Alexei #5
“You know, your brother put a gun to my head more than once,” he says casually.
“All these situations have something in common—it’s his response to being contradicted.
” He exhales smoke with a humorless smile on his lips.
“He doesn’t know that you—or Griffin—found out about me.
Otherwise, he would have set fire to all my points of interest, all the places that are minimally important to me, because he knows I would put a bullet in my own head in exchange for peace for my people.
It would be a good ultimatum, don’t you think? ”
Seraphim watches me, smoking his cigarette, and he no longer smiles. I see where he’s going with this.
I initially thought he would ask for money. Funds for his business, if money was what drove him to make deals with someone he speaks of with as much contempt as Vasily. But no.
He knows that, even with the possibility of his information neutralizing Vasily, we are still talking about the Malakovs.
“You want protection,” I say.
He shrugs. His eyes drift to the city, and he blows smoke.
The dim lighting, accentuated by distant neon lights, gives him an ethereal, androgynous air.
“More than that,” he says. “I want guarantees. A safe passage for me and my people. And… due separation. Even if there comes a time when any Malakov wants my head again for something I did, I want guarantees that the consequences will be reserved for me alone. No kidnapping of a convenience store cashier, Alexei.”
Of course, it reached his ears. But he knows, and I know, that I’ve come too far to be shaken by such an ultimatum. Kidnapping civilians is not standard practice, it’s not common, nor should it be. But for very high stakes, drastic measures are taken.
“You have an irritating sense of drama, Seraphim,” I say, and I almost smile. He notices. He finds it amusing.
I slowly put the gun back in its holster. The top of the Metropol groans with the wind, the old structures protesting. Sit down, Malakov, he said—I doubt Seraphim has ever sat down by concession in his life.
“Let’s suppose I grant you this amnesty,” I say.
“Your services aren’t just charity, and you, I imagine, align with whoever pays best. You even foresee this with your extra condition.
So enlighten me: how could I open a safe passage for a mercenary who invariably acts against the interests of my own empire?
If you sold services to Vasily, what you do is not only illegal but will, one way or another, intersect with the foundations of my family. ”
I think of something else. I think of what I don’t know.
I don’t know what Vasily asked for: if it was raw intelligence, system sabotage, an execution, or just planting false files.
I only know that Seraphim, if he has survived this long, never worked for lost causes, never mixed with those who couldn’t pay in lives or clean money.
And if Odessa is the axis, everything he has done could be a time bomb embedded under our feet, ready to demolish the Malakovs from within.
As if reading my mind, he smiles at me.
This smile is different. Disconcerting.
“Do you want to know what I sold your brother?”
I narrow my eyes. He touches the back of the adjacent chair, with the affected delicacy of someone who has never gotten their hands dirty, and makes a gesture: sit down, for real this time, come and hear the secret.
I don’t accept immediately. I maintain my distance, inspect the floor, the surroundings, the way he holds his cigarette—left hand.
“I’ll tell you,” he says. He tilts his head toward his invitation, waits.
So I pull out the chair.
I sit.
“Coherent lies, sometimes, begin with a truth,” he says. He takes a matte plastic card from his pocket, which gleams dully under the rooftop light. He holds it between two fingers. “Sample card from M.I. Trust,” he says, with a smile.
I inspect the card before taking it.
It’s heavy PVC, pale green, institutional. The edge is slightly beveled. On the front, tiny micro-printed letters identify M.I. Trust in the Jersey Islands with an old, opaque magnetic stripe on the back.
I take it. The name embossed at the top, in the discreet typography of a corporate card, is that of one of Ivan’s front companies. Below, a demarcated area sealed with a thin, transparent plastic film—the Signature Sample field.
There it is, in black ballpoint pen ink, Ivan’s signature. Legible, quick, with a hesitation on the M—the same hesitation he always had when signing what he knew he shouldn’t, with guilt and haste.
“One person, in the Odessa operation, was chosen to survive,” he continues. I know who he’s talking about.
“Kirill Denisov,” I say quietly, analyzing the card.
Seraphim smiles. “Yes. A person with banking and logistical access, who could speak with credibility. Vasily made a real initial payment to keep him quiet about the operation. He put on a show as if keeping him alive wasn’t part of the plan.
It was his guarantee. He wanted to tell the family he did what was necessary and present real, legitimate proof that he had bought his silence. ”
“And this?” I lift the card slightly.
Seraphim maintains his smile, a little less forced, a little more like someone genuinely enjoying himself. “This account was really opened,” he says. “And, for all legal purposes, it was opened by Ivan Malakov. It’s solid.”
He emphasizes that last word, solid.
I look at the card again. Everything that is said to be solid in this world usually doesn’t last two winters.
But the signature sample is perfect. Not like the public signature Ivan used for official contracts, but like the private signature, the one that only appears when he’s nervous, scared, or signing something that could condemn him. The hesitant M, the drawn-out A.
“Is it solid, Seraphim?” I say.
He gives me a smile that can only mean no.
He raises his cigarette, taking a drag with an elegance that only serves to annoy me more.
“Since Odessa, smaller transfers from this account were made sporadically to Kirill,” he says. “Vasily wanted to use it to say that Ivan, behind his back, was making additional payments to cover up his own parallel operation that went wrong.”
I feel pressure in my right temple.
“He was going to blame Ivan?”
He leans back in his chair, the white leather of his gloves a stark contrast against the darkness of the rooftop. “With Kirill alive, knowing nothing but numbers and transfers, he would just plant the right narrative for him to ‘confess’ that Ivan paid him in parallel to Vasily.”
That’s why Vasily wanted him alive. That doesn’t surprise me.
Still, the audacity of the plan is admirable in its cruel simplicity.
“Weakening Ivan is a lateral move,” I say. It’s the only piece that doesn’t fit. “Why would he target someone who strengthened him more than he did me?”
Seraphim looks at me, and for the first time, his gaze loses its grace and gains an analytical, clinical depth. Then, he gives a half-smile again, goes back to smoking, and blows smoke toward the sky.
“This was never about Ivan. It was about you. Vasily acts like a child breaking his own favorite toy just to get attention. He created a problem that only you could solve, leaving only himself for you to lean on to clean up the mess supposedly left by Ivan. He wanted you to see him, with his privileged information that he would pretend he got on his own merit. For you to finally recognize him as an equal.” He takes a drag.
Pauses. “…But that’s just my personal reading of the facts,” he whispers.
Seraphim’s analysis is so precise, so invasive in its diagnosis, that I allow myself the silence to just listen to the strings of the wind and the distant noise of the city’s brakes.
The portrait he paints of my brother—a pathetic infant, destroying everything around him in the hope of provoking a reaction—is so, so unbearable that I physically struggle not to clench my fists.
Until now, it was easier to hate him as a traitor, an adversary who deserved to be put down; now, Seraphim plants the corrosive doubt: what if Vasily is nothing more than a beggar for affection, condemned to repeat the cycle because he was never loved even by his own blood?
And, more than that, what if I am just the other side of that coin?
“Sentiment is for children and poets, Seraphim,” I say, trying to regain control. “I deal with facts. Vasily shows a pattern of incompetence and betrayal that began long before this… ‘reading’ of yours.”
I see a fleeting shadow of genuine compassion in his eyes. “You still think about Istanbul, don’t you?” he says. “You still believe he betrayed you.”
I hear the name and everything inside me recoils. It’s a forbidden word, a mistake so absolute that it redefined our family. No one says Istanbul out loud. No one, except someone who wants to hit the core of the problem.
“Was it Vasily who told you? Or did you steal it from one of our files?” I say.
He answers in a low voice, without arrogance. “He told me,” he says. Just that.
His statement is absurd. The image he painted before, of Vasily pointing a gun at his head, clashes with the intimacy required for such a confession. How does a man share his most shameful secret with someone he despises and threatens?
I feel the danger of falling into a double trap, but I can’t help but follow the thread. If Seraphim is lying, it’s a performance so convincing it deserves an award; if he’s telling the truth, then everything I hated about Vasily disintegrates into the air, replaced by something worse: pity.
“The man who threatens you with death sits down with you to confess his past sins?”
“I am an excellent listener.” He gives me a crooked, cynical smile.
He pauses. “Vasily never betrayed you in Istanbul. He just made a mistake. But the older brother he both idolized and feared accused him of treason. A shame. It happens. Since then, I get the impression that he only lives to prove that he’s not the failure you painted him to be. ”
The memory of Istanbul overlays everything: the smell of gasoline at the port, the cry of birds over the Sea of Marmara, the blood running down the dock’s stone. I was there. I saw the operation fall apart, I saw the bodies of my men lined up like trash in black bags.
It’s devastating how it echoes. The space between me and my brother—always an abyss—suddenly widens. I try to deny it, to rationalize, to deflect. I can’t.
I refuse to accept without dissecting the messenger. He offers me my brother’s weakness in one hand while hiding the nature of his own involvement in the other. He paints himself as a mere confidant, but trust is not born at gunpoint.
Despite my suspicion of his methods, the story has the disgusting ring of truth. What I believed to be an act of betrayal could, in fact, be an act of weakness. And weakness, I realize, is infinitely more dangerous.
I press on. I need to know if Vasily didn’t simply lie to Seraphim. “What is your relationship with my brother, Seraphim?”
Seraphim lets out a puff of smoke, and I see him look genuinely perplexed.
“It’s… something,” he says finally. “It depends on the day, the dose of vodka, the size of the wound. Your brother is a contradictory man. One day, he treats me with a contempt that borders on hatred, accuses me of conspiracies, reminds me that I am a disposable mercenary.” He pauses, lost in memory.
“The next, he shows up at my door in the middle of the night, drunk and soaked in rain, needing someone to listen while he laments about the father who never loved him enough.”
The image is so pathetic and so Vasily that I can visualize it. The idiot, in an expensive, soaking wet suit, smelling of cigarettes and vinegar, begging for someone to just listen. I always thought it was an act.
Now, I’m not so sure.
“He has threatened me with death more times than I can count,” Seraphim continues.
“And yet, here I am. He doesn’t follow through on his threats.
” He looks at me. Behind the analytical gleam in his eyes, I see a strange respect.
“He’s not a strategist, Malakov. He’s a lonely and desperate man with too much power in his hands.
And there is nothing more dangerous in the world than that. ”
I can’t disagree.
All I see is the outline of Vasily, translucent, floating between me and Seraphim.
The power of his diagnosis is that now, every memory of my entire life reorganizes around this narrative—Vasily the traitor becomes Vasily the orphan, Vasily the beggar for affection, Vasily the idiot who just wanted to be seen, even if it was through the dark reflection of my contempt.
I want to resist, but I can’t. I am the product of the same violence, the same abandonment, the same unbearable desire to be acknowledged by someone who will never acknowledge anything.
Seraphim sees the impact. He doesn’t even smile. He just waits, with the patience of saints or immortals.
I lean back in my chair and face Seraphim. His sincerity, or the performance of sincerity, was impeccable.
It no longer matters. His analysis is correct, and that is enough.
“Full amnesty,” I say finally. “Safe passage for you and yours. And the consequences of your future actions will be reserved for you alone. Those are your conditions.”
Seraphim nods, once. “They are.”
“You will have them,” I affirm. “With one addition. As long as this agreement lasts, you will not accept any work, from anyone, that goes against the interests of my family. You become a ghost to us, and we become ghosts to you.”
Seraphim considers my condition. It’s a fair move. He nods again. “Accepted.” He pauses, and I know the counter-proposal is coming. “But I also have an addition.”
He leans forward. All the lightness disappears from his face.
“Protect him,” he says, low. “Myrddin. Keep him alive. Judging by the news running through the city…” He gives a humorless smile. “...you haven’t been doing a very good job.”
The fight at the bar. Of course, he knows. His network sees everything.
“I deal with my family,” I say.
“Deal better,” Seraphim retorts, not backing down. “That is my condition. Keep him safe. If he dies, for any reason, our agreement dies with him. And all the secrets and information I have on your family… will become public domain. Understood?”
I look at him, the weight of his condition settling on me. He is asking for the life of the one man who matters to both of us.
It’s the one price I cannot refuse.
I extend my hand across the table.
Slowly, he extends his gloved hand and places it on mine. The grip is firm, cold.
The pact is sealed.