Alexei #4
On the small silver table beside him rests a dossier. Personalized stationery, red seal. Griffin’s name is stamped on the cover.
“Alexei,” he pronounces without turning around.
“Father.”
“Come closer,” he orders, pointing to a spot two steps from the armchair.
I obey, feeling Angélica behind me, on watch.
I stop where he wants me to, and only then does he turn his head slightly to face me.
His eyes are sunken in his skull, but alive.
His mouth is contorted in something between contempt and analysis.
He dissects me, cell by cell, looking for the gene of failure.
“Your brother brought me this gift,” he says, tapping the dossier lightly. “He says you have become weak. That you hired a rat, a traitor, and now you protect him here, right in our financial center.”
I don’t respond. The art is never to speak first.
“You yourself, Alexei,” he spits, “you make him your right-hand man. While accusing your own brother of treason in Odessa.”
“Vasily is the traitor in Odessa,” I state.
My father smiles with a cruelty so pure I admire it. A cough comes, deep, which seems to rip his sternum out of place. Angélica steps forward, already with a glass of water, but he waves her away with a minimal gesture.
“Every treason needs proof,” he says when he catches his breath. “Your logic is impeccable, Alexei. Your numbers never lie. Except when your paranoia about your brother poisons it. Like in Istanbul.”
I wasn’t wrong in Istanbul, I think, with the old resentment burning cold in my chest. His operation was full of holes, the money was disappearing.
I just couldn’t get the last piece of the puzzle, the final proof that linked his hand to the embezzlement.
And Vasily, with his theater of the offended, cried about ‘honor’ and ‘trust’, and my father.
.. my father swallowed the whole performance.
I know he is weighing what is left in me against what is left of Vasily. I know that, even on the brink of death, he would not hand the empire over to someone who cannot destroy his own brother if necessary.
For a moment, only the sound of the oxygen.
“I’m dying, Alexei,” he whispers. “And I won’t leave an empire of chaos behind.” He points to the dossier. “This is chaos.”
Angélica takes another step closer, perhaps certain that the scene is reaching its climax. She rests her hand on the back of the armchair with the perfect posture of an anticipated widow.
“You brought this man into the house,” he says. “You protect him from those who have reason to kill him. You have committed yourself.”
There is the same cold calculation as always, the search for the slightest sign of hesitation. I do not give in.
(If I stood still long enough, my father would eventually fossilize before me, becoming just a piece of the room, another trophy among so many.)
He expects me to deny it. He expects pleading, he expects desperation, he expects to see his son lose his composure. I will not give him that pleasure.
“I didn’t commit myself,” I say. “I made an investment.”
My father lets out a sound between a laugh and a grunt. He looks like he’s going to suffocate. He gestures to the dossier with juvenile contempt. “An investment. Is that right? You invest in a rat and call it a strategy?”
I don’t avert my gaze. “I invest in a tool that knows the smell of all the rats that hide in our walls.” The words come out before I even think them; that’s not why I keep Griffin around, but it is the automatic defense ready.
I know that any concession will be used against me.
“His betrayal is what makes him useful. He knows how a traitor thinks.”
“He knows how a traitor thinks because he is one,” my father growls.
“And you put him in the center of everything, just when your brother and cousin need unity the most. You understand nothing about loyalty, Alexei. You never have. I built all this with blood, sweat, and the fear imposed. Do you think you can keep this empire standing just with algorithms and strategies?”
I don’t yield an inch. “I created systems that tripled your profits in four years. I identified and neutralized twenty internal threats. I am the only reason we survived the disaster in Istanbul and the shame that was Odessa.”
The mention of Istanbul is a mistake, but I let it slip on purpose. The old man doesn’t miss the cue. “Istanbul,” he hisses, spitting out syllables as if they were concentrated poison. “You never forgave me for not believing you back then, did you? You needed a rival to justify your own existence.”
The lines of tension form webs on the patriarch’s forehead; his sunken eyes shine with stubborn ferocity.
“I didn’t need to invent any rivalry,” I retort. “He makes a point of playing that role himself. Every week.”
He laughs, a dry sound that seems to tear small pieces of his lung out. “And yet he is the only one who never tried to stab me in the back,” he says.
The accusation is old. It no longer affects me.
“I don’t want to stab anyone in the back,” I say, and I point to the dossier, to his own body leaning in the armchair, to the future that drains away with every drop of synthetic oxygen.
“While the others celebrate imaginary victories, all I do is to ensure we will still have something to celebrate five years from now.”
I’m surprised the old man hasn’t yet thrown the dossier in my face. He stays there, motionless, weighing his next phrase.
Finally, he speaks. “Are you telling me that this rat—this Griffin—is more valuable to you than your own blood?”
This is the trap. If I say yes, I’m a traitor. If I say no, I’m an idiot. So, I cheat: “He is a tool. And too much blood has already been shed for personal reasons in this family. Perhaps it’s time we learned from our enemies.”
Behind him, Angélica wears a faint smile, full of false compassion. The silk statue moves a few millimeters forward, always to the side of the one who is winning.
“You always believed you were the smartest one here,” he says.
“I could respect that, if you didn’t disdain the blood that put you on your feet so much.
” He taps the red seal of the dossier with his finger.
“Use your pet worm to clean our corridors, but if he fails, you will be the one who pays the price. I’m tired of wasting time on sentimentality. The next failure will be your last.”
Behind everything, the hiss of the oxygen continues, indifferent to the battle fought in that room.
I lean in, pick up the dossier, and make a move to leave.
Before I do, I look at Angélica, who now approaches my father like a velvet shadow, filling his glass with an amber liquid.
She watches me over her shoulder.:
“Dear,” she intones to the old man, but it’s me she’s aiming at. “Don’t get worked up. The doctor recommended absolute rest.”
I don’t reply. I turn and leave, closing the massive oak door behind me.
I take two steps before I hear the door open and close again. The sound covers the click of Angélica’s heels.
I already know what she’s going to do. The warmth of her perfume reaches me before her voice.
“You did well,” she says.
“I survived.”
It takes me half a second to turn back and face her. She smiles, just enough not to be cold, and leans against the opposite wall. “He’s bluffing.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What?”
“He knows he’s not going to last, so he needs to decide quickly. And he needs convincing excuses for the world if he chooses you and not Vasily.” She leans her face closer, lowering her voice. “You would be a failure if you didn’t know that.”
Her voice is sharp and warm at the same time. The same old trick: seduce with the truth, then slowly suck out the poison. I try to decipher where loyalty ends and self-preservation begins. “And what do you get out of this, Angélica?”
She smiles, this time more sincerely.
“Stability. And maybe a vineyard in Tuscany when all this is over?”
She winks at me and turns, walking back to the king’s bedroom door.
“Good luck with your pet rat,” she says over her shoulder. She turns on her heels and disappears again, as quickly as she appeared, returning to my father’s room.
I go down the stairs, ignoring the frozen gaze of the doorman and the invisible tension that permeates every square inch of that luxury mausoleum.
The old man said one right thing: every treason needs proof.
On the main screen of my terminal, a red dot pulsates above a decrepit map of the industrial zone. Griffin.
Since I left the mansion, he has been in motion.
The trajectory of the dot is a chaotic electrocardiogram, snaking through neighborhoods I only visit in financial reports.
The purgatory of the damned. I see the dot stop near Schmidt’s tailor shop, then move through ill-reputed bars, alleys that don’t even have a name.
I see the transactions from the card I gave him only with essential expenses.
The circle around the red dot pulsates, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, according to the biological sensor of the bracelet on his wrist. With each peak of adrenaline, a wave of anxiety runs through me: Is he in trouble? Is he killing someone? Is he rebelling for good and preparing an ambush for me?
The memory of the morning—him, stumbling in my kitchen with the gun in his hand, the “be careful, okay?” said without knowing if it was a joke or a threat—haunts me as I review the logs, the statements, the charts.
The fear is that I cultivated Griffin’s chaos precisely to make it useful, and now the chaos has started to manipulate me.
I don’t know if I admire or detest this idea.
It gives me a headache. The lack of data. The need to rely on a human variable that is, by definition, unpredictable.
The voice of one of my men, always correct, echoes on the intercom, “Mr. Malakov, your car is ready. The Kaito investors arrive at the Krestoran in thirty minutes.” The reminder sours my teeth. Kaito Corp is the future, they say.