Chapter GRIFFIN #3
A black sedan is parked across the street, headlights off, the moment I step onto the sidewalk. It’s not really trying to hide. My babysitters.
Alexei isn’t hiding me anymore. Every expensive display piece comes with insurance.
I cross the street. I stop by the passenger window, dark with tint. I wait a second.
Nothing.
Then, I knock on the glass. Twice.
There’s a moment of hesitation inside. The window rolls down a few inches.
One of the men inside is one of the ones who picked me up from the locker room. Stone-faced, empty eyes. He looks bored.
“Seriously?” I say.
He is impassive. “Mr. Malakov’s orders, sir,” he says. Calling me sir is ridiculous. “Just ensuring your safety.”
I roll my eyes. Fuck. I can take care of myself.
I walk down the sidewalk with my hands in my pockets. The black sedan follows me at five kilometers an hour. It’s the most expensive, most intimidating babysitter in the world. The situation is so ridiculous it makes me laugh. I walk slower on purpose.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. Marcus’s flood of messages, which hasn’t stopped since I left that locker room.
GRIFFIN FOR GOD’S SAKE ANSWER
Where are you?
Did they take you?
Are you okay?
What the hell is going on?
I roll my eyes, typing a short reply as I walk.
handling business
Business with the Malakovs?!?!?!?!
those guys are CRAZY
You know what I heard the other day?
That they COOKED a guy
Poured oil on him, put CEMENT on his feet and left him there to boil in the midday sun
I ignore it. I put my phone back in my pocket.
The neon light of the 24-hour convenience store on the corner comforts me. This place isn’t as fancy as all the others from the past few hours.
I walk in, and the bell on the door makes a shrill sound. The black car stops across the street, waiting.
I go straight to the counter. I automatically stare at the brand I always smoke, but the name doesn’t come to my tongue.
An unwelcome image flashes in my mind: Alexei’s slim silver cigarette case, the smell of the expensive tobacco he smokes.
What the hell, I think, but I still point to any dark pack of shit.
“That one.”
The sleepy attendant moves to get my order. I look at more desperate messages from Marcus. An idiot telling me ways to die and torture methods used by the Malakovs. I leave him talking to himself.
I look at the convex security mirror on the ceiling. It reflects the front door and the back of the sedan waiting for me. It’s silent. At this time of night, it seems like only I am in the neighborhood and a few heads in nearby establishments.
But something’s wrong.
By the back door, there’s a silhouette. Tall, thin.
I look for it outside the mirror.
The hair is too light under the fluorescent light, white. Confident posture, one hand in his pocket, leaning against a shelf.
No.
I rub my eyes.
It’s my head projecting shit that doesn’t exist. The stress, the drinking, the lack of sleep.
The figure doesn’t disappear. It turns slowly, it feels my gaze. The face is in shadow, but I see it. The fine features. The clear eyes. There is no surprise in his gaze. There is only… recognition.
He turns. Disappears through the back of the store.
Wait.
I force the scream back in.
It’s a hallucination. I’m just seeing ghosts.
“That’ll be five-fifty,” the attendant says.
I throw a random bill on the counter.
“Sir?”
I grab the cigarettes. I shove them into my pocket any which way. I leave the attendant calling after me with change for a too-high bill.
I’m going crazy.
I walk to the back door in a hurry. Don’t vanish, a part of me wishes. Don’t vanish again. I try to be fast enough to catch the damn ghost hallucination.
I pull the door open forcefully. It’s an alley. I look around. A dumpster. Trash bags, stomped-out cigarettes, a flickering light.
I take a step. The flimsy door closes slowly behind me. I feel the gaze. His icy gaze. The feeling that has haunted me for all these years, the feeling that, no matter how hard I try, won’t leave my fucking head.
“Myrddin.”
The voice.
I turn towards it. That fucking voice.
And there he is. The ghost. The angel, leaning against the wall. Dissecting me with his eyes, calmly, with providence.
I touch the pendant of my necklace. Saint Michael.
A passage. On that day Michael, the great commander, will prevail, always standing by your people.
The memory of that same voice reciting biblical verses.
That same voice blessing a gift—a Saint Michael necklace—to the heretic who never even believed in a god.
I don’t know when I approached. But I did. The ghost. Right here, in front of me. Older, with longer hair, with more tired eyes. But as beautiful as he always was.
I raise my hands. One trembles more than the other. The flesh always feels more. The flesh.
I touch his face. Cold skin. Pale. It doesn’t suit my fingers, and I only feel it with one hand, and he doesn’t move. He stays. This time, he stays.
I don’t recognize myself. The voice comes out, but it’s strange. It doesn’t seem to have come from me when I say, “You’re real.”
The ghost doesn’t smile. His clear, tired eyes drop. To my trembling hand on his face. Then to my eyes. He covers my hand with his. It’s not for me. I could never deserve that touch.
“I am,” he says.
In the beauty of this face, my hands. His over mine—my real one. The only one. And the metal.
The fucking metal.
The veins in his irises are visible. His eyes.
Something happens, and I don’t see properly.
Everything blurs. His eyes—the veins in the unpigmented irises—looked at me like that once, a long time ago.
There wasn’t as much warmth. But it was that color.
It was that color, looking. A machete can’t cut through human bone.
So they hit. Until it broke. And he watched.
It was for him they hit. It was for him. Me, too. I didn’t fight. I deserved it, at some point. I let it happen.
I can’t breathe.
“Myrddin.”
His voice.
And a soft touch.
His hands, leaving mine. They touch my face now. They are soft. It’s the same silky texture. It’s the same thing preserved in my dreams.
“Breathe. You are here,” he says. Everything he says is prophecy. Truth bends to him.
And I let it bend.
The alley. Dark, narrow, ugly. A sin to contain him here. You are here.
It’s true. I am here.
I feel both my arms. It’s a tingling that doesn’t exist. How long has it been since I’ve had this sensation? A defective discomfort of not knowing where my nerves are sending impulses. To nothing. To a piece of metal.
I see him again.
Seraphim.
I’m breathless. I haven’t done anything, there’s nothing here but him, and I suffocate. His voice gives me the antidote and poisons me.
His thumbs move. They pass over the scars, the new cuts on the sides of my face.
“I am with you,” he says.
That’s the fucking problem. And yet, I let him anchor me. I let myself sink into a version of the story where he really was with me. A version where things didn’t go so wrong. A version where he stayed.
He slides his hands. He touches my jaw, my neck.
“Are you with me?” he asks, softly.
I shake my head. I can see him, now. The tremor isn’t as strong. But those eyes still move me in every possible way.
“I am,” I say. My voice comes out raspy, strange to my ears. Exhausted.
He pulls his hands away from me. I want to ask him not to.
“I needed to talk to you,” he says. It sounds intimate, low.
After so many years, Sera. After so many years picking up the pieces of what you left, alone.
I try to find the anger. It’s my armor, the only thing that protects me. I open my mouth to ask why he took so long, to tell him he can go to hell.
But I’m still holding his face. He’s still looking at me. And he’s here.
The twitch of a smile appears. I can’t.
“I always need to talk to you,” I say.
I look down. The only light I ever had was him. Suddenly, I’m a teenager again.
His hands find the pendant of my necklace.
“You kept it,” he says.
I force the courage to look at him again. And fuck, that smile.
“You are a part of me,” I say.
He closes his eyes. In pain.
“I know,” he whispers.
He lets go of the necklace. I let go of his face. It burns where I touched him.
He takes a deep breath. Then, an urgency surfaces in his tired eyes. The urgency of when things were about to go very, very wrong.
“Listen,” he says. “I came to warn you.”
None of this feels real. Seeing him again is… distant.
“About what?”
“I saw your escort,” he says. The black cars. That’s why we’re in the back. “You’re… in a difficult spot right now.” He pauses. Even with his urgency, with everything that burns in him, he speaks with a calming firmness. It’s always been like this. “Vasily Malakov is digging into you.”
Fucking uncanny valley: Seraphim saying that damn name. The now and the before merging into a temporal paradox, in tangled threads of yarn.
A spot hurts between my eyebrows. I squeeze it. “Who the fuck is that?”
“You were seen with his brother. Alexei Malakov.”
I never knew any of those Malakovs’ names before Alexei. Vasily. I repeat in my head.
“They’ve been at war for some time. I don’t know what your arrangement is, but the Malakovs are unstable.
It’s not worth getting involved, Myrddin, for either of them.
Vasily will try to kill you if he thinks you’re a problem, no matter what protection the Malakovs have promised you. The bullet always comes from within.”
The image of the dinner, the fake smiles, the contained hatred. Of course the fucking bullet comes from within. But Alexei seemed focused on his cousin. Why didn’t he say anything about his brother?
Seraphim opens his mouth and hesitates.
“...I’m selfish. And I… I’d feel good if you stayed alive.”
I feel it again. The spasms, the contractions threatening to return.
“Please,” he whispers.
His plea breaks me in a way that anger never could. I see him. I want him to know that. Beyond the myth of the angel. Beyond the radiance he created for himself.
I thought that, today, there would only be a caricature of him. Someone who no longer fit the man I knew. But there isn’t. It’s like before.
How am I going to reconcile this? How do I reconcile the one who gave the order for all the blows of that machete with the one who still cares?
If he came trying to kill me, maybe there would still be something for me. I could still squeeze anger from somewhere.
“Lucian,” I say. His name—his real name—sounds strange in my mouth after so many years.
He looks away. I see you.
Then, he spies the alley entrance.
“I need to go,” he says. He pulls away from me. “Your escort will come looking for you any minute.”
Alexei’s babysitters. I had forgotten about them. There’s no way to think about anything but him.
“Be careful, Myrddin,” he says one last time.
I want to ask him to stay. I want to scream for him to come back. And I can’t.
He disappears into the dark of the alley.
My legs give out.
I slide down the cold brick wall until I’m sitting on the dirty ground, among the trash and stomped-out cigarettes.
And I cry. It’s an ugly sob for everything that could have been.
For a fantasy. For an idiotic thought that things could have continued as they were for so long, with him, if this fucking arm were still real—for the fucking angel who gave me the only light I ever knew.
I don’t know how long I stay there. But, at some point, I hear footsteps. I also create this fantasy: Seraphim returning to the alley. I don’t want to think about it, but it’s automatic. His memory always is.
“Mr. Griffin,” I hear a voice. One of Alexei’s men. “We need to go. The area isn’t safe.”
“Get the fuck out,” I say. I don’t lift my head. I let him think whatever he wants.
His hands are suddenly on me, on my arms. He lifts me from the ground with impersonal efficiency. Like a bag of trash.
I push him hard.
“Go fuck yourself,” I say. Automatic.
It’s the stone-faced man, with empty eyes.
“I know the fucking way,” I say as I turn. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
He doesn’t draw his weapon. I feel him watching me, following me. And disappearing, somewhere in the middle of the street. Back into the car, I imagine.
I walk back home, pretending to have some control.