Alexei #2
“Come here,” he orders. “Tomorrow. Noon. And explain to me why there is a rat eating at our family’s table.”
The call ends without a goodbye. Just a sentence. I stand looking at the phone, still hearing the echo of the click in my ear.
I want, just by sheer willpower, to crush that device in the palm of my hand and, with it, the entire lineage of conflicts and humiliations that brought me here.
Tomorrow, at noon, I will be forced to sit before his deathbed and defend not only Griffin, but my own existence, because Vasily decided to go crying to daddy.
I put the phone back in my pocket and, for a few seconds, I spin on my own axis, calculating the vector of each threat.
Griffin is still free, Ivan is on a leash, Vasily is scheming, and my father is waiting to tear me apart.
None of these threats is new, but the patriarch’s morbid pleasure has always been to force his children to compete for their own relevance.
With each crisis, he watches who is willing to devour whom.
This time, the rat at the table is mine.
Back in the office, my first reaction is compulsion: I open the screen and pull up the telemetry feed. The surveillance interface is blue and red: a map of the city, digital veins running through neighborhoods, heat spots blinking on Griffin’s routes.
I see everything. His movement through the wet streets, his punctual entry into Schmidt’s tailor shop, the timed waiting period.
The biomonitoring from the bracelet spiking right after contact—twelve minutes of absolute peak, followed by a sudden calm.
The pattern doesn’t lie: he either found what he was looking for, or he was found.
I see his path to St. Jude’s church, from where he leaves with a different rhythm: a dragging foot and an unstable heartbeat.
Physical pain or reopening of a wound. Then, a slow path to the hideout north of the train line, to an area I never deigned to go to.
The information piles up in real time: intercepted messages, activated contact networks, resources moved in the shadows.
I ignore all the routine reports. I only want to know one thing: if the gamble I made, of releasing Griffin, really worked.
If he is loyal enough to his own survival instinct to swallow his pride and give me results before trying to stab me in the back.
The problem is that, as Griffin navigates the city, he becomes less predictable with every minute.
And, with tomorrow’s trial, my margin of error is zero.
I enter the apartment expecting to find Griffin in the bedroom, collapsed from pain and exhaustion, perhaps sleeping on his stomach with an arm hanging off the side of the sofa.
But the first blue flash of screen light reveals that I’m not alone in the perimeter: he is sitting in front of the central terminal.
He doesn’t even turn around when I close the door behind me.
I gave him restricted access. Low-level meetings, logistics, nothing that could compromise the security of my main operations. A tool for him to understand the rhythm of my world, so he could anticipate. And, as expected, he is using it to study me.
“Analyzing my movement patterns?” I ask.
He takes long seconds to react. “Trying to figure out if you have any free time for hobbies. Or if this is all your life is.” He gestures to the screens. “Your logistics meeting tomorrow at eight at that fancy restaurant... Do you always meet to talk about crime in a public place like that?”
I approach, stopping behind him, looking over his shoulder at the screen. He’s viewing part of my operational calendar.
“Restaurants are neutral,” I say, taking off my jacket. “Public places are less likely to be ambushed. And less likely for someone to lose their head in front of witnesses.”
He nods, filing the information away. But he doesn’t say anything for a while. He just stares at me, and I notice that something is wrong, something beyond the sarcasm, a background disturbance, a fever of ideas that don’t fit.
I go straight to the point anyway. “You went out. Went to the church. Twelve-minute heart rate spike, then a sharp drop. Report.”
His gaze hardens, but not with the childish anger I expected. He seems... outraged. Not at me, but at himself.
“I found out why Seraphim is with your brother,” he says, bitterly.
I wait.
“It’s for money.”
Of all the things I imagined possible—blackmail, death threats, a crisis of faith, brainwashing—this was the most banal. Vasily understood this, and he paid the right amount. It was that simple.
I feel an unexpected relief. Money problems are solvable. They are spreadsheets, tables, numerical promises. Nothing that cannot be reversed, compensated, recalibrated. A problem of ideology is a terminal illness. But money is basic chemistry.
“That makes it easier,” I say, perhaps with more sincerity than I intended.
The only problem is not knowing the current state of their relationship. To what extent was Seraphim’s loyalty bought?
Griffin reacts as if I had broken his nose. He gets up from the chair in an impulse, stiff with indignation.
“It makes it easier for you. For a fucking bourgeois, everything is always solved with fucking money, isn’t it?”
I stare at him, genuinely confused by the violence of his reaction.
Why is he angry? This was the best possible news. His god has a price. That is a weakness I can exploit. He should be relieved.
Emotion is a confusing variable that I prefer to avoid. But not with him.
“You’re projecting,” I say.
“Fuck you,” he exclaims, with a grimace. “I had a flash of idiocy and thought you’d understand. Forget it.”
The scene strangely bothers me. I am used to dealing with people broken into smaller pieces than this, but I don’t have immediate control of the outcome. Griffin should be relieved that the myth was just a myth. But he reacts as if he has lost the only thing that kept him whole.
The silence stretches for a minute. I try to think of something to pull him back, but everything I mentally cross off sounds false, therapeutic, or too paternalistic.
“Then explain it to me,” I say then.
He collapses onto the sofa. His metal hand is lying on the armrest: elegant and grotesque at the same time, and I remember when I first saw him. It was also like this—beautiful and grotesque.
He laughs, without joy, just to fill the air.
“Seriously, you can be so cold you don’t even notice?”
I don’t react. I don’t want to contaminate his combustion with skepticism. He is burning, and I want to see how far the fire goes—he is fascinating like this, in flames.
“For you, ‘it’s for money’ is an answer that simplifies everything.
‘Oh, great, he has a price.’ Broke a leg?
Buy a better one. Betrayed a friend? Pay him double.
Your fucking soul is rotten? Cover it with a hundred-thousand-dollar suit.
It’s the only language you speak. But you have no idea.
You have no idea what people are forced to do for that shit.
You’ve never had to choose between eating and keeping your fucking dignity. ”
His anger spins in circles, hitting the walls like a trapped bird. The explosion ends as it began: with a premature exhaustion, a devouring silence.
He sinks into the sofa, staring at his own hands. He sees both and seems not to know which of them is more alien to his own body.
“Sorry,” he whispers, the word so low that I almost miss it. He doesn’t look at me. He just shakes his head slowly. “I just...”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
I approach slowly. I sit in the armchair across from him.
“The information you obtained,” I say. “It wasn’t just about money, was it?”
He gives me a look that is half fury, half a plea not to continue. I realize I’ve hit bone. The equation has an unknown term, and he’s biting it between his teeth.
I wait, making space for the silence to force him to confess.
I think he will give in. His face wavers, his mouth open, the word almost coming out.
But then a shadow passes through his eyes—an iron curtain that falls and seals everything up again.
The fragility retreats, giving way to an ancient weariness.
He shakes his head, slowly. “It’s just what happens when people like us don’t have the luxury of your money.” He stares at me, and there is no more anger, just a cold, hard fact. “It’s an old story, Alexei. And it’s not mine to tell.”
I could pressure him. I have the tools for that. But I look at him—the stained bandage on his leg, the exhaustion in his shoulders...
I know how to recognize a defeat in an open field, so I do what I have never done in years of negotiations: I accept his word as the final sentence.
I nod a single time.
“Alright,” I say, getting up. The business conversation is over.
What remains is the logistics of having a wounded man bleeding on my Italian leather sofa.
“You did a mediocre job of dressing that wound. Change it or it will get infected.”
I approach, stopping in front of him. He stares up at me, his chin raised in an exhausted challenge, waiting for the next order, the next analysis.
“Afterwards, go to the bedroom,” I say. “Sleep.”
Confusion ripples across his face. He looks at the corridor, then back at me. He has snooped around the apartment. He knows.
“Your bedroom?” he asks with genuine suspicion.
“It’s the only bed in this apartment,” I reply. “And, at the moment, it’s more useful for your recovery than for my sleep.”
I turn, walking towards my office.
“What about you?” he asks. There is something in this question that never existed before: a hesitation to say more, an impossibility of letting go of the now.
I don’t turn around. “I have work to do,” I say. “My brother is making an effort to affect my reputation. It’ll be a long night.”
I close the door behind me, leaving him alone in the room with an order that was not really an order, but an invitation. A permission, perhaps.