GRIFFIN
The sun set hours ago and only absolute night remains. The city lights blinked on one after another through the panoramic windows, turning the glass into a private planetarium; millions of tiny lamps stretching to the black sea. This should help distract, but it doesn’t.
I’m alone, and the emptiness of the room only highlights the obsessive rhythm of my steps on the Persian rug—a trail of static that will soon wear out the pattern, from how much I’ve been walking in circles.
His words to me echo in my head in an infinite loop.
If I don’t come back by dawn, take the money, the passport, and disappear.
Just like that, simple. As if he were teaching me how to use a fire extinguisher or program the washing machine.
At the same time, it was an instruction so sincere and direct that it hurt more than any romantically elaborate goodbye.
It didn’t need drama, a will, a handwritten letter; I just had to obey.
Except he knew—we both knew—that I wouldn’t.
No matter how risky it was: if Alexei didn’t come back, not only would I not disappear, I would do the opposite.
I would tear the world apart until I found his bones.
I wasn’t the type to wait for the end of the play to applaud or leave at intermission; I would stay until the final act, even if it meant dying on stage.
I look at the bottle of Veuve Clicquot chilling in the silver bucket. It was supposed to be a celebration. A silent commemoration of our small victory against his world. Now, the bottle mocks me.
Plan B: drink the entire bottle of champagne by myself, cry a little on the very expensive Persian rug, and then burn the whole world down until there’s nothing left.
It’s the waiting that kills me. Not the prospect of failure, torture, or death, but the suspended moment, the absence of information, the terror of imagining that the next news will come over a security guard’s radio, or through a notification on that burner phone.
Is he okay? Did his family devour him alive, like a pack of elegant, well-dressed wolves?
My one arm trembles, itching to break something—a glass, a neck, anything solid to prove I’m still here.
I get so distracted by my own suffering that I almost don’t notice when the sound infiltrates the room. First, a click. Then, a muffled noise of a magnetic card scratching the electronic lock.
The apartment’s security sensors register the movement but don’t go off—a sign that the biometrics match. A sign that it’s him. Or someone who stole his finger.
The doorknob turns. The door swings open just enough to reveal a sliver of the outside hallway.
The smell of wet concrete mixes with expensive cologne and a trace of smoke. It’s him. There’s no mistaking the silhouette: the tailored jacket, the hair slicked back with gel.
But his eyes… his eyes give everything away.
Alexei enters the apartment like a ghost returning to its own body.
He moves slowly, without his previous imperial impetus.
The first thing he does is close the door behind him, with a gesture so precise that the click is engraved in my mind.
Then, he drops the keys on the silver tray—a gesture I’ve never seen, because Alexei never left anything to chance.
I can’t stand it. I take two steps toward him but stop when I realize that maybe Alexei needs this silence.
He looks at me, and I see what’s behind the veneer: the cracks, the exhaustion. All the glamour of the criminal dynasty melted away.
“You’re back,” I say, and instantly hate myself for the obviousness.
“It’s over,” he says.
And then he walks toward me. He simply comes to me and wraps me in his arms, burying his face in the curve of my neck.
I hold him even tighter, ignoring the phantom pain on my amputated side, and everything boils down to two bodies pressed together, trying not to fall apart.
After a long moment, he pulls away a little, enough to look into my eyes. His hands are still on me, firm. His gaze passes over me and lands on the bottle of champagne.
A tiny trace of a smile, exhausted and real, touches his lips.
“Do you think,” I say, my voice still low, “we have a good reason to open that?”
Alexei looks at my face with a smile that seems genuinely worn—alive and frayed at the edges, pulling at the skin under his eyes with every line written by the hours he spent without sleep.
“I think we’ve never had a better reason.”
The weight on my chest finally dissolves. The space between us dilutes, and the apartment is no longer a hermetic box of paranoia.
Alexei crosses the carpet to the silver bucket and picks up the bottle, his hands still steady, and even exhausted he does everything with that precision of someone who learned etiquette before learning to walk.
Every movement is millimeter-perfect: his fingers refuse to tremble even after a private civil war.
“Oh, and I bought dinner,” I say, trying not to sound like a dog wagging its tail after a beating.
I gesture with my chin toward the counter crowded with containers.
“Maybe I overdid it. There’s Thai food. And salmon.
And some gluten-free sandwiches. And ice cream.
Depending on how your night went, I thought I might need a lot of ice cream.
” I hesitate, and add: “And some esfihas. And raw kibbeh. I didn’t know if your family meeting menu included cannibalism or just hemlock, so I thought it was better to be safe. ”
Alexei stops, his thumb on top of the cork, and looks at the cardboard delivery boxes. I almost think he’s going to laugh at my pathetic attempt to take care of someone so far above me on the food chain, but he just raises his eyebrows, fascinated.
“You bought raw kibbeh,” he repeats, a statement of wonder. The idea of cheap Arab food in his multi-million dollar apartment is indeed an alien concept.
“With plenty of mint,” I add, feeling my face heat up. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I thought it would be a reminder that life still has flavor. Or that it can, if we don’t get poisoned first.”
The cork lets out a muffled sigh, the exact sound of a tradition fulfilled. Then, with a ceremonial gesture, he serves the champagne into two glasses, taking care not to spill a single drop. He hands me mine, and the brief contact of our fingers short-circuits my nerves.
Alexei takes the first sip, closes his eyes, and lets out a short, almost imperceptible sigh, but one that gives everything away. Relief. I drink too, the sparkling liquid burning my tongue and washing away the metallic taste that has been in my mouth since he left.
“Say it,” he says suddenly. “You’re ruminating on something.”
I hesitate, pathetically. In my head, I should run into his arms, tear out all the answers, demand promises that nothing will change, that I won’t be erased because I’m no longer useful or wake up alone in an apartment full of food for two.
In practice, I just lean my elbow on the table and look at the floor.
“I thought you wouldn’t come back,” I say. “I thought they were going to cut you into little pieces and serve you with dry ice at the family Christmas cocktail party.”
Alexei laughs, and it’s a strange laugh because there’s no joy in it. “It was a possibility.” He pauses. “My brother has been exiled.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” I say, feeling like I’m treading on territory I don’t know well. Because he doesn’t seem happy about it. I recall his words and repeat them, “He was the one who betrayed you.”
“Yes.”
Except it doesn’t sound like yes.
I take a sip of champagne.
“You don’t seem happy,” I say.
He takes a while to answer. “…I’m just thinking.”
I want to ask how the meeting went. I want to ask for details, names, how many bodies were left behind, if he got hurt, if there’s a new cut hidden under his shirt. I realize I’ve never really asked. I’ve never asked him to tell me. About his family, what made them so fucked up.
“About him?” I say, softly.
The mood changes. I feel it. Alexei looks like the one I first met: all ice, polished and impenetrable.
Except he’s not. It’s a different gaze, with no more possible defenses.
I can imagine him dismissing me, throwing out one of those glass aphorisms about how the past “doesn’t matter”, about how there is only the now.
The silence between us is longer, stranger.
He holds the champagne glass with one hand, watching the bubbles.
“My father,” he begins, “taught us a lesson when I was twelve. He took us, Vasily and me, to the safe room. There was a pile of money on the table. A million dollars. He placed a gun there. He told us that the business world was simple. The man who was willing to shoot first, to eliminate the competition without hesitation, would get the money. The other… would get the lesson.”
I can hear the hum of the lightbulbs, or maybe just the blood pounding too loudly in my head. Two boys. One gun. A fortune.
“I didn’t hesitate,” Alexei says, and he finally raises his gaze to me. “I picked up the gun, pointed it at my brother’s head, and pulled the trigger.”
I feel an instant nausea, as if the scene were happening now, in this room, between him and me. I see myself as a boy, I see him as a boy, I see Vasily there—even not knowing what he looks like—, and I want to cross time and take the gun from his hand. But there would never be time.