Chapter ALEXEI #3
He notices my movement. He turns his head with minimal effort, but his eyes dart, alive, betrayed by his own body. I try to measure the interval between recognition and command. He never calls me son, never allows himself the luxury of investing in affection. Only business. Always.
“Father.”
He ignores the greeting. “Reports on the southern expansion,” he says. His voice is hoarse but still calibrated. The air passes through the nasal cannula, hissing softly.
“They are already on your desk,” I reply. I approach, sit in the vintage leather armchair beside the bed. “The numbers are correct. The margin is forty-six percent above the last forecast. Even with the increase in transportation costs.”
He digests the information without blinking. His gaze always strips my sentences, looking for fat, lies, incompetence.
“The flow?” He doesn’t need to explain. I know he’s talking about the money laundering arms, the international transfers, the hundreds of micropayments shuffled around the world to disguise the origin of the money.
He asks because it’s the only sector he never fully handed over to anyone—only delegated, temporarily, to Vasily, the less brilliant and more predictable brother. Vasily knows how to keep the gears turning, but he wouldn’t invent a new machine if his life depended on it.
“The inflows remain clean,” I respond. “Vasily has done a good job, but I see some redundancies that can be eliminated.”
He looks at me sideways. He must be trying to distinguish if my answer is a kiss of a dagger or just a sign of my boredom with the old way of doing things. Between us, there were never any illusions: I want total control. He knows that. Always has.
His left hand is covered with bluish spots with his fingers stiff, but he still raises one. “Reduce the layers. Too much noise attracts attention.”
“I’m already taking care of it,” I say.
Now, he closes his eyes. His chest rises and falls irregularly, but I’ve grown accustomed to this rhythm.
Before all this, he never allowed me to see him sick.
Not even vulnerable. Now he imposes the illness itself as a staging of his power over the narrative.
There’s nothing dignified about it, and he makes it seem like there is.
He pretends that every strand of hair stuck to his forehead, every crack in his voice, is a deliberate choice.
Excessive smoking, in fact, was a deliberate choice. It would carbonize his lungs sooner or later.
“I hear you’ve got a new fighting dog,” he says. “A cripple. From Ivan’s circuit.”
The word cripple barely comes out. There’s a subtext of revulsion, a judgment not just of the choice, but of who makes it. He’s never content to attack the object.
“He’s an investment, father. Not a dog,” I reply. “He has the potential to generate considerable profit.”
“You’ve always had a weakness for broken things, Alexei. Like your mother.”
Her mention, after so many years. Just to compare me to the woman he broke and discarded. A repetition of inherited weakness.
I force myself to respond. “Broken things are easier to remold in your own image.”
He smiles, or tries to. The muscle that controls the smile has already been partially overcome by medication, so the effect is grotesque, a grimace between mockery and pain.
“And Vasily? Does he approve of your new… broken toy?”
He knows. Of course, he knows. There is no rumor, disagreement, or lateral movement in this house that doesn’t reach this bedside first. He frames the question to demand that I admit, aloud, my dissent.
I don’t hesitate.
“Vasily sees the world linearly, father. He sees the money laundering routes you built twenty years ago. He maintains them, but doesn’t innovate them. I prefer to be proactive.”
His eyes gleam. Recognition, or excitement, I can’t distinguish. It’s in these moments that I remember who he was before the illness—a hunting animal, incapable of being satisfied with the kill, always wanting more, better, faster.
“The sponsors who finance Vasily’s front operations are men whose loyalty is tied to cash flow, not blood.
Under a sports front, we could double the money with half the risk.
That would eliminate fifty percent of the noisy layers; we would have twenty-five percent in net quota.
If we optimize flow, there would be room to go up another ten percent without attracting attention. ”
My father stares at me. He just breathes, and the wheezing of the respirator mixes with the silence of the room. That’s when he lets out a dry, guttural sound, which could be laughter or a cough. I can never tell.
“Good,” he whispers. “Prove it works.”
The only blessing I’ve asked for my entire life is permission to take the reins. The only one I’ve ever had.
The rest is irrelevant.
The bedroom door opens, this time without the hesitation of a nurse.
Ivan enters. He notices me and the man in the bed, trying to read the atmosphere. He’s late. As always.
“Uncle!” The word explodes too loudly for the ballast of tubes, probes, monitors, and silent death.
It’s an attempt to regain affective hierarchy.
He approaches the headboard, stooping for the dominant touch: a wide, somewhat brutal hand resting on my father’s shoulder.
The gesture is less affectionate than possessive.
My father doesn’t react to the contact. He just twitches his eyelid—he certainly expected Ivan, the idiot, to come in late.
“How are you feeling?” Ivan says. He wiggles his thumb, massaging the old man’s diseased muscle, unaware that there’s nothing there to reanimate.
My father ignores the question. “Where is Vasily?”
Ivan straightens up. His smile becomes a halfway point: embarrassment and relief, as the focus shifts from him. “Vasily is a coward. He just called, said he had a ‘last-minute unforeseen event’ with one of the containers at the Marseille dock.”
Vasily never has unforeseen events—he designs them, packages them, delivers them with a receipt and protocol.
“But he’ll fix it and come straight here. His word,” Ivan completes.
My father lets out another one of those guttural sounds. He knows the sons he raised. Then, he turns to Ivan, and the conversation shifts to tactics.
“And the docks?” my father asks. “Are the Volkov men still quiet after the beating we gave them?”
Ivan lights up at the command. His hand withdraws from the old man’s body, and he puffs out his chest, adjusting into the militiaman pose that only he finds elegant.
“Yes, sir. The guys don’t even look up. I put two of my men to rotate patrols at the docks, and no one dares to come near. The message was sent.”
I watch the scene, bored. The family theater unfolds as always.
My father questions Ivan about the loyalty of the henchmen, about territorial disputes, about the violence of everyday life.
The language Ivan understands. He praises him for his strength, for his loyalty.
At least, for now, Ivan didn’t let out about Griffin’s role as a Volkov agent to my father.
But today there’s a new noise. Vasily’s “unforeseen event” rings a bell.
Why did Vasily, accustomed to ignoring everything that isn’t a bank calculation, move so much in recent days that he invented an absence on the boss’s deathbed?
I think of Griffin. What would he do if he knew all this?
Probably what he always did: bleed, devour, survive.
Something is happening. And I don’t like not knowing my variables.
It’s dark outside now. From my office window, the city appears in industrial, orange and yellowish lights, year-round, never truly seeming dark—but today there’s a kind of gloom beneath every street.
Ivan hasn’t shown a sign since my father’s house.
Vasily, of course, vanished like gas: silent, invisible.
I ignore my fraternal ghosts, for now; to win, one must know how to prioritize the enemy of the moment.
Today, the battlefield is this meeting room on the 31st floor, and the immediate adversary goes by Eriks Karpov.
He occupies the leather chair with his arms inadequately spread, trying to project comfort where there’s only sweat and nervousness. It’s almost comical, if not for the figures at stake.
I slide a pair of thin, black-framed reading glasses down my nose.
I flip through the profit and loss report from the last event.
I skip the pages on fixed costs and security bonuses; I already know they’re inflated because I ordered the inflation myself.
What interests me are the bolded lines: bar revenue, bets, VIP table sales.
My left hand leafs through, my right keeps the red pen ready.
I note minimal discrepancies here and there.
A note about the difference between initial and reported ending inventory.
I get to the point. Page 12. I tap the document lightly with the pen cap.
I look over the top of my glasses until I meet Karpov’s eyes, which are reluctant to lift from the table.
He fidgets slightly, and sweat trickles down his temple—even with the air conditioning at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
He knows he’s in deep shit; he just hasn’t calculated the depth of the hole yet.
“Seventy percent of your beverage revenue wasn’t declared, Eriks.”
My voice is calm, factual. And, I know, absolutely terrifying to him.
Karpov clears his throat and stutters, his eyes darting from me to the paper, then to an imaginary stain on the wall behind me. “Mr. Malakov, I... it must have been an accounting error, maybe on the last cash register’s spreadsheet... I’ll check, I can—“
I think about how Vasily would handle it: a polished speech, a veiled warning, perhaps a bribe under the table. Ivan would have already pulled one of the poor guy’s teeth right there, just to make a point. Not me.