Griffin #2
“I don’t know if that would be wise—“
“Just—fuck, tell me where he is,” I interrupt, stepping a little closer, as if it were possible to intimidate someone who believes in resurrection.
And the moment he opens his mouth, that voice comes. From the shadows, incisive, cutting through the stone ribs of the church.
“I’m here, Myrddin.”
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that name again. And with Seraphim, you can’t get used to anything.
The blood drains from my fingertips; my biological hand clenches into a fist, the other, metallic one, just grinds.
The priest turns his head, recognizing him immediately as Seraphim slowly emerges, with his usual elegance, a charcoal-gray overcoat, turtleneck, black boots, clean hands—always clean, even after dirty work. A Renaissance saint.
The priest tries to regain control. His voice comes out as barely a thread. “Seraphim,” he whispers. “I thought you were out of town.” He makes the sign of the cross, first for himself, then for us. The gesture is automatic, old, and insufficient to protect anyone from what’s coming.
Seraphim walks to the first pew. He doesn’t even look at the priest. His blue eyes are glued to me.
“I was supposed to be,” he says with an empty smile. “But I heard an old friend was causing trouble for me.”
The priest understands that he wasn’t invited to this conversation. He retreats, quickly, with a respectful nod of his head to Seraphim. The devil in the church.
“You never change, do you?” I say. I don’t know where the metallic taste in my mouth comes from, the bitterness that bends my half-smile. “Always have to be the last one to enter the room.”
Seraphim comes closer, observing the prosthesis on my arm, the way I put all my weight on it to bear the pain. “I see you got my message,” he says.
“I did. I took it as an invitation to make peace.”
He points to a side door with a quick jut of his chin. “Not here.”
I follow him without hesitation, feeling the cold of the stone floor through my soles, then the dull thud of the door closing behind us.
We enter a hallway with damp walls, smelling of melted candles and cheap incense, but Seraphim is so familiar with the place that he walks without looking around.
He climbs iron steps, passes through a faded door, and only then leads us outside—to the walled garden at the back of the church, forgotten in the middle of the city.
The garden is a quadrangle of sparse grass, crooked trees, and a stone bench toppled on its side.
The city seems far away, even though police sirens echo every minute.
Seraphim stops a few meters from me, his back to the buildings, looking directly at the moss-covered wall.
He only speaks when he feels there’s no one else listening.
“Why did you come after me, Griffin?”
No nostalgia, no irony. Every time he used that name—Griffin—it was like this: a tired emptiness.
I let out a breath. I’m also more exhausted than I expected. “You know why.”
He pulls a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket. “It’s true I have no sympathy for any Malakov,” he says, placing a cigarette in his mouth. He lights it. Takes a slow drag. “But one of them is threatening you. I align with the side that isn’t actively trying to kill you.”
I expected a negotiation; I expected strategy, power plays, territory drawn on the ground between us.
Instead, I get this. The man who mutilated me years ago now places himself, once again, exclusively between me and the abyss.
There’s something grotesquely cyclical about it.
The contradiction throbs in my chest, so absurd, so deep, that the words get lost. Anger, gratitude, a rotten affection I tried to bury. All tangled up under my sternum.
He offers the same cigarette to me.
Without thinking much, I take it.
I take a drag. Let the nicotine clear my head.
“Cain told me about your conversation,” he continues. He finally looks at me. His eyes are clear, icy. “I don’t see Alexei as the villain. You’re right—it would be a losing fight.”
The weight of the confession disarms me. I’m not prepared for this. Seraphim was never one for such bluntness, always preferring theatrics—manipulating, suggesting, dragging his interlocutor to the breaking point. But now, the tone is different.
“Then why Vasily?” My voice cracks on the first syllable, but I drag it out anyway. “If you know he’s going to put you against Alexei, why take his money?”
He looks at the cigarette, then at me, then at the moss-covered wall. It gives the impression that he’s analyzing all possible answers, each one a bomb about to explode, and he has to choose which one will kill us more slowly.
He takes the cigarette back, so quick and precise that I barely feel the touch of his fingers. He takes a drag, and when he exhales, the smoke comes out thick, murky.
“I’m not his ally. It was a job. Things grew, Myrddin,” he says.
“I no longer look after a bunch of teenagers stealing bread. The network is bigger. The needs are different. And that requires a kind of money that is…” he pauses.
“There’s no honest way to accumulate so much power, so much money.
There never was. The only question that matters isn’t where the money comes from, but where it goes.
I honestly don’t care where the money comes from.
Whether it’s from Vasily, Ivan, or the devil himself. I only care where it goes.”
A part of me wants to explode, to scream that he’s faking it, that there’s still a piece of Seraphim that believes in the purity of intentions. The other part—the part that survived all this—recognizes the terrible truth of what he says. It was always like this. It will always be like this.
But all I can hear is the echo of my conversation with Cain. Where did you think the money came from?
The image of him, washing himself for hours, scrubbing his skin until it bled, comes back. My throat tightens.
I go to his side, lean on the balustrade, and look out at the city.
“And back then?” My tone comes out bitter, childish—it’s impossible to hold back. “The money… for Theo’s sister. For the house. To keep everyone alive. Did that not matter either?”
Seraphim looks at me, really looks, and I see the crack. For the first time in years, the marble facade gives way. He didn’t know that I knew. He didn’t expect me to throw that past in his face, not with such precision, not with such anger. He looks away, and shame consumes him in a boyish way.
And I just stand there, feeling the open wound of a decade on my skin, throbbing under the scar.
“Cain told you, did he?”
He bites his lower lip, a strange and vulnerable gesture from someone who made elegance a shield.
“I just wanted… you weren’t supposed to have to deal with that.”
He seems smaller, more fragile. I’ve never seen him like this. I’ve never seen him look guilty.
“Why did you never tell me?” I ask. “Why didn’t you trust me? I would have helped. I would have done anything for you.”
He turns to me, and I see shame. A deep, corrosive shame.
“I did trust you,” he whispers. His eyes are wet. “Myrddin, you were the only person in my entire life that I truly trusted. And that’s exactly why I could never share certain things with you. I just… I just wanted to protect you from that.”
I think about saying I understand. But I don’t understand a fucking thing. Between Seraphim and me, there has always been this abyss.
When I finally look away, I realize how much I’m shaking.
“Myrddin…” he begins, his voice low.
There’s a pause, a fraction of a second in which everything could dissolve, and maybe it would be better if it did.
“No,” I cut in. “You… you thought you had to do that, and I… I’m not even angry.
I’m just so fucking sad that you thought you had to do it alone.
” The scene of him underwater repeats like a fucking movie.
“I would have helped you. I would have stolen. I would have killed for you—I did kill for you. And I would have done anything so you wouldn’t have to…
” My voice fails. I can’t finish the sentence.
In Seraphim, the shame quickly gives way to a deeper abyss—a pain he never managed to hide well, only camouflage behind pretty words. “You were the only good thing I had,” he whispers. “And that was my burden. Not yours.”
He touches my back. His hand slides slowly, and I feel him get closer. The gesture is strange, hesitant, and maybe that’s why it has such an effect.
He rests his forehead on my shoulder, and the smell of his hair—tobacco, floral perfume, shampoo—transports me straight back to my teens, to nights of running away and coming back, to the taste of blood and cheap booze in my mouth and the absolute silence after the crime.
It calms something inside me. I don’t dare look at him anymore.
“I thought,” I whisper, “for a long time… that you hated me.”
He says nothing for a while.
“I never could,” he whispers.
I feel a lump in my throat, a tightness that goes down to my stomach.
“Even… even after everything, Sera… even without a fucking arm, if you had stayed…” I close my eyes.
I try to purge all the fantasies I spent a decade weaving: what would have happened if things weren’t as they are.
“…fuck. I would have… I would have kept going,” I whisper.
My voice breaks on its own. “I still… I still would have followed you anywhere.”
The weight of Seraphim’s hand on my back is strange, unnatural—because the last time he touched me like this, I was half my age and twice as arrogant, and neither of us knew what to do with our own anger. Now, he holds me as if I’m about to fall apart. Maybe I am.
And yet, he doesn’t tremble. The difference between us was always this: even when he’s fucked up, Seraphim never loses his composure. Not when he speaks, not when he lies, not when he kills, not now.
“You turned me in. To the police.”