Chapter ALEXEI #4
The room where I keep Griffin is a sterile apartment.
When I enter, only a crumpled pack of imported cigarettes on the table betrays his presence.
Lying on the bad spring bed, Griffin doesn’t even bother to look at me when I come in; his face is turned to the ceiling, his eyes fixed on a point that perhaps only exists inside his head.
His cell phone, which I allowed him to keep, vibrates on the mattress.
He’s not wearing his prosthesis, which makes me smile slightly.
His right arm ends in a stump with taut skin, a compression half-sleeve enveloping the end like a second skin.
It seems he only wears the prosthesis to fight, or when he needs to intimidate someone.
The rest of the time, its absence is a manifesto of preference for raw vulnerability over the dead weight of technology.
When he finally sits up, he does so without ceremony: the look of a stray dog, full of preemptive hostility, a granite chip where any remnant of gratitude should be. “Finally tired of using me as your secret little trinket?”
I don’t answer. Only then does he notice what I’ve brought with me: a hard case of matte polymer, the kind that would transport dynamite or frozen fetuses, never office papers. He knows the weight of things by the way I place the box on the table. Interest overcomes contempt for two seconds.
I open the latches. The lid lifts, revealing the custom-cut foam interior. Inside, resting, is the arm.
It’s a work of art of lethal engineering—deep black carbon fiber, shot through with veins of cold titanium.
Lighter. Stronger. Much more elegant than the old, worn model he used.
Myoelectric sensors, too advanced to be exposed, are visible like arteries under a translucent panel near the socket base.
It doesn’t disguise itself as a prosthesis.
It doesn’t fool anyone. This is a weapon.
Griffin remains motionless, but his eyes betray a child’s avidity.
“An upgrade,” I say. He approaches, limping, and stops in front of the table. The desire is explicit. So is the hatred. He hates needing gifts. He hates needing me even more.
“You really got a prosthesis,” he says quietly. “What’s the catch?”
“That you learn how to use it,” I reply. “The plan was to give you a week to adapt here. But things have changed.”
I open a side compartment in the case, revealing a precision toolkit.
Antiseptic wipes, a digital pressure gauge, tiny torque wrenches.
For the last three nights, between hunting a ghost and managing an empire, I have studied every screw, every diagram, every line of code in this thing’s programming manual.
I don’t trust technicians. I don’t trust anyone.
“Sit down. And show me the arm,” I order.
Reluctantly, he obeys, sitting down and pulling the sleeve down, exposing the end of the limb. I kneel in front of him. I hold the stump, examining the skin and scars.
He tenses at my touch, a muscle in his jaw contracts.
“You’re not going to—“
“I am,” I interrupt him. I run the alcohol wipe over his skin, cleaning it slowly.
I pick up the prosthesis. It’s lighter than it looks.
I align it with the contours of his arm, and the fit is perfect, the silicone liner molding to the relief of his skin.
I activate the suction pump, feel the small vacuum seal the prosthesis in place, hear the subtle click of the adjustment.
My fingers adjust the torque of the screws, connect the surface electrodes.
His breath is held. He’s watching me, his face inches from mine. There’s a tension between us, purely physical, but charged with everything that has already happened.
The last latch makes a sharp click. “Try to close your hand,” I murmur.
He obeys, almost without breathing. The carbon fiber fingers curl into a perfect fist.
He opens his hand. Closes it. Opens it again. The fluidity of the movement is hypnotic. A marvel of engineering attached to the end of a man who is the personification of chaos.
“The neural feedback is at least twenty percent faster than your old arm,” I explain. “The old model left fingerprints in the clinic’s database, so it was easy to recover the measurements. But brute force is useless without control. We need to calibrate the pressure.”
I take a small block of high-density silicone from the toolkit. It’s the size of an ice cube, used to test the resistance of materials.
“Hold this.”
I place the cube in his metal palm. I feel the cold of the carbon radiating, rising through my fingers, recalibrating my own sense of temperature.
“Use... let’s say, twenty percent force,” I say. He gives me a half-smile, that kind of low laugh that’s less about humor and more about despising the order.
“How am I supposed to know what percentage of force I’m using, boss?”
“Instinct.”
I gesture for him to begin.
He hesitates just long enough to show that he’s thinking of ways to defy me.
The carbon fingers close around the cube with a slow, ceremonial movement. The implanted sensors notice every micro-adjustment in the torque; a digital graph on the tablet next to the table begins to trace a blue line, rising in real-time. He squeezes the cube, the line jumps.
“Less,” I say, and Griffin immediately relaxes his fist, but only as far as his ego allows. The line trembles and drops, stabilizing. “Good. Fifty percent.”
He glances at me sideways, about to say something, but gives up. He returns his focus to the cube. He squeezes. The silicone begins to deform, discreetly at first, then deepens the imprint of the fingers until it almost folds in on itself.
“Eighty.”
The cube is now visibly crushed. As he maintains the pressure, I lean in closer.
I pull his shirt collar to the side, exposing the warm skin of his shoulder, and adjust it with one of the micro-wrenches.
My fingers, by accident or intention, touch the beginning of his trapezius.
I feel the warmth of his skin, the tension of the muscle, and I know he notices.
His body stiffens under the touch. He holds his breath long enough for me to see the vein in his neck pop.
On the display, the graph shoots up, hitting the maximum.
The silicone cube breaks in two. The halves roll across the table and fall to the floor.
His face is too close to mine. The tension, previously only physical, converts into something else. He looks at me as if he wants to devour or destroy, maybe at the same time.
I feel my own pulse race, a biological weakness I despise, and yet it fails to bother me.
I force myself to pull away. Before things get too out of control.
“You like this, don’t you?” he says. “Controlling everything with a touch.”
I stare back at him, without smiling. “I like knowing the tool works.”
“Is that all I am to you?” He gives me a half-smile. The tone is a provocation, not a question. His gaze burns, but it never yields. “Or are you talking about the prosthesis?”
He moves closer to me, without my answering. Now it’s he who invades my space.
The new, gleaming hand rests on my thigh, weighing exactly three hundred and twenty grams of fiber, titanium, and intention. I feel the fingers tighten slowly, testing the resistance of flesh or the fragility of my pose. I don’t react. I can’t.
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
“You never ask for permission.”
“Why did you choose me, Alex? Why not someone else?”
I think about telling him the truth—that no one has ever challenged me like him, that few men can stand to look their own abyss in the face without blinking, and even fewer can laugh about it. That maybe I see in him what I wanted to see in myself, if I dared to be that way.
I try to guess what he expects to hear. But I don’t know.
“Instinct,” I repeat the word.
He laughs. “Instinct is dangerous, boss. It can take you places you never come back from.”
With that smile, the same one that captivated me in the first footage I saw of him, he looks at my mouth. Then back to my eyes.
I feel the impulse to kiss him, to break the logic of tomorrow, but I hold back. Not now.
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” I say.
My instinct is to retreat, to re-establish the distance, but his smile holds me in place. A smile that is part challenge, part invitation.
I force myself to focus on the reason I accelerated this meeting. I step back to close the case.
“You were supposed to have a week to get used to the prosthesis,” I say. “Locked in here. Safe.”
“And what changed?” he asks, his voice still too close to my back.
“My cousin is not only an imbecile but decided to be one in public.”
“Oh, you’re talking about Karpov?” he says, and suddenly his tone is no longer intimate. Even without looking at him, I can feel the smile in his voice. “My agent won’t stop texting me about this shit. He’s terrified. Thinks the Malakovs are going to kill everyone.”
“The panic is justified.” I turn to face him completely. “The hand that stirred him up belongs to my brother, who is quiet, with no movement at all. And his only weapon that I can’t track is, coincidentally, the same one that could prove his treason to others. Seraphim.”
The mention of the name erases the smile from his face. The change is instantaneous.
“We’ve already had this conversation,” he says, seriously.
“Yes. And I can’t trust you when it comes to him. But the situation has changed. Seraphim has a network in vulnerable areas, and I need to figure out how to dismantle it.”
I wait for his reaction, and I don’t have to wait long: Griffin observes his newly attached hand, the hypnotic movement of the carbon fingers, and then looks back at me, with that look of someone who was born breathing deception and never believed in a single altruistic gesture.
The smile he gives is a personal offense, a death sentence to the possibility of naivete between us.
“Ah. Now I get it.” He gestures with the prosthesis. “I get why all this. The upgrade.”