Chapter GRIFFIN #2
Before registering the room, I register the body.
I don’t recognize myself. I feel bandages pressing against my thigh, shoulder, and part of my ribs.
The phantom limb throbs, as always, but my prosthesis isn’t with me.
A split second of panic; I search around and there it is, resting next to a dresser with a portable chessboard, and an armchair that.
.. is occupied. Alexei. He’s there, sitting, staring at me.
Not a muscle on him moves. He looks more like a statue than a person, and I presume he needs to conserve energy to deal with me.
The last thing I remember of Alexei is him trying to save my blood, staining his designer clothes just to keep me in one piece.
My first attempt to sit up is an absolute failure. It hurts in parts of my body I didn’t know hurt; parts I honestly thought had already been destroyed years ago. I swear. The second attempt puts me half-sideways, facing Alexei, who doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask, doesn’t move.
“Alexei,” I say. It comes out low. My throat is dry.
Alexei looks at me.
But it’s strange.
I don’t know if it’s the lost blood or the damn head trauma, but he seems like a mirage: present, but not accessible. I force myself to remember how he was before, the clearest memory I have of him before all this shit.
There was warmth there, I swear. I’m not making this up. It was something in his eyes, in the line of his jaw when he laughed, even in his hands. Now they’re just shark eyes, dark, bottomless.
He rests his fingers on the side of the table next to the bed, and then leans in until I feel him too close and yet too distant. I even smell him, and I remember the car, his lap, his hand on my face. I wish that were more real than what’s happening now.
I can’t handle silence. Silence swallows everything, including my survival instinct.
“Your brother,” I whisper. “He’s a horrible killer. Send my regards.”
The comment should elicit some reaction, the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth, a raised eyebrow. Alexei just blinks slowly—the comment is a fly passing in front of his eyes, annoying and disposable.
He just says, tonelessly, “How do you know it was my brother?”
It’s funny how, even after everything, I can still make elementary mistakes.
The fucking adrenaline completely clouded my head. I don’t even know Alexei’s brother. I shouldn’t know this. I’m just an idiot who still believes anything Seraphim tells me, but I can’t tell him that. I can’t risk putting Seraphim in danger.
Alexei is the type who detects lies by sweat, by the way the jaw muscle trembles, by the speed of the heart’s beat in the jugular. I know this, and yet I can’t help it.
“I... put the pieces together,” I lie.
Not even an idiot would fall for that.
He stands up. I follow him with my eyes, trying to predict where the next question will come from. He stops at the edge of the bed and looks down at me.
“Let’s try that again, Griffin,” he says. “Who did you meet in the alley behind the convenience store?”
Damn it. Does he have cameras at a fucking convenience store? I should have known. There’s no privacy with him, there’s nothing but eyes and ears and recorders, all connected to him, to his empire. Even so, I feel invaded, naked.
I pretend not to understand. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But it’s a child’s lie, and he knows it.
Alexei’s gaze hardens.
“What did Seraphim tell you in that alley?”
I stop. The name, the name that has been buried in my head for years, the name I try to forbid myself from thinking, let alone pronouncing. And he says it, so casually. The name that should never exist here, now. But it does, because Alexei put it between us.
Bile rises in my throat, and I’m not sure if I want to vomit, scream, or touch his face just to see if it’s really real skin. I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready for him to know. Because if he knows, then the game is lost for me, and maybe for Seraphim too.
“...How do you know that name?” I ask, and my voice falters because I never imagined I would hear that name from his mouth. Seraphim was a shadow, a secret, one of those things that only exists in the crooked lines of the past.
He doesn’t answer. He’s disappointed. That deep disappointment, which has nothing to do with anger, nor contempt, nor disgust. It’s almost… sad.
Alexei pulls the leather armchair closer to the bed and sits down. He’s not going to torture me physically. He doesn’t need to. He has better weapons. I recognize in his posture the method: keep the other person in suspense until their own anxiety does the dirty work.
I try to look away, but his gravitational pull is impossible to deny. His eyes—cold, analytical, predatory—map my face, looking for signs of weakness, hesitation, lies. The feeling of absolute exposure makes me want to tear off my own muscles.
“He warned you,” Alexei begins, “that my brother was coming after you. Was that it?”
I swallow hard. I should lie. But the exit plan has already been destroyed, along with my reputation, my shoulder, and what’s left of my pride. I look back at him, without answering. The silence grows, alive, like a thing between us.
“Did he pay you?” he continues. “Was there any transaction? Money, information?”
I shake my head. A silent “no”, a nod that, at best, is pathetic.
“Did he give you any instructions? Any orders? Something you were supposed to do or report?”
“No,” I manage to say.
He nods. He watches me for what seems like too long, and I know the pause is strategic. He wants me to imagine what’s coming, for me to build the torture myself. It works.
Then he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“What do the snitch and the man he snitched on talk about after a decade?”
Snitch. The label I spent years trying to bury, recalculate, erase from the records of the universe. The label that burned my skin and turned me into this. A wave of heat takes over my chest, a shame that burns inside, all the way to my face. It’s so intense it makes me nauseous.
I open my mouth to answer, to say that he doesn’t know, that he wasn’t there.
But the words don’t come. My voice is cut off in my throat, and I find myself looking away at the clean sheets, at the monochromatic pattern of the room, at anything that isn’t that frozen, judging gaze.
I, who always had an answer for everything, who always managed to turn even pain into a joke, am empty. No armor, no provocation, no shield.
“You don’t understand,” I whisper, and the phrase is so childish that I feel disgusted with myself.
I feel the weight of his gaze. “Then explain it to me, Griffin.”
Anger is the only thing I have left, so I grab it like a weapon. It’s the last fraction of me that Alexei hasn’t yet taken possession of. Seraphim keeps me anchored to my own identity, it’s sacred ground. It’s my reminder of who I am—or who I used to be. I couldn’t forgive myself.
“No,” I say. “You already have all the rest of me. My body, my struggles, my fucking freedom. This story is mine.”
I expect him to lose his composure. For him to retaliate, shout, threaten, break something. It would be easier, more predictable. But Alexei does none of that. Of course not.
He stares at me with that sociopathic calm, a frozen lake without a ripple.
He stands up, adjusts his jacket, and goes to the window, opening the blinds to let the city light flood the room.
He looks outside, searching for answers in the distant lights, or perhaps just gathering enough patience not to kill me.
“Everything that affects my investment is my business, Griffin,” he says. “All of these are variables that I need to understand. You are giving me a damage report that I demand to keep you alive.”
He turns to me. His voice is even colder.
“I’m not asking. Explain.”
The ridiculousness of it all: being forced to distill my life into a damage report, line by line. An object.
The table between us becomes magnetized: all that I am, all that I once was, stacked in that space between the armchair and my bed. I never thought that if I ever spoke about this shit, it would be to this guy; but there’s nothing left.
I shouldn’t talk. Not now. But his silence pushes me. And Alexei is the only possible recipient.
“Explain what?” I stare back at him, holding his gaze, because if I falter now, I know he’ll break me.
“That he... that he was going to kill himself? That he had a shitty plan, a glorious and suicidal plan to take over the city, and that he was going to drag everyone in his circle to hell with him?”
I crush the sheet, trying to find an anchor.
“I tried to warn him. I begged him to be the man I thought he was, and he wouldn’t listen to me.
He was so blinded by the myth of his own fucking name that he couldn’t see anyone else.
I idolized that son of a bitch,” my voice cracks.
“He was the only fucking light I had, and I wasn’t going to watch him go out in a hail of bullets because of his own pride. ”
My head hurts. I run my tongue over my teeth and taste old blood, because that’s what this shit is: an open wound that never properly healed, and which he is, again, shoving his damn fingers into.
“The only fucking way out I could think of was that. Fucking stupid. But I was seventeen.”
I take a deep breath. The air is clean in the room, but the scent that invades me is that of a basement, blood, sweat, and the bitterness of that night. I remember Seraphim saying, I can’t kill you. Not you.
“I’ve already paid my price for it,” I say.
I tap my right shoulder, at the place where flesh ends and memory begins. The price was too high.
“There’s nothing more to understand.”
And then comes the silence. It’s a limbo, a space where I exist suspended, waiting for the sentence. I want to hear him call me a rat, a traitor, trash. I want him to scream, for the fucking show to be complete.