Griffin #3
And the worst part—the cruelest—is that he doesn’t pull away when he says it. He doesn’t let me go, nor does he push me away.
With every reunion, Seraphim tears away a layer of flesh I thought I had already lost. I stay silent, because there’s no right answer to that.
But he waits.
“I…” I whisper. “You weren’t listening to me,” I try. The beginning of the justification is pathetic, yet I don’t know any other way. “It was the only way to…”
He interrupts me with a subtle gesture, his hand tightening on my back. “I know,” he says, and that fucks with my head. Because the old Seraphim would have thrown this in my face until I bled. He would have staged a play, plotted revenge, made every word a rope around my neck.
This Seraphim just looks at me with a silent compassion so absurd that I start to hate him even more for it.
“You told me that, that night,” he says. “I’ve had… a lot of time to think since then.”
I remember his face, stripped of all elegance, just raw anger and pure sadness, and how I tried to explain what I didn’t understand myself.
He offers me the cigarette again. I take it. I need to occupy my mouth with something other than an apology.
“I didn’t want to take the plea deal. It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I continue, hoping some of these words make sense. “But…”
“It’s okay, Myr,” he whispers. “I know.”
There is silence.
“The rest of the boys wanted you dead,” he continues. “They thought you had sold me out to get rid of your sentence. I did too, for a while. And yet… I couldn’t stand the thought of burying you.”
I let out a short, humorless laugh. It’s the only possible reaction to the absurdity. It’s so fucked up. It’s so absurdly, poetically fucked up.
“Then we’re both idiots,” I say.
I turn my face, finally. Seraphim does too. He gives me a genuine, sad, but true smile, made of nostalgia and defeat, and of everything we could never have. “We always were.”
His smile slowly fades, and the weight of what we lost seems to crash down on us. We were a family, in our own twisted way.
“And the others?” I ask, softly. “Theo, the boys, Anya? What happened to everyone, Sera?”
Seraphim looks away. “Anya… she left. Got married, has kids. She’s somewhere in the south. It’s what she always wanted.” He pauses, and I know the next news won’t be good. “Theo… he didn’t make it. An overdose, three years ago. I buried him next to his sister.”
Of course. Theo, with his easy smile and fierce loyalty. Another grave.
“The rest… some are still with me. Others… died in jobs that went wrong.”
I nod.
I could stay here forever, in this forgotten garden, until the rest of the planet forgot to exist. But that never lasts, not for people like us.
Just then, a siren stutters on the avenue, and the spell breaks.
There are too many graves.
“I… I don’t want to become a corpse either, Sera,” I let slip, with more honesty than I intended. His name feels different now. “…Alexei… Alexei Malakov believes you can prove Vasily’s betrayal in some operation… I don’t know the details. But he…”
Seraphim pulls away, first removing his hand from my shoulder with extreme care, then sliding back into his own orbit. He leans against the balustrade and doesn’t look at me—he looks at the city’s dirty horizon, as if some redemptive answer were there.
“…He sent you,” he completes, and he’s back to being the Seraphim who commands, who never yields ground. It’s bitter. “You’re Malakov’s message.”
I shake my head, trying to laugh again. My throat won’t let me. “It’s not that simple. I… Sera, I could never sell you out like that. I just… I need you to fucking protect yourself. Alexei… he’s not a second-chance kind of guy. If he thinks you could be an obstacle, he…”
“He’ll kill me,” Seraphim concludes, without emotion.
“He will.” I rest my forearm on the low wall, poking the thick stone with my metal fingertips. “But he doesn’t play dirty. He just eliminates the problem. He keeps his word. If you cooperate, if you show you can be useful, even for a short time, he guarantees your safety. That’s why I—“
“Is that why you came back to me now?”
His gaze finally meets mine, and there’s a shadow of mockery in it, but also weariness.
I shake my head. I whisper, “The only thing I want is for you to survive.”
He laughs. A hoarse, shattered sound that might have been a sob in another life. “You’ve become a romantic, Myrddin. What exactly do you think will happen if I say no?”
I turn my body, forcing him to look at me up close. “If you say no, someone, from some side, if not all of them, will come after you. I know this game, Sera. I know it because I’m a part of it now.”
He just leans on the balustrade and studies the sky.
“Do you really think Alexei is better than Vasily?” he says.
I hesitate, because Seraphim can always smell a lie from a mile away, and it doesn’t matter that I’m smarter now, more thick-skinned; with him, it never works.
“I don’t know. But Vasily tried to kill me.
Alexei… saved me. I didn’t come to blackmail you.
I just… want you to not become a target.
You’re good at that, remember? Adapting.
Inventing a way out when there is none,” I say.
“Alexei wants proof. That should be enough.”
“And after? What about when I’m no longer useful?”
“You’ll figure something out,” I say, knowing how empty that sounds. “You can run. You always ran when you wanted to.”
He gives an ironic smile. “This time, I have nowhere to run.”
Silence. I think: maybe he’ll just disappear now—vanish like last time. But no. He just lights another cigarette.
“You really believe that,” he says, regretfully. “You believe this new world has room for people like us.”
I don’t answer. I don’t know. I never have.
The cigarette burns slowly.
“I thought I knew you,” he says, without resentment. “But you were always a mystery.”
I take a deep drag from the cigarette I’m still holding. “There’s no mystery, Sera. There’s survival. And you’re good at it. Better than me. I just… I need you to trust me.”
He sighs. “Trust,” he repeats, chewing on the word. “It’s been a long time since anyone asked me for that.”
For a moment, we’re just that: an idiot with a tin arm and a master manipulator, begging for trust in a condemned building.
“What do you get out of this?” he asks suddenly. His gaze is that of someone who already knows the answer but needs to hear it anyway, perhaps to measure the size of the lie I’m going to choose to tell.
The question dismantles me. I could say it’s for loyalty, or because I owe him the only good part of my history; I could invent that it’s out of fear, or because Alexei demands it, but the truth is I don’t even know anymore.
“He makes me want to stay alive,” I say, and the confession comes out so raw and low that I almost choke on it. “I spent a whole decade just… surviving. With him… I want to see tomorrow.”
The truth hangs between us, naked and ugly. I see the understanding on Seraphim’s face.
“Fuck, Myrddin…” he whispers, and there’s a genuine sadness in his voice, the sadness of someone who finally gets a terrible joke. “Are you in love with him?”
I open my mouth to deny it, to curse him, to tell him he’s ridiculous. In love? The word is stupid, too soft, a word from another world, for other people. People who exchange flowers, not stabs.
What I feel for Alexei has nothing gentle about it.
It’s the handle of a knife pressed against my sternum, only I’m the one begging him to drive it in.
The desire to be the perfect instrument in the hand of the only man who never hesitates.
It’s the feeling of burning alive and, for the first time, not wanting the fire to go out.
It’s the fact that the idea of dying doesn’t scare me, but the idea of dying without seeing him again… that terrifies me.
Maybe, for a fucked-up person like me, that’s exactly what love looks like.
No words come out of my mouth. To deny it would be to lie.
Seraphim lets out a short, humorless laugh. He shakes his head. “You were always terrible at asking for help.”
I feel like hugging him, apologizing for all this garbage. Seraphim never liked cheap sentimentality.
“Fuck, Sera,” I murmur, “I didn’t want it to end like this. I wanted…”
“For us to have a second chance?” he suggests, with a sad smile.
The desire is so pathetic, so out of place, that it chokes me before it becomes sound.
“There’s something funny about all this,” he says, looking into the void. “We survived too much to die now.”
I don’t know if he’s saying it to calm me down or to convince himself. The phrase hangs there, planted between us, like a last cursed seed of hope.
The silence grows long. A dog barks somewhere in the neighborhood. The wind brings the smell of rain. Deep down, it was always like this: him and me—and, most of the time, just me—waiting for the world to end slowly.
“What do you need?” he finally asks, resigned.
It’s his surrender.
I step back a little, wiping my face with the back of my hand, trying to reassemble the armor that shattered in the last few minutes.
“I need you to contact Alexei,” I say. “I need you to find a way to show him you’re willing to cooperate. A sign, a message… I don’t know. You’re the master of ghosts, Sera. You’ll figure out a way to appear without being seen. Just make him believe. I’ll handle the rest.”
He doesn’t argue. There’s no fight left in him, just a tired acceptance.
He nods his head once.
“Alright, Myrddin,” he says. “I’ll make contact.”
After leaving Seraphim, the silence of the church is no use to me anymore. I need noise, life, a place where I can dissolve.
My feet take me to the only kind of sanctuary I really know: a shitty bar, where the world makes less sense, where all the saints will die of cirrhosis, and no one gives a damn about your name. It’s familiar territory, one of the few places in the city where my face is known enough to be ignored.