Chapter GRIFFIN #6
I laugh. The sound comes out louder than I intended, drawing glances that quickly disperse, accustomed to the absurd.
“For us who?” I lean forward, and the joints of my bionic arm creak, drawing Cain’s attention to the prosthesis, to the void between us, a void he himself helped to dig.
“You look at me with that disgusted face because I’m on the ‘other side’, but the only difference between my demon and yours is that mine, at least, doesn’t pretend to be an angel. ”
And I say it on purpose because I know it’ll hurt him.
I myself still see Seraphim as divine.
He finally breaks eye contact, looking down at the table.
He’s still for a moment, then murmurs, “Don’t talk like that.
Seraphim came to see you, to warn you when he shouldn’t have,” and there’s an urgency in his tone, begging me not to scratch the remaining veneer any further.
“It was sentimentalism. He exposed himself, and he exposed you. I’m just here trying to clean up the mess. ”
“Like last time?” The heat of indignation rises in me like acid reflux, burning everything in its path. “With a rusty machete?”
This time, he doesn’t try to hide the blow. His eyes get moist, but not from easy tears—it’s anger, or perhaps the memory of pain, accumulated and never properly metabolized.
“He saved your life, Myrddin. The others... they wanted you dead. Do you think it was easy to convince them? The arm was the price for you to be able to walk away.”
Now it’s me who can’t hold back. I feel my face flush, the blood pulsing in places that shouldn’t even feel anything anymore.
The mother with the child next to us notices the tension and moves the boy away before an explosion occurs. The entire refectory senses, in a diffuse way, that the atmosphere has changed, that something deeply wrong has been put on the table, and no one has the stomach to clean it up.
“Saved me from what, Cain? From being killed? And who was going to kill me? The others? And who, for fuck’s sake, was leading the others? Who made the final decision?”
He doesn’t answer. He can’t.
“He saved me from his own decision?” I continue, the fury finally finding words.
“He put me in front of a train and then saved me by pushing me off a cliff? What the fuck kind of savior logic is that? Don’t give me that shit!
Don’t try to paint him as a hero in the fucking tragedy that he wrote himself! Everything. Comes back. To him.”
The world around me slows down, and I can see everything: Cain’s hardened expression lines, his accentuated pallor, the way he holds the edge of the table.
Cain rubs his face, ashamed, and when he looks back at me, there’s nothing messianic there anymore. Just exhaustion. “Myrddin, you turned him in to the police.”
I remain silent, because it’s the truth. The only weapon I had against his suicidal madness, and I used it.
“He was going to kill everyone,” I whisper. “He was going to die for nothing.”
Cain laughs, but it’s a crooked sound. A laugh that only serves to confirm that, actually, there’s nothing funny about it. “For nothing? Myrddin, for fuck’s sake... He couldn’t take it anymore. Where did you think the money came from?”
My first response is automatic, perhaps even childish. “From the robberies.”
“This?” Cain gestures to the soup, to the place, to the fuck-ups around us. “The robberies barely paid for our food back then. It was barely enough for Theo’s sister’s syringes, let alone keeping the house running.”
He leans over the table. A decade’s worth of weariness.
“He always made sure to keep the group that way. Pure. So no one would ever have to be the commodity.”
The word hangs in the air between us. Cold, disgusting. I don’t understand, but I do. My brain refuses, but my body has already processed it for a long time, because I feel the sweat go cold between my shoulder blades and the muscles in my back lock up as if they need to protect my spine.
Still, I ask.
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Myr.”
In slow motion, the scenes fit together: the nights Seraphim would disappear, always with the excuse of handling “things”.
The money, which appeared in old paper envelopes, without any markings, spontaneously materialized from the wall.
The new clothes he would wear for one night and then burn.
And the way he would wash himself afterward: he would take hours in the shower, scraping his skin until it bled.
“Fuck,” I whisper. The taste of bile rises, prodding my throat, acidic and bitter.
Cain shakes his head, not even savoring the victory. “We have an ideology, Myrddin. But you can’t buy medicine with ideology. You can’t pay for a safe rent with ideology. You can’t survive without money. There’s no way.”
The image of it is so profane, so absolutely wrong, that I have to look away.
“He forbade me to talk about it,” Cain continues. “I wasn’t even supposed to know. I found out by accident.”
“And Vasily?” I try to swallow the poison in the name, but I can’t. “If he owes loyalty to no one, was it just the money? Just that?”
Cain laughs again, louder, and now, yes, he draws glances from half the refectory.
“You say that as if money is just one thing, Myrddin. But look at you. Look at me. We’re made of debt.
You think the new arm fell from the sky?
Over time, we armed ourselves with other things—it gets easier with a network of contacts.
Forgery, information. But it all comes down to the same principle, doesn’t it?
Vasily is just doing what has always been done to him. ”
Cain stares at me. There’s no more hope, no accusation. There’s just a desire for me to finally see what he has always seen.
The anger I felt, the righteous hatred for my lost arm... it all dissolves into a heavy, cold nausea.
“Cain,” I call out, and my own voice surprises me. It’s no longer sharp. I take a deep breath, and the question that comes out is the one I’ve been burying for a decade, the one I was most afraid to ask. “Is he... is he okay?”
Cain remains silent for a long moment. When he finally speaks, his voice has also lost its hardness.
“He’s focused.”
I close my eyes. I know exactly what that means. The focused Seraphim was the Seraphim on the edge of the precipice, ready to jump and take the world with him.
“He can’t go against Alexei Malakov,” I whisper. “Being with Vasily is a collision course. He’s going to get hurt, Cain.”
Cain processes. He sees that I’m not bluffing.
“What do you want?” he asks, finally.
“I won’t betray him,” I say, and the promise is as much for him as it is for myself. “Not again. But I didn’t go through a fucking amputation to watch him die. Give him a message for me.”
Cain waits.
“He told me Vasily is digging into me. Alexei is digging into him. He’s going to find him. The next time we see each other, it can’t be an accident.”
Cain studies me for what feels like a lifetime.
“He won’t negotiate with Alexei Malakov,” he says, and the name comes out with disgust.
“But he negotiated with Vasily. Tell him to stop treating Alexei as an enemy and start treating him as what he really is,” I reply. “The fucking chessboard in person. And if you don’t play his game, you lose.”
Cain nods slowly, not in agreement, but in understanding. He understands the gravity of the warning.
“I’ll tell him,” Cain says, finally. “But don’t expect an answer.”
He gets up.
I watch him leave, blend into the crowd of faceless ghosts, and I’m left alone with my own realization that I’ve just placed myself right in the center of the fucking collision course to try to keep Seraphim unscathed.
Because, if he goes against Alexei, I know I won’t have the strength to go to Seraphim’s side.
I can’t go against Alexei.
Not when the only thing that makes me feel alive is him.