Chapter ALEXEI #4
I lean back in my chair, taking off my glasses.
“You won’t check anything, Eriks. Starting tomorrow, all revenue, down to the last dollar in tips for the waitresses, will be processed by my system, and you will send me a report every twenty-four hours with all your defined gains and losses.
No double books, no straw men, no phantom supplier advances.
We’re redefining your role. You’re the face, the loud promoter the crowd loves. I’m the owner. Are we clear?”
He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He nods, voiceless, fear finally overcoming the urge to argue.
“Good,” I say. “Now let’s talk about how to increase the revenue you will declare.
That energy drink company you mentioned last week.
‘Titan Energy’. Schedule a meeting with their CEO.
I want a seven-figure proposal. And an exclusivity contract.
If you close it, I’ll triple your bonus.
If not, I’ll make sure you end up selling energy drinks at the traffic light on J Avenue. ”
Karpov’s will to survive is stronger than his will to question. He just shakes his head, jotting everything down in a notepad with a trembling hand. He didn’t expect it would be like this when he first saw me. But the hierarchy needed to be defined.
“They’re... big. Aren’t they already tied up with others?”
Karpov was raised in a world where great fortunes have walls, security, decades-long contracts.
He doesn’t understand the pleasure in tearing down those walls with one hand and rebuilding them from scratch with the other.
Yes, they’re expensive. Yes, they’re loyal to my brother.
Vasily has been using them to launder drug money for years through inflated sponsorship contracts with other venues, including the music halls that, ironically, bear my mother’s surname.
Small empires within the empire, each with its owner and its own rules.
But only one rule interests me: if you want the top, everything below is a step or an obstacle.
They are the first domino I intend to knock down. And Karpov, of course, doesn’t need to know that I’m using him to steal from my own flesh and blood’s business partners.
I don’t blink.
“They’ll listen to the proposal,” I state. “Especially after last night.”
I don’t even need to complete the sentence: Karpov’s face lights up in understanding.
“Oh, yes! Griffin! The kid’s a sensation, Mr. Malakov!
A goldmine! Everyone was talking about him!
He—he bit that guy’s face and the crowd went wild!
People are already willing to pay triple for tickets to the next fight—“
He doesn’t even seem like the man who wanted to kill him for dismantling a ridiculous champion. I don’t encourage his enthusiasm.
“He serves his purpose,” I say. “Make sure you serve yours, Eriks. Schedule the meeting.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” he says, getting up hastily. “Thank you, sir.”
He forces a strained smile, says goodbye, and finally leaves my office.
I lean back in my chair, looking at the numbers in front of me. Karpov was my last appointment of the night. I think about pursuing the resolution of Griffin’s little alley mystery, but I need to find Vasily and Ivan first.
It’s then that my office door explodes open with a bang that makes the crystal glass on my desk vibrate.
And, speaking of the devil, Ivan enters.
After hours with no sign from Sacramento, he appears, his face red with fury. He holds a cardboard file folder and throws it forcefully onto my desk. It makes a mess. Papers scatter and the documents that were already there fall.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, ALEXEI?” he shouts. “YOU PUT A RAT IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR BUSINESS?!”
I pick up the folder. Inside, poor-quality copies of police records and what looks like a plea bargain.
The name “Myrddin Griffin” is on all of them.
“The guy has a history of turning coat, and we’re supposed to believe he ‘turned to our side’? Have you gone crazy?!”
I read the highlighted words on the papers.
Informant. Deal with the feds in Bakersfield.
How... how did I not see this? And, more importantly, how did he see it? The idea that Ivan, with his hammer-like intelligence, discovered something I missed, wounds my pride in a way few things can.
“Where did you get this, Vania?” I say, keeping my voice as calm as I can.
“I have my sources,” he puffs out his chest. “A contact in legal. I went to check our new friend’s background.”
What a lie. Ivan wouldn’t have that initiative. “Your legal contact is good,” I say, testing him. “How did he know to look specifically in Bakersfield?”
The eye contact Ivan holds with me lasts less than three seconds. He tries to resist, but the child within him always crumbles first. He stutters. “I... I heard things. A rumor.”
Contempt reaches me before anger. I rub my hands over my face, trying not to laugh at the irony. Ivan, who always relied on brute force solutions, now gets lost in a rumor. What a joke.
“From Vasily?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
At the same time, Ivan turns red. “I didn’t tell him anything! He came to me, talking about rumors, saying he was worried about you! I just followed the lead!”
I try to suppress the urge to punch the table.
Of course it was Vasily who started everything, Vasily who planted the doubt, Vasily who always operates in the shadows.
Always centered, always calculating how to move the pieces without ever getting his hands dirty.
Now I wonder: what else was said between them?
What did they conspire while I was busy trying to build this rotten empire?
It’s clear: Vasily is using Ivan, as he always has. But he wasn’t supposed to act so fast.
I remember the smell of gasoline and wet earth in our backyard, the fights that started with words and ended with blood, all fueled by a competition that was never healthy, never fair.
“Don’t you see, Ivan?”
Funny how, even as adults, the dynamic never changes. Three vertebrae of a broken spine.
“There are no rumors.” I speak each word clearly, slowly. The explosion is at the brink, but I try to push it back. I try. “There’s no concern. Vasily used you! He gave you a lead and sent you, like an obedient, stupid dog, straight to my door, and you... you fell for it. Like a child!”
His face contorts. He hates the insult more than the accusation. “I did what had to be done!” he yells. “The guy’s a rat! At least I do something! I don’t hide behind a fucking screen all day, moving numbers! In the real world, out there, things are solved like this!”
His accusation, the eternal insinuation that I’m less of a man than him, boils inside me.
I stand up so fast that the chair scrapes the floor and almost falls over.
“SOLVED LIKE THIS?” I repeat, shouting back. “It was solving things like this that we lost Odessa! It was blind trust in ‘force’ that cost us control of the port!”
“He’s our blood! He’s your brother!” Ivan retorts.
“He WAS my brother!” The shout escapes without my permission.
“He stopped being my brother the moment he sabotaged a nine-figure deal out of greed! He stopped being my brother when he left a living witness just to use later as a pawn! And he stopped being my brother when he used you to try and destabilize me!”
Ivan doesn’t reply. He can’t take another round of this. Neither can I, to be honest.
I think about how his mother worked herself to death cleaning blood from his school uniform; I think about how my father said, in the only compliment any of us ever received, that Ivan was “a wild bull”—but he never said he was smart, nor did he need to.
He would say that his area is his area. There’s no way to fit a different mold.
No way to go it alone. But the truth is: we have no choice.
Family always returns to the same ring, always bleeds the same blood.
I don’t like to shout. I don’t like that everything got to me so strongly.
I am the first to retreat. I take a deep breath, forcing control back. Anger doesn’t solve anything.
I walk to the window, trying to regain distance and logic. I look at my reflection: the dark circles under my eyes, the face of someone who never sleeps well. I am the eldest, raised to manage chaos and grow the empire at any cost, but I never learned to deal with the cracks.
“From now on,” I say, trying to put everything back into an icebox, “you don’t talk to Vasily anymore. About anything. He no longer exists for you.”
Ivan frowns. “What do you mean, I don’t talk?”
“You don’t talk,” I say. The disgust is still too obvious in my voice. “Unless I say otherwise.”
Ivan shakes his head, but I understand he won’t stop. He’ll just do it better, more secretly.
I still allow myself a small outburst.
“Get out, Ivan,” I say, louder than I’d like. “I’ll take care of this.”
He glares at me. A dangerous, stupid indignation. The inclination to do any idiocy whatsoever.
And I let him leave anyway.
The reverberation of the door slamming shut as he leaves makes the window glass tremble. I need to think.
I sit, but my body doesn’t relax: it’s prepared for another explosion, another brutal discharge of anger.
Now, after a night like this, with Ivan’s voice still echoing in the walls, I look at my hands and the fine tremor of nerves that haven’t received enough discharge to calm down. I hate this. I hate losing control.
What Ivan just threw on my desk is not an invitation to error.
I don’t want to fall. I can’t. Not after everything I’ve already lost to Vasily, not after all the messes I myself had to sweep under the family rug.
The folder is still here, in front of me, like a hairy tumor.
I open it, expecting to see a severed finger inside, so grotesque has everything become between us.
But it’s just cellulose, just ink. Just a bunch of records printed on cheap paper.
I pick up the papers. They are probably hastily photographed from a dusty file. I read the header: Kern County Juvenile Court, California. The date is over a decade ago.
Defendant: Myrddin Griffin, age: 17.
Juvenile proceedings.
That’s why my initial searches showed none of this. Juvenile records are sealed. It wasn’t my mistake. Vasily, or whoever he used, paid dearly to gain access to this.
I keep reading. The transcript of the plea bargain. A seventeen-year-old Griffin describing routes, names, operations. Turning in his own gang in exchange for a reduced sentence. A rat, as Ivan said.
Then I get to the main accused, the man Griffin turned in. The gang leader. Lucian Caine.
And, next to the name, a clerk’s note: Known on the streets by the codename “Seraphim”.
I know that name.
That’s why I found nothing. The real name wasn’t Seraphim, but it’s the name Kirill gave me. Vasily’s ghost.
No.
I open the convenience store video file on another monitor.
I pause on the image of the reflection in the refrigerator glass.
The tall, thin silhouette, with light hair.
I go back to the papers and look at the grainy photo attached to Lucian Caine’s file.
It’s a photo from over ten years ago, but he has the same hair—light, wavy, long.
I take the encrypted phone from the drawer. My lawyer, Mikhail—he must be sleeping, but he answers on the third call.
“Mikhail,” I say, trying to keep my voice deadpan to avoid suspicion from anyone who might be listening. “I have a sealed juvenile case number from Bakersfield. I need the original, unadulterated file on my desk in an hour. Pay whatever it takes, to whoever it takes.”
I realize my hands are still trembling. More, perhaps.
If Seraphim is a contact of Vasily, what does that say about Griffin?
The variables don’t fit. The equation doesn’t close.
Vasily gave me this file, using Ivan as a stupid messenger. This file connects Griffin to Seraphim. And Seraphim... Seraphim is Vasily’s ghost. The man he used to sabotage Odessa.
Why? Why would my brother give me the key to unravel his own betrayal? He wouldn’t. But does Vasily know that I know about Seraphim?
No. Impossible. He thinks Ivan killed Kirill. So, for him, he’s just giving me the information that Griffin is an informant. A way to make me doubt him and crack my temporary alliance with Ivan.
But if Seraphim works for Vasily, and Griffin has a connection to him, does Griffin work for Vasily?
It would be a catastrophic system error. The possibility is so absurd, so... complete, that it invalidates every calculation I’ve made in the last few days.
Was it all a setup? The challenge, the performance on camera, the vulnerability at dinner, what happened in the car... did Griffin report every word back to my brother?
Alex.
The memory of his voice. Fuck.
I close my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose hard, trying to squeeze logic back into place. Holy shit, Alexei. Seriously? You let this happen?
Did I fail to distrust the man I myself put at the center of his operation? Just because he was... interesting. Because he was a deviation from the plan. A disaster that, for one fucked-up moment, seemed more important than the plan itself.
Is that it? My greatest tool, my objectivity, corrupted by a pair of challenging eyes and a story I, arrogantly, thought I could control?
My secure phone vibrates on the desk.
The name on the screen: GRIFFIN.
How convenient. I hesitate. Is it him? Is it Vasily, using his phone?
Fuck it. I answer.
I hear the sound of breathing. Heavy, ragged, fucked up.
“Boss...” His voice is a whisper, breathless, pained. “Fuck... I think your brother tried to kill me.”
It doesn’t make sense. My brother? If Griffin works for Vasily, why would Vasily try to kill him? How would Griffin even know it was my brother?
But the pain in his voice... it sounds genuine.
“What?” I say, my own confusion leaking out. “Where are you?”
As he tries to answer, I pull up the security feeds from his apartment. The room is empty. The bed unmade.
I access the hallway camera. Static.
No, not static. A loop. The image is repeating the same three seconds. Shit.
I open my security team’s status—something happened for no alarm to sound for me.
And I see that the escort was redirected twenty minutes ago. A “priority threat” alert at one of our docks. A false threat. A distraction.
The shit about sharing the same fucking blood is that men are only loyal to him.
“Uh... Wait...” Griffin gasps on the other end of the line. “It’s... in a warehouse... a division.”
Vasily redirected my security. Manipulated the cameras. And lead one of my assets to the slaughterhouse.
I admit it. He outmaneuvered me. The son of a bitch outmaneuvered me on all fronts.
“Griffin, tell me exactly where you are,” I order. I grab my car keys and the gun from the drawer. “I’m coming.”