Alexei #2
His fury condenses. And, without hesitation, he does what he always does: he reacts with violence.
He punches me.
His fist hits my face. My head is thrown to the side, and I taste blood before I process the pain.
I don’t react. Not immediately, not as expected of me—of someone “at my level”, as my father would say, or as the wretches watching me from there surely think, each one turned into a sadistic judge of the Malakov fate.
I raise my hand and touch my lips. I see the dark glint of my own blood on my fingers.
My blood.
Ivan has managed what no one has dared to do since childhood. He made me bleed. In public. In a shitty bar. In front of twenty witnesses who aren’t even worth the price of a bullet to silence them later.
I feel my face contort, involuntarily—I was never good at theatrics. I slowly turn toward Ivan. He’s there, panting, his chest rising and falling to the rhythm of a troglodyte. He’s shocked by his own feat. He can’t believe he was capable of it either.
I don’t waste more saliva. There are no more words in Russian or any other language that can mediate what needs to happen here.
I advance.
I return the favor.
The weight of ancestral rivalries, of never-verbalized contempt, condenses into punches, headbutts, elbows.
Ivan hits me with another blow, this time to the shoulder, but I absorb it, letting my arm cushion the raw energy of the attack.
I retaliate with a hook to the liver, precise, surgical, and his body bends, the air instantly leaving his lungs.
He tries to grab me, uses his greater weight, seeks the clinch, and tries to take me to the ground like in those amateur wrestling championships he dominated in childhood.
Except I’m no longer the skinny kid, and he’s no longer the king of the school.
I move out of his arms’ reach, land an elbow that catches him right on the temple.
The whole bar turns into a nightmarish arena.
I throw him against the counter. Bottles explode, the smell of alcohol mixes with fresh blood, the shards fly like acid rain on our hands and arms.
There are muffled screams from a woman, maybe a drunk, but all eyes are fixed on the spectacle.
Ivan pushes me back. I lose count of how many hits I take—around the third or fourth, the brain learns to ignore the immediate damage, to enter that zone of clarity that only death or victory can bring.
I feel his knuckles tear my eyebrow, I see the blood run again, hot, staining the white collar of my shirt.
I dig my thumbs into his eyes. I feel the eyeball give under the pressure. Ivan screams, roars, and lets me go.
I take advantage of the space, reverse the position, pin him to the floor. His face is stained with blood and anger, his teeth bared, the look of someone who wants to devour me.
Punches. More punches. One, two, three. The bone of his nose breaks under the skin, his jaw dislocates. The blood runs down my fist, staining the filthy floor. But he doesn’t give up; he never was one to give up.
With a burst of strength, he knees me in the kidney, and the impact is so great that I see black spots swimming in my vision. He kicks me, unbalances me, slides out from under me, and gets to his feet with surprising speed for someone his size.
Ivan advances, blind with rage. His face has become a blur of raw flesh.
He raises his fist, aiming for my face, the final blow that should seal the moral victory, the primacy, the redemption for years of humiliation. That’s where instinct takes the helm.
As his arm comes down, I reach for my lower back, feel the cold of the metal, and, automatically, I pull my gun.
Ivan freezes.
The gun is pressed against his forehead. The barrel touches his skin, sinking in slightly.
For a second, I think about pulling the trigger.
No one moves. No one breathes. The entire bar is an installation of suspended violence, a few millimeters from becoming an urban horror story.
I hold Ivan’s gaze. He’s there, sweating, trembling, more animal than man.
He knows I’ve never hesitated before. He knows I would do it. We both know.
Ivan’s two men, who until now had only been watching the carnage with a mixture of dread and empty obedience, move their hands to the holsters under their jackets.
The reflex is automatic, the soldier’s instinct triggered by the smell of gunpowder, by the muffled sound of leather and metal.
But neither of them draws. They stand there, frozen, paralyzed in the kind of nightmare that only exists in the annals of civil war: there, in the most miserable bar on the pier, their two generals have guns pointed, blood running, and there is no protocol for choosing a side.
Shooting me would be suicide. Shooting Ivan would be a betrayal.
And, in the end, henchmen aren’t made to think about destiny.
They only know how to act or freeze. So they freeze.
Ivan swallows hard. A red drop runs from his eyebrow and drips onto the floor. No one moves. The silence weighs more than lead.
Ivan grinds his teeth. His mouth trembles, and it’s not just anger; it’s terror, and I immediately smell the fear, pure and distilled.
“Alexei,” he whispers. The arrogance finally shatters into a million pieces. “He’s just a mutt. A snitch. He’s not worth this.”
My attention shifts—I try, but I can’t help it—to Griffin, who is slumped on the floor like a broken doll, his back crooked against the nicotine-stained wall.
He watches me without blinking, blood running down his chin, one eye already swollen shut.
There’s no plea on his face, no hope, just the resigned waiting of someone used to taking beatings from life and people.
I wonder if he would prefer for me to kill Ivan. Or if he wanted me to die right there, just to end this infinite sequence of violence.
I realize that Ivan’s anger, looking at him again, has already lost half its force. The rest is just disappointment, a forty-year-old child begging to be taken seriously by the cousins who never respected his pain.
In that nanosecond of eye contact, I feel more pity than hatred for him. The weight of the years, of the Sunday dinners full of silence, of the times we pretended we were a normal family, settles in. Times when he, too, had used all this fury to help me.
A remnant of guilt under my tongue. I swallow it.
“You’re right,” I say, low. “He’s not worth this. He’s worth more.”
The sentence short-circuits Ivan’s brain. The muscles in his jaw lock, his breathing quickens.
I lean closer. The barrel of the gun is still pressed against his forehead.
“He’s mine, Ivan. And you don’t touch what’s mine.”
All the family’s unspoken stories flash by: the buried betrayals, the nights of fear, the pacts made with one’s own shame.
I realize my left hand is trembling with a fierce self-denial, an ancestral impulse to preserve what I have left, even if it’s a man on the verge of death.
In Ivan, a sorrow so raw appears that it makes me nauseous. This was it, it was always this: the pain of never being enough. The resentment of someone who lived in the shadows, who was thrown to the wolves and had to survive with no one to call a brother.
I feel for him, but I can’t show it. Not now.
“All this…” he whispers, “because of him?”
“This is because of you. Because of your stupidity. Because of your disobedience.” I tilt the gun, a millimeter at a time, away from his face.
I don’t put it away. I keep it pointed at the floor, between us.
I signal that the threat remains, that mercy is temporary.
“This is the last time I’m warning you. Stay out of my way.
Stay away from my business. And if I so much as dream that you came within ten meters of him again,” I say, with a nod toward Griffin, “I will end you. Understood?”
He doesn’t answer. He just stares at me.
“I asked if you understood,” I repeat, more quietly.
He nods. Short and spasmodic. “Understood.”
“Leave,” I order. “Take your men and get out of my sight before I change my mind.”
Ivan hesitates, but the survival instinct overcomes his pride.
He looks at his henchmen. They jolt out of their lethargy and follow, dragging themselves like drenched dogs, unable to look at anyone nearby. Ivan doesn’t speak, doesn’t turn, doesn’t dramatize: he just leaves.
The bar door slams behind them. The neon sign starts flickering again, a cockroach crawls over a pool of blood, and only then do I realize that all the other customers are hiding under the tables. No one dares to get up.
I breathe, relax my shoulders. Ivan’s blood is now mixed with mine on my clothes, on the floor, on the tables, and with Griffin’s, in a disgusting metaphor for what Malakov life has always been: all together, all contaminated, all with no way back.
After gathering my courage, I turn and go to Griffin.
He looks at me, but says nothing; he just waits, as if I were going to decide right then and there whether he lives or dies.
I crouch beside him. I lower the gun.
I brush a lock of bloody hair from his face, so I can see the damage. It’s ugly. One eye is swollen shut, his lip is split in three places, and there’s a deep cut on his forehead that won’t stop bleeding, in addition to injuries from other fights in the days prior.
“Can you stand?” I ask, quietly.
Griffin spits some blood on the floor before answering. “Give me a minute,” he mutters, his voice a rasp.
I don’t have a minute. My men will be here any second, followed by a cleanup crew that will make this place disappear from the records. I look around at the customers still huddled under the tables.
Witnesses. Another expensive problem.
“This was stupid,” I say to myself.