I’m not participating, pretending I’m just a spectator to this grotesque theater.
But I’m not. I never was. My presence is part of the script, and Seraphim knows this better than anyone.
He gives me a look with an apology in it, or maybe a cry for help.
He begins the questions, the same questions, always in that low, affectionate voice.
The voice that could convince a pig to happily walk into the slaughterhouse.
In the dream, I know everything that’s going to happen before it happens.
I know Seraphim will take his time. He’ll explore the borders of physical and psychological pain.
He’ll poke, provoke, pull out confessions that don’t matter to anyone.
He’ll laugh the way only he could: a dry, joyless sound, with the very concept of happiness being an inside joke that only he understands.
I feel the blood rising in my throat, I feel my stomach churn, I want to scream, but I don’t.
I stay there, static, part of the furniture.
Until finally, in the dream as in life, I can’t stand to watch anymore.
I step onto the stage, gently push Seraphim aside, and end it all with a clean cut.
I hear the guy in the chair’s sigh of relief, and for a moment, I believe he’s thanking me for ending it quickly.
But it’s just an impression. He’s already dead.
The next second, the dream cuts to the motel room.
I’m on the floor, cleaning the knife on the back of my sleeve, and Seraphim is leaning against the window, looking out at the world, waiting for some divine sign.
The neon light from a pawn shop near the highway paints his face blue, then red, then blue again. Police sirens.
“You didn’t have to do that.” He says it without looking at me. There’s no censure, no anger. Just weariness. A weariness I understand to the bone.
“The guy was already broken,” I say, without lifting my head. “No one deserves to suffer for nothing, Sera. Not even scum like him.”
“I know,” he replies, and his laugh is an involuntary spasm. “But it’s like I need to feel that, you know? Just to be sure I’m still real.” He turns, and now he looks directly at me. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop.”
“Everyone has their vices,” I murmur, pulling the cloth back between my fingers. “Yours just makes more of a mess.”
He approaches, slowly. When he crouches in front of me, he seems like a mirage, so close I can count the fine scars on his jawline, the almost imperceptible tremor of the muscles in his neck.
He takes the knife from my hand, gently, and places it on the floor beside us.
Then he takes my hands, as if they were delicate. As if I hadn’t just killed someone.
“Myrddin,” he says. My name tastes like something forbidden in his mouth. “You always see. You know when I go too far. Promise you’ll pull me back if it happens again?”
In the dream, my heart races. I want to say yes, that I always will, that I will forever, but I can’t say anything.
I just nod, my face burning with shame, with desire, with fear.
His fingers trace over my knuckles, where the skin is already starting to heal, and I feel like crying and laughing at the same time.
Like killing and dying. Like staying there forever, trapped in that limbo of brutal tenderness.
He rests his forehead against mine, and we’re just two boys trying not to fall apart.
The dream always ends the same way: I wake up with his name in my throat and cold sweat running down my back.
I sit up in bed, gasping. I bring my right hand to my face and feel the artificial weight, the phantom absence of what was mine. I shouldn’t have slept, much less with the prosthesis on.