Chapter ALEXEI
ALEXEI
Titan has signed the contract. The champagne is on you.
Iread the message once, twice. It’s a significant strategic victory.
The deal solidifies our control over the fighting circuit and injects a corporate legitimacy that wards off unwanted attention.
More importantly, it cuts off one of Vasily’s main sources of unsupervised income, further tightening the financial leash I’ve placed on him.
It’s a check. Not a checkmate, but a clean and potentially lethal move.
I should feel satisfaction. But I feel nothing.
The victory registers in my mind like a data point on a spreadsheet, devoid of any emotional weight. It’s a strange anesthesia. And I know, with irritating clarity, what the cause of this system failure is.
Griffin.
His taste—nicotine and a desperate urgency—still lingers on my tongue, something that refuses to be spat out, even after gargling with cognac and washing my face twice. The victory with Titan feels distant, theoretical. The memory of Griffin’s chaos is immediate, physical.
I sit in my office armchair and run my thumb over my lower lip, where the mark from his teeth threatens to become a bruise. A physical reminder that I lost control, a souvenir of impulsivity.
I never indulge. I never allowed myself the luxury of consuming anything that wasn’t planned, tabulated, accounted for—and, above all, useful.
Indulgence. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake.
Pleasure, for me, was always a tool, a lever; it was currency, or blackmail.
I remember a leaden night in Zurich, where an investment analyst opened up about a Swiss vault in exchange for a chemical orgasm and the promise of anonymity; I remember the son of a politician in Moscow, who told me the names and numbers of his father’s undeclared accounts with me between his legs.
Sex was a transaction. A contract without witnesses.
The body’s pleasure was just a dividend, a disgusting cashback, never the objective or the prize. Until Griffin.
With him, it was consumption, a short circuit, a combustion that left me with nothing but a racing pulse, a hormonal trace, and a shameful lapse in my architecture of control.
He makes me careless. I’m so focused on extinguishing the fire in my own veins that I barely noticed the empire outside continues to function.
Mikhail confirmed two days ago that the files are legitimate.
Myrddin Griffin is exactly what the records say: a street fighter, an orphan, Welsh blood, a career of violence and failure recycled into a supernatural aptitude.
An almost perfect asset, if not for the convenience of his connection to Seraphim.
The bank account number that Kirill, in his last pathetic act, left me, turned out to be a drain. Which only leaves Seraphim as the only direct link, the only living piece I can drag to Vasily as proof of treason in Odessa.
And I need that.
I try to put the memory of Griffin aside and start with the first logical step: I search for Seraphim’s real name in federal criminal records, Interpol watchlists, CIA and FSB files to which I shouldn’t have access.
Nothing.
I expand the search. Global financial records, SWIFT transactions, tax returns, property records. The result is an 87-year-old Lucian Caine retired in Florida and dead for six years. A 19-year-old Lucian Caine with two speeding tickets in Ohio. Garbage.
I go deeper. Mercenary forums. Passenger lists for international flights from the last ten years. Immigration files. Social media, active and inactive, scouring for any facial match to Griffin’s vague description.
Nothing.
There is no man named Lucian Caine with the profile to be an elite enforcer for my brother. There isn’t even the ghost of a man beyond his only initial records of being deleted and spending a subsequent year in a juvenile correctional institution.
I believe in digital footprints, in traces, in the idea that every existence, no matter how careful, leaves an echo in the system, but not this man.
So I try to follow the tracks I do have: to understand how he knew Griffin’s exact whereabouts, in a convenience store at a random time.
The apartment—which I myself selected in the middle of that transitional zone between the old city and the cynical cluster of newly built luxury—is surrounded by silence and a rotten ecosystem: expensive boutiques side-by-side with corner bars, Korean waxing salons, 24-hour pharmacies, and a floating population of beggars, credit card promoters, and prostitutes.
A perfect mix to hide someone like Seraphim. I created the opportunity myself.
In my office, the screens are already lit.
I start with the most obvious flaw: the camera of the warehouse nearest to the alley that failed the exact instant Griffin entered.
The system report cites “scheduled maintenance”.
Except no one schedules maintenance in the middle of the night in a city where cameras are worth more than the police.
I ignore the report and directly access the security company’s server—a labyrinth of proxies, but only up to a point.
The digital work order exists. Serial numbers, protocols, the supervisor’s electronic signature.
Except the signature was cloned, and I figure this out because the on-duty technician, according to HR’s biometric records, was on the other side of the city, fixing a hotel elevator on the waterfront.
Seraphim anticipated I would look for the error, and he planted it to divert my attention. Elegant. In a way, I admire it.
Swallowing my frustration, I change tactics.
My first scan is with facial recognition software—a gift from the FSB, with some improvements of my own. It checks if anyone, anyone at all, followed Griffin between the cameras.
But nothing. No repeated faces. No suspicious figures. Nothing that lingers for more than thirty seconds. Too clean.
I discard the algorithms and trust a superior processor: my own.
I go back to zero. The point of origin: Griffin leaves the building, alone.
Turns right, walks two blocks, enters the store.
What did I miss on this route that neither my men nor Griffin himself would have seen, if he really wasn’t involved?
I replay the seconds. Griffin passes a prostitute, a thin brunette under a synthetic coat.
For five seconds, her eyes follow Griffin.
People always look at him, at the prosthesis, but it doesn’t seem like flirting or curiosity.
When he turns the corner, she instantly pulls a phone from her bra, types for eight seconds, then puts it away again.
She doesn’t look back. It seems like a habit.
I fast-forward the timeline: Griffin crosses the street.
A bar, still open. Inside, the bartender pours a glass, but his eyes don’t stray from the window pane.
Twenty seconds after the prostitute sends the message, he tilts his head toward the back of the bar and gestures—a double tap on the counter—to someone in the shadows.
Whoever receives the signal doesn’t appear on camera, but the language is clear.
It’s a human chain. A circuit of transmitters, with no visible loose ends.
I move on. The convenience store. The facade camera is low-resolution, but it’s enough.
Griffin approaches. The clerk is behind the counter. A cell phone in his hand lights up. He looks down. No change in his expression. But his right hand moves. He reaches for a small plastic sign hanging from the window by a chain. The sign says “We’re Hiring”. He flips it to the blank side.
I pause the recording. I rewind one, two, three days to this same time. The clerk, with the same boredom on his face, never flips the “We’re Hiring” sign in any other recording. Only at that hour, on that day, in that minute.
I return to the moment Griffin arrives, frame by frame, until I capture the exact instant the clerk turns the sign.
I need a name.
The convenience store is part of a national franchise. A corporation. And corporations have a weakness I know well: HR and payroll systems with pathetic security.
It doesn’t take long to bypass their firewall and access their servers. It’s child’s play. I locate the employee file for the specific branch. I pull the time clock records for the night in question. And there he is.
Arthur Penhaligon. 46 years old. Single father. Minimum wage.
I use his name to dig deeper, to find financial data with public records. The story that unfolds is so predictable it’s sad. Denied bank loans. A growing credit card debt. And then, the why.
Recurring and substantial past payments to a pediatric oncology clinic, which are now spaced out between months.
I leave my office, crossing the dark hallway of my apartment. It’s not a complete answer, not by a long shot. But, for the first time with Seraphim, I have something.
The act of softening the meat, of breaking the spirit before the first question is even asked, always comes first. The method never varies: a theater of pain and panic amplified by the desolate echo of the surroundings.
I watch from the shadows, listening to the impact of fists and kicks on the fragile bones of the bound man, the squeals muffled by the makeshift gag.
His face is already a map of purple and cuts, and yet, each new blow tears away another shred of resistance.
I let it last for another thirty seconds, enough for the fear to settle in his bones, for the taste of blood in his mouth to become the only reality he knows.
“Enough,” I say.
My men pause in the same instant. The larger one steps back, wiping blood from his hand on his shirt hem; the other releases Penhaligon’s shoulders, who collapses against the back of the chair with an asthmatic sob.
This is the secret to control: not to scream, not to foam at the mouth, not to lose your composure. Perfect order is silent order.