Alexei #3
This time, unlike the others, I resist the urge to monitor his telemetry, to access the hidden cameras in the ceiling, or check the sensors on the bedroom door. I want to see if Griffin knows what to do with a space where there is no supervision, where no one expects him to fail.
The office is dark, and for a long time, I only hear the hum of the security system and the muffled sound of the wind on the triple-glazed windows.
I try to work, but the reports and charts dissolve before my eyes.
My brain goes back to the image of him bleeding on the couch, fierce and humiliated, refusing to accept that his own dignity can be bought.
I wonder at what point in my life I lost the ability to feel shame for it.
When I leave the office, it is already dawn. I walk through the living room in silence, avoiding the place where he was. The corridor to the bedroom is dark, but I recognize his shoes, lined up together next to the door.
I open the door slowly, not to wake him. He’s there. The metal arm rests on the dresser, and he sleeps with the most relaxed expression I’ve ever seen on his face.
I don’t know what I intended to see here. Maybe I expected a gesture of sabotage, an attack, or at least a nightmare worthy of his tragic biography.
But all I see is a man sleeping with his wound exposed.
I force myself not to touch him. But I observe him. I just don’t know exactly why.
He’s a variable I threw onto the board without having the slightest idea how to calculate the result. And, for the first time in a long time, the uncertainty—his uncertainty—doesn’t bother me.
I didn’t sleep. Sleep is a luxury I can’t afford when there’s a war being fought on three fronts: one against Ivan’s stupidity, another against Vasily’s cunning, and a third, more confusing and irritating, against the anomaly currently sleeping in my bed.
I am the heir to an empire designed never to rest, but I hadn’t foreseen the kind of insomnia that sets in when someone starts to occupy a real space in your existence.
The silence in this apartment has always been carefully maintained and unaltered, but now it’s different.
It carries the muffled echo of another body breathing.
Griffin occupies the house with an unclassifiable presence, an energy that repulses and attracts, that contaminates the air with something I don’t know if I can name.
I get up from the leather chair. I spent the night working and drawing up scenarios for today’s meeting. I need a coffee.
I find Griffin in the kitchen—up earlier than I thought he would be.
He’s in front of the coffee machine, wearing only gray sweatpants with his torso bare, despite the cold, displaying his dozens of scars.
He’s barefoot, limping slightly, and stares at the machine with the same confused hostility that a caveman would stare at a smartphone.
For the first time since the emotional disaster that was our last conversation, I feel like laughing.
The machine hisses, chokes, and makes noises that suggest an imminent domestic catastrophe. Before I am forced to intervene as a firefighter and a homeowner, I decide to announce my presence.
“You’re going to break the machine,” I say, hoarser than usual from lack of use in the last hours.
Griffin turns, half-jumping, already in a defensive position. He didn’t hear me come in. But he immediately returns to the machine. “Do you need a fucking PhD to use this thing?” he scoffs. “Where’s the ‘make coffee’ button?”
The answer, so childishly defiant, amuses me in a way I don’t know how to process.
I walk up to him, invading his personal perimeter as a deliberate test. His scent is immediate, and there’s nothing about him that matches this apartment of steel and glass: it’s the remnant of analgesic and, underneath everything, sleep.
A real, true smell. A threat to the sterility of my sanctuary.
“There isn’t a ‘make coffee’ button,” I say, touching his hand to adjust the machine’s selector. The gesture is supposedly technical, but our knuckles bump, and there’s a jolt of static electricity. “The grind needs to be exact. The machine is sensitive to pressure.”
He doesn’t back away. I have to lean over him to reach the water reservoir, my chest touching his back. I feel him hold his breath.
“Do we live together now?” he asks, testing the exact distance between provocation and disaster. “I need to know if I can leave my things scattered or if my husband is a clean freak.”
Husband. Said with all the sarcasm in the world, but said nonetheless.
I should reprimand him for his insolence. I should put the barrier back in place.
But instead, I just feel a twitch at the corner of my mouth.
I grab two cups. I pour coffee for both of us, and I feel like we’re pretending a life that never existed, that can never exist. But Griffin accepts it willingly. “Make yourself at home,” I say. Our fingers brush. The same familiar static electric shock.
Only then does he really look at me. “Jeez, boss. You look like shit. Didn’t you sleep?”
The question is banal, but it displaces something inside me.
“I’m functional with little sleep. How’s your leg?”
“I’ve had worse,” he lies.
“Is the bed comfortable?”
“Hard as your fucking soul, but it’ll do,” he replies, and I almost smile.
I take a sip of coffee.
I need to go. I have three business meetings before noon.
But I hesitate.
The morning light enters through the window at a sharp angle, cutting the shadows, and I see Griffin as I have never seen anyone before: vulnerable in the clarity, less a threat than an invitation to disaster.
He’s there, holding the cup of coffee I made for him in my kitchen.
The scene is so absurdly domestic that it defies all logic.
“I have a conversation with my father today,” I say. “Depending on the result, others might feel... encouraged to act.”
Griffin immediately understands. He straightens up, the muscles in his shoulders tense.
I go to one of the kitchen cabinets—one that doesn’t contain food—and open it with my fingerprint. Inside, in a foam insert, there is a Glock 26. Small, compact, easy to hide, but lethal at close range. I place it on the counter between us.
“Keep this,” I say. “Especially if you leave the apartment. Do you know how to use one of these?”
He places his cup on the counter and takes the gun without hesitation. The weight seems appropriate in his hand. He smiles at me.
“This is America. We learn to shoot before we learn our multiplication tables.”
He tries, with his left hand, to check the chamber. The movement is perfect, but the gun slips for a moment. He recovers it quickly, but gives me a defiant look, as if betting I would laugh at him.
He clears his throat, his face flushing slightly as he laughs at himself. The bravado melts away into an adorably pathetic vulnerability.
“...I swear I know how to use it.”
The man who survived everything, who challenges me at every turn, who just made a joke about us being married, is now fumbling with a gun because he forgot he only has one arm. And I feel a wave of something I refuse to name.
In fact, I don’t laugh. Instead, I take his hand and position the gun as the missing support hand.
“I know you do,” I say, low. “Just remember to aim.”
I release his hand, but the electric sensation remains, running up my arm even after I move away.
He watches me collect the gun with the still-hot coffee in the cup left behind. He expects me to say something else, to explain myself. But I don’t.
I leave behind the smell of coffee and the unanswered provocations, turning towards the door.
“Alexei,” he calls.
I stop. I look at him over my shoulder.
He’s there, with my gun in his hand, my coffee on the counter, in the middle of my sanctuary. Even so different from everything, he seems... part of the place.
“Be careful, okay?” he says.
I nod and leave.
Angélica awaits me on the threshold of my father’s private wing like a sphinx, adorned with blue silk and a lipstick that seems too expensive for this time of day.
The corridor is saturated with her scent, a heavy perfume of flowers and spices, made to stifle the hospital decay leaking from the half-open door.
She holds a champagne flute, as if the morning never happened, sparkling with a kind of morbid rejoicing.
The queen of the castle of ruins, ready to watch the auction of the last relics.
“Alyosha,” she calls me with an empty smile. “So punctual. He hates waiting, you know.”
“How is he?” I ask, because it’s what is expected of a son, but I already recognize the code: no one asks about the patriarch without admitting weakness.
Angélica swirls the flute in her hand with a rehearsed elegance.
“Dramatic, as always. Vasily put on a beautiful scene. He even brought a photo album.” She studies me from head to toe, searching for traces of the two-headed traitor she heard about.
She whispers, “Do us both a favor and get this over with quickly. Stress affects my skin.”
She grants me passage with a tilt of her head.
I cross the corridor, feeling the electricity of the confrontation building up. The objective is simple: survive, leave with the minimum amount of damage, prevent Vasily from raising another point on the scoreboard. The rest is cosmetic.
I enter the room. Curtains drawn, dark furniture, a thick rug swallowing the sound of my footsteps.
My father is not in bed, but sitting in a leather armchair, contemplating the gardens through the closed window.
He wears a grey cashmere robe, his legs covered by a heavy shawl.
An oxygen tube hangs from his face to the steel cylinder beside him, hissing low with each breath.
His face is hollow, his eyes invisible at first. For an instant, he just looks like an old man—but the smell of authority, of unrenounced power, fills the room like toxic gas.