Chapter GRIFFIN #3
“God be with you, my son,” Schmidt says, and there is an infinite sadness in his eyes. “And tell our angel... that we are still praying for him.”
I leave the tailor shop, the little bell ringing behind me. Back on the street, the world seems different. Sharper.
Cain.
Those who carry much guilt never die. Cain carried the guilt of us all.
I put the paper in my pocket. It’s the only thing anchoring me to the present. I have a name. I have a place.
As I turn the corner from the tailor shop, a sharp, hot pang shoots up my thigh, so strong it makes me stop in the middle of the sidewalk and inhale sharply.
I look down. My jeans are dark, damp. A stain that wasn’t there before.
Fuck.
I press my hand against the wound and lean against the wall of a building. I need a public restroom and some paper towels.
Afterward, I can go somewhere safe to patch myself up.
And, considering that in the fucked-up universe I now inhabit, there’s only one, I’d rather delegate as much as possible.
I wake up to a dry click, a noise that pulls me from a dream where I was back at the orphanage and all the boys had Alexei’s face and were stuffed into suits.
It takes me a few seconds to realize where I am, even longer to accept it. The click wasn’t from the dream—it’s real, it’s the sound of a magnetic lock disengaging.
Adrenaline attempts to force me up, but my body is glued to the sofa’s surface by a mixture of exhaustion and the throbbing pain that radiates from my thigh as if they’d left a white-hot iron bar between the muscles.
Before I can coordinate my limbs to get up, I hear footsteps echoing from the entrance hall, crossing the polished wood floor with a confidence that recites the owner’s name in every step.
All that goes through my head is: I wasn’t the one who unlocked that door.
And no one but Alexei would have the panel’s password.
Still, something inside me prepares for the worst, and I do a quick inventory of improvised weapons within reach: a glass of whiskey on the coffee table, heavy enough to crack someone’s head; a hardcover book; the prosthesis itself, which I had taken off hours earlier and left on the rug, and which might serve as a club. But I don’t move.
If it’s an assassin, at least I’ll die in my sleep.
Earlier, the house was empty when I arrived, which was lucky. Because, bleeding like that, and with fatigue eating me from the inside, I would have lost any duel to Alexei. Or to whoever he sent to greet me.
The first mission was to find a place where I could sit and treat the wound, and the second was to make sure there wasn’t a trap in the way.
In the living room, the black leather sofa was too hard, and it had that new, never-used smell that forced the feeling down your throat that this was anything but a home.
That’s exactly what impressed me: the apartment seemed like a staged theater, enacting the life of someone who never put their ass in their own armchair, but there were traces.
The bookshelf, at least, had Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, treatises on facial expressions, and behavioral psychology.
The fridge had half a bottle of vodka and bottles of water, and one of the glasses in the cabinets had an almost invisible crack.
The bathroom was a capsule of brushed steel, with a medicine cabinet that seemed to have been assembled by a paranoid pharmacist: antibiotics, latest-generation painkillers, suture kits, gauze, self-adhesive bandages.
I allowed myself the luxury of using everything I needed, tearing my jeans to expose the wound and washing the blood with fresh water.
I cleaned it as much as I could, cut the threads of the old stitches, and replaced them with new ones.
The whole process took half an hour, during which I trembled so much I thought I was going to pass out.
Then I rinsed the stump of my arm, which was already inflamed and shining a sickly red, the result of a full day without breaks with a new prosthesis. I tried to ignore the smell of heated flesh that emanated from the skin, and just changed the liner and put on more ointment.
Alexei’s house was also a pit of temptations. I couldn’t resist the curiosity to snoop in his room.
The bed looked like an altar, too big, dark gray sheets stretched to perfection, like a Russian barracks in a war movie. There were no clothes thrown around, no smell of perfume, just that absence of anything human. On the nightstand, a black-covered book and, next to it, a clear glass of water.
I sat on the edge of the bed. It was so firm, so unyielding, that my weight barely sank into the mattress.
After that, I stumbled to the living room sofa, turned on the television just for the noise, and let my mind float on the white noise of news reports and vodka commercials. Sleep caught me in the middle of a report about a nightclub fire.
Now, awake, the television is still on. The bluish light cuts out the silhouette approaching down the hallway. A tall man in a dark suit. His step is absolutely controlled—no hurry, no hesitation.
Definitely Alexei.
I close my eyes again and turn on the sofa. I want to sleep. I want to pass out, to fall back into that tunnel of absence where nothing hurts.
“Be fucking quiet. I’m trying to sleep.”
I hear his footsteps approaching, stopping beside me. I don’t move. Maybe if I pretend to be asleep, he’ll leave me alone.
“Griffin.” My name in his voice exists on another frequency, lower and more direct. “What happened to your leg?”
I open one eye, then the other. Alexei’s outlines are so sharp they seem drawn with a black pen against the gray background of the room. He’s standing, looking at the bandage I put on, which now has a dark red stain spreading across it.
“Nothing you need to worry about, mommy,” I murmur, my voice hoarse from sleep. “I’ll handle it.”
“Clearly,” he says, dryly. “Get up. This needs to be cleaned before it gets infected and I have to cut your leg off.”
“You and your mutilation fetish,” I grumble, but I’m already getting up, testing the weight of my leg on the floor.
The world spins. My good arm rests on the back of the sofa, the stump and my thigh throb, but I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing weakness.
Alexei disappears toward the bathroom and returns with a first-aid kit.
He kneels in front of me, and his touch on my thighs is delicate, meticulous, very different from what I would expect from someone who has killed at least twelve people.
Probably. He pulls at the torn jeans, cuts the fabric with round-tipped scissors, and begins to remove the bandage.
The clotted blood makes a wet, pornographic sound as it detaches from the skin. I sigh because I know it will get worse before it gets better.
“The stitches have opened,” he says, without even looking at me.
“Genius,” I retort, and the word dissolves into a grimace of pain as he pours antiseptic on the wound. “Fuck, that stings.”
“Maybe, next time, you’ll avoid crossing three neighborhoods with a bullet in your leg?” He speaks in the tone of someone explaining a basic concept to a stupid child.
“How did you...” I start, but then I stop. It all makes sense. “Ah. The fucking bracelet.”
“The fucking bracelet,” he confirms.
He continues to clean the wound, focused.
It’s strange, because normally the silence between us is like the tense calm before a storm. But now it’s just concentration.
I watch the way he handles cotton, gauze, adhesive tape. A model’s hands.
I remember what Schmidt said about Seraphim: he takes care of his own. Alexei does too.
“Just try not to stick a piece of your hundred-thousand-dollar suit in there this time,” I say, to break the tension. “It took me hours to get the last thread out.”
A twitch at the corner of his mouth. An almost-smile. “Quality fabric accelerates healing,” he replies, finally sticking a new bandage on the skin. It’s also strange to see how every gesture of his is perfect, as if he’s rehearsed his whole life for this role and doesn’t accept improvisation.
“Of course it does,” I say, rolling my eyes.
He finishes the job and stays a second longer with his hands resting on my knee. I don’t know if it’s for provocation or because he’s really thinking about the next step. His gaze rises, slowly, to my face.
“Now,” he says, and fixes his eyes on my shoulder, “take off your shirt.”
I let out a short laugh, but I don’t question it. I lean back, pull the old T-shirt off by the collar, careful not to snag the stump on the fabric.
My torso is covered in new bruises mixed with old ones, marks of recent violence and memories that never quite heal. I feel his gaze travel over every detail, every scar, before moving to the second bandage. The one I didn’t change when I arrived.
He sighs. Then, he leans forward and begins to examine my shoulder. The smell of alcohol, mixed with Alexei’s own scent—something citrusy, clean, expensive—starts to make me dizzy.
His hand slides along my collarbone, presses lightly, looking for any new fracture or dislocation. The touch is cold, but every centimeter he advances seems to set my skin on fire.
I hate the vulnerability of it all. I hate even more that a part of me likes it.
He then removes the old bandage. The process is similar—he wipes a gauze soaked in antiseptic around the wound, and no matter how much I try to control myself, a shiver runs up my spine.
“You’re suicidal, Griffin,” he says. “And it’s not even for the job. I think you just like the feeling.”
He finishes the bandage on my shoulder, but he doesn’t pull away.
He stays there, leaning back, studying my reaction.
The distance between us is less than a hand’s breadth.
His face is lit only by the blue light of the television, the shadows running down his cheeks and making his eyes even more glacial.
I don’t know what he’s going to do. I feel that any movement could trigger an explosion, or a kiss, or a punch. With Alexei, you never know.