Alexei #3
Then, without another word, I holster the gun.
I put one of his arms over my shoulders, hold him by the waist, and ignore the protests of my own bruised body.
I lift him from the floor. He is heavy, a dead weight of muscle and bone, and he groans in pain when I move him, his head lolling against my shoulder.
He uses what little strength he has left to lean on me.
I carry him out of the bar, past the wreckage of my family war. No one dares to lift their head. No one says a word. I carefully place him in the seat of my car. The immaculate white leather is immediately stained with his blood.
And I find that I don’t care.
The suture needle enters the skin above Griffin’s eyebrow with firm precision.
He doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound. The muscles in his shoulder tense.
In the apartment, the only sound is my breathing and the click of the forceps as I change instruments.
Griffin’s blood no longer pulses, just flows, resigned, onto a cotton cloth folded in the palm of my hand.
The cut on his forehead is deep, a perfect red line, fading from crimson to rust as it coagulates.
I’ve already cleaned the worst of it. The blood, the filth from that wretched bar. Now, the repairs remain. The cut on his forehead, the split lip, the abrasions on his face.
I work under the bright light of my desk lamp, which I dragged into the middle of the living room. He is sitting in a chair, bare-chested, a map of new and old bruises across his body.
Every wound I clean, every stitch I make, is a personal affront.
Ivan not only dared to touch him; he forced me to intervene, to expose myself, to turn a private settling of scores into a circus spectacle for anyone on the pier who had the misfortune of being there.
The idiot didn’t understand the basics: in a public duel, it’s respect that is lost.
I finish the last stitch and cut the thread. I pick up a gauze soaked in antiseptic and move to clean the area, and Griffin is already watching me with a crooked smile, half cynical, half stunned.
“It’s going to sting,” I warn, in as neutral a voice as possible.
“I’m already stinging,” he replies, hoarse. They are the first words he’s said since we got here.
I press the gauze against the cut, and he hisses as his whole body tenses. He looks at me with one swollen eye and the other clear and defiant. He watches me work with a confidence that borders on insanity. He saw me almost kill my cousin for him, and now he sits here, allowing me to patch him up.
I finish cleaning, cover the suture with a bandage. I take a step back. The damage is contained. He will survive. On the outside, at least.
Griffin takes a deep breath, once, then another. He raises his hand, slowly, perhaps expecting me to push it back. But I don’t.
His fingers stop inches from my face, hesitate, then touch me. A romantic gesture, were it not for the brutality of everything we’ve been through. His fingers are calloused and rough, and the touch is disconcertingly gentle, reverent. His thumb brushes my jaw, where Ivan hit me.
“He hurt you,” Griffin whispers, and there is something frighteningly honest in the sentence; a confused, amazed realization.
I don’t know how to react. The pain doesn’t matter—it never mattered, not to me—but the fact that Griffin sees it unnerves me.
“One Malakov fighting another,” he continues, the trace of a smile growing, even if only at the corners of his mouth. “If I weren’t so fucked up, I’d find this… hilarious.”
His laugh is dry, a low rumble that ends before it starts.
I hold his wrist. I keep his hand on my face. The gesture is intimate, perhaps even dangerous. For me, at least, since I never let anyone get this close, and Griffin knows it—I can see it in the way his smile falters that he understands he has crossed an invisible line.
“Why did you do it?” he asks softly. “All that mess. You could have left me there. You could have sent your men.”
I repeat the standard answer, the one my whole family expects to hear. “Ivan challenged my authority in public. He damaged my property. The response was appropriate.”
I also know that appropriate is far from what it was.
Griffin laughs again, breathless. “Property,” he repeats and pulls his hand back. “You bled for property, Alexei?”
The metallic taste of anger still coats my tongue, mixed with something I don’t recognize: perhaps shame, perhaps pride.
I think about responding as I always do: with sarcasm, indifference, a veiled threat.
But Griffin is there, still breathing, still holding my gaze, and I find myself without defenses.
“No. You’re right,” I admit.
I am the first to break eye contact. Vulnerability is an unknown and hostile territory for me.
I stand up, stiff, and start to put away what’s left of the first-aid kit. I need a task, an action that gives me back control.
“That’s enough for today,” I say, more formally than necessary. “You need rest. And I need a drink.”
I turn to go to the bar, to the familiar safety of alcohol and distance.
“Alex,” his voice stops me, firmer than I expected. “Wait.”
I stop. I listen.
“I found him.”
I think I’m delirious. Hours of bleeding and neuromuscular pain can cause auditory hallucinations.
I turn slowly, expecting to see him falter, the sentence dissolving into stumbles. But Griffin is sitting there, his head held high, aware that he has survived the slaughterhouse.
“What?”
“I spoke with Seraphim.”
I take three steps toward him.
“When?”
“Today. Before the ambush,” Griffin replies, and pride overcomes exhaustion in his features. I stare at his hands: trembling, yet firm. “He’s going to cooperate. He has no loyalty to Vasily. He’ll give you what you need to prove his betrayal.”
I process the information, trying to find the flaw in it. But there is none. Griffin was never one for embellishments.
Ivan’s attack, which should have been the night’s main event, becomes amateur theater in the face of what Griffin announces. I try to react with the same coldness I do everything, but the news dismantles me.
Griffin, chaos incarnate, the most unpredictable variable in my plan, not only survived but completed the mission. And so quickly.
“What did he ask for in return?”
Griffin shrugs, or tries to. “I’ll leave that part to you guys. It’s not like there’s anything you can’t do.”
I don’t answer immediately. I run through scenarios, possibilities, dangers.
“Do you trust him?”
“I trust his fear,” Griffin replies. “It’s genuine. And his hatred too.”
I look at his face, at the still-throbbing cut, at the almost-closed eye and the other, glazed but lucid.
“He’ll make contact,” he continues. “Give him a chance.”
I run a hand through my hair, tired. The feeling of control returns amidst the chaos.
“You did well,” I admit.
“I’m good at surviving,” he says, and there’s something sad there, an acceptance that perhaps he’ll never be good for anything else.
We stand in silence.
“Want a drink?” I say.
“I want you here.”
His request is not something logic can process. It comes from a place of vulnerability so raw that I feel exposed just witnessing it.
I stop. I watch. The broken and bloodied man who has just turned my world upside down twice in one night.
He doesn’t look away. In his waiting, there is a trust I have done nothing to deserve.
Slowly, I abandon the idea of the drink. I walk to the sofa nearest to him.
I sit. And I stay.
He says nothing more and doesn’t try to touch me. He knows he no longer has to fight for my attention.
He already has it. Completely.
The cycle of hours ends with the promise that order will be restored.
It always does. Chaos never lasts more than a few moments: a fight, a shootout, a scream, then come the calls and threats, the cleanup crews, the payments made in silence.
My men have already scrubbed the bar until the bloodstains have become a memory of bleach.
Ivan, they say, is icing his jaw, chewing on his own humiliation.
Griffin is recovering in my bed, his pain softened by pills and alcohol.
The world remains, invariably, on its march.
I spend the next few hours in insipid meetings, numbers and contracts, pretending the previous night didn’t happen.
No one dares to mention the turmoil; the official version of events has already spread—a trivial disagreement, resolved the old-fashioned way, with no major consequences.
The lie sticks better when you don’t force it too much.
At the end of the workday, I put on my overcoat over my suit, straighten my tie, and signal for the car to be brought around.
My bodyguards are waiting for me in the lobby.
They wear dark suits and have the look of men who have seen hell so many times that they only fear ridicule.
We go down to the ground floor together, where the air is filled with that cold smell of waxed granite and artificial flowers.
The building’s mirrored facade returns my distorted image: an impeccable man, but with the clear shadow of exhaustion—and a previous fight—under his eyes.
A black car is already waiting across the street.
I walk to the car, aware of the script: two men in front, one by my side, another behind, each attentive to the variations in the scenery.
Today, there is a new detail.
Half a block away, an old man is leaning against a lamppost, squeezing a time-worn accordion.
He plays an old Russian song, and his hoarse voice sings of an angel who fell from the sky and was lost among men.
It’s a sober commercial street, where every square meter was designed to be safe and predictable.
There are no street musicians here, much less people with a folk repertoire and no hat out front to collect coins.
My bodyguards quicken their pace, uncomfortable with any anomaly. I feel their tension escalating.