Chapter ALEXEI
ALEXEI
Vasily is panicking.
My men report discreet “conversations” behind the scenes.
Ivan’s men, on the other hand, report not-so-discreet interrogations.
My brother is sniffing around, desperate, trying to catch the scent of the ghost who eliminated his key witness.
He’s sniffing in the right direction—Ivan—but for all the wrong reasons, convinced that the brutality of the crime scene is the unmistakable signature of our most passionate cousin.
While Vasily’s paranoia consumes him, the source of all this new revenue—the fight circus—thrives.
Karpov is happy. I gave him the title of “Chief Promoter”, a generous percentage, and a front-row seat.
He watches the fights, drinks expensive beer, and feels like a king, unaware that everything operates under my rules.
A satisfied puppet is the best kind of puppet.
And at the center of it all, Griffin.
Vasily would never connect such a public and extravagant figure to a dirty, quiet job like Kirill’s elimination. He’d see Griffin and think: “another one of Ivan’s stupid toys that Alexei is monetizing.”
And in that, I was right. The moment he found Kirill, the interrogations of Ivan’s men began. Only later, seeing us together, did the disease of distrust spread.
Everything is going well. Almost too well.
Then the report from my head of security arrives. It’s concise, but one word irritates me: compromised.
“The asset was found in an alley behind the convenience store,” he says through the communicator, trying to keep his tone neutral, but there’s too much hesitation. “He was… emotionally compromised.”
I’m allergic to that word. Compromised. It’s a filter, not a fact. A soft interpretation, a layer of subjectivity over what should be concrete. I try to remember the last time I allowed such imprecision in my operations and conclude that I’ve never tolerated it.
“Define ‘compromised,’” I say.
There’s a hesitation. “…He was crying, sir. He refused to move. We had to physically extract him, but without violent resistance.”
I hang up without responding.
Crying. Griffin. I try to imagine his face in an expression that goes beyond his usual combination of sarcastic calculation and bitterness.
The concept of tears on Griffin’s face is so incongruous.
Perhaps it’s a bought report? Or real, a performance by Griffin himself to manipulate my men?
Genuine weakness? But I don’t work with “maybes”.
I work with facts, derived from data, from images, from patterns. Not with tears. Not with “compromised”.
I open the surveillance network. First, the cameras in Griffin’s apartment.
I see his message on my phone, the sardonic signature.
I see him leaving the building, with long, confident strides, shoulders straight.
I fast-forward the clips. He returns less than an hour later, accompanied by two of my men.
His walk has changed; each step is heavy, his head is down, his face is swollen and pale, his cheekbones are wet with trails that even Sacramento’s dry weather couldn’t erase.
The Griffin who returns is not the same one who left.
My head of security’s description was, if anything, an understatement.
I pull the reports from the last forty-eight hours, cross-referencing them with intercepted messages, calls, pings on the cell phones of all relevant people. There’s nothing unusual in the period before the event.
I expand my search to cameras scattered throughout the city, not just mine, but also public ones, those from other companies, and any private ones I bought at data auctions. I assemble a mosaic of images from around the convenience store in the hours before and after.
The visualization confirms: Griffin is followed by the black sedan with two of my men inside. He enters the convenience store, talks to the clerk.
I fast-forward the frames. Griffin looks back. He seems to have seen a ghost. He throws money on the counter, grabs the pack of cigarettes, and exits the camera’s view towards what looks like the beginning of a side door.
Here, the coverage ends. It’s a shadow, a strategic blind spot no more than ten meters wide.
It’s irritating, humiliating, that a professional like me still depends on physical hardware and the residual limitations of the real world.
The alley is out of reach of all lenses, except for a blurred reflection that appears, by chance, on the glass of the beverage refrigerator inside the store—an artifact, a coincidence, but enough to capture a silhouette: tall, thin, light hair.
Exactly in the blind spot. On purpose? It’s not Griffin. It’s not one of my men.
I go back to the footage of the store’s facade.
The black sedan remains parked for ten minutes until one of my men gets out.
He checks the store, and then goes straight to the back—the way you exit when you don’t want to be seen.
Then, in the cameras’ view, Griffin returns, followed by my man, with red eyes and the walk of someone who has lost something.
I replay the images in slow motion, analyzing the rhythm of the steps, the micro-gestures of the body, the exact time between each movement.
Before leaving the camera’s field of vision, Griffin hesitated at the store door, looked around.
But Griffin knows he’s always being watched. Still, he walked into the alley.
Why would Griffin, knowing the risk, agree to walk into a blind spot?
The traffic camera next to the alley is at the wrong angle. I try the warehouse one… and it’s static. Out of order for “maintenance”. Too convenient.
I pull the ambient audio from the surroundings. Not all cameras capture sound, and those that do only pick up traffic noise, a broken refrigerator, a bottle on the asphalt.
The alley file is a black box. I have the before and after, but not the main event.
Griffin met someone. Someone who managed to dismantle him in less than five minutes, someone professional enough to move through blind spots.
And I have no idea who it is beyond a vague silhouette. The lack of data is a threat.
I check the current footage. Griffin is, at this moment, being monitored by more than four cameras, in silence, sitting on the couch, staring at the wall like a prisoner in solitary confinement.
I want to ask how he is.
No. I stifle the idea. I need to understand what happened. Ivan wouldn’t be so careful, Vasily wouldn’t have the means to upset him like this. Not even I would.
I sigh, pressing my temples. This is a problem. If something really important had happened, would he have contacted me?
I force myself to bury that question. I have commitments and cannot cancel them without concrete evidence of a problem.
I get up from my chair for another sleepless night.
“Are you seeing the old man today?”
A reminder flashes red on the car’s digital dashboard: Monthly visit.
Ivan sighs on the other end of the line. “I’ll go later. Aunt… uh, Angela called. She wants to discuss the costs of the new nursing team. As if I understand a fucking spreadsheet.”
He says the name with little certainty. Ivan is the only one who refers to her as a real relative, albeit with reservations. Perhaps that’s why she only calls him. My stepmother. I wonder how long it will take until she starts hitting on one of the heirs when the source dries up.
“Leave the costs to me,” I cut him off. “Just be there at four. Has Vasily shown any signs of life?”
“I don’t know,” Ivan replies, too quickly. “I haven’t spoken to him.”
A lie. Or an omission. It’s the same thing. His tone changed. There’s something he’s not telling me.
I grip the steering wheel. The dashboard glows, projecting an animated weather avatar: cloudy, risk of storm.
My mood syncs with the meteorology. What the hell are you not telling me, Ivan?
The truth is, I don’t know who found Griffin in that blind spot.
I don’t even know who is manipulating the variables now.
The feeling, for me, is like losing control of the chessboard for a few seconds—and the mere possibility repulses me.
“Really?” I press.
Ivan stutters. “Really. Uh, by the way, your new fighter,” he begins. As subtle as a fucking mastodon. “The kid’s good. Brutal as hell. I liked him.”
Brutal.
He is. In more ways than one. I remember the smell of dried blood in his blond hair, the dry look at the beginning of each confrontation, and then the softness of his face when he broke down in front of me.
His voice, hoarse and breathless in this car.
His weight on my lap. The ridiculous sound of the horn.
His laugh against my mouth. The stain on my twenty-thousand-dollar suit, the way he looked at me after everything. Alex.
A disaster. A complete deviation from the plan. And, for one fucked-up moment, the only thing that mattered.
“Lyosha?”
I force the memory to the back of my mind. Focus.
I clear my throat. “He’s efficient,” I say.
What would break a man like Griffin?
The silence stretches. Sacramento drags in the background like a third-rate diorama, all cracked concrete, lawyer billboards, sick trees. Behind me, in the rearview mirror, I see the escort: two dark cars, tinted windows, men paid to die before me.
“…I really didn’t talk to him,” Ivan says. “To Vasily.”
The denial comes out of nowhere, answering a question I didn’t ask. It’s the clearest confession he could give me. Not only did he talk to Vasily; the conversation made him nervous enough that he felt the need to lie about it so awkwardly.
I don’t confront him. Not now.
“Good,” I say, pretending to believe every word. “Keep it that way.”
“Right,” he replies, almost relieved, almost fearful. “I’ll meet you inside.”