GRIFFIN #2
“It was unloaded, of course,” he concludes, with a humorless half-smile.
“Vasily cried for a week. I… I haven’t cried since that day.
” He takes a sip of champagne. I don’t know if I’m still breathing.
“…There was an operation in Istanbul, years ago. Vasily was in charge. It almost sank us completely. I didn’t doubt it for a second.
In my head, the boy who trembled in the safe had finally found the courage to pull the trigger.
I condemned him right there, on that dock.
It all added up. I was sure he was a traitor, I just never found the definitive proof.
But I knew. Seraphim… tried to tell me it was just incompetence, not betrayal.
But what could a stranger know about my family?
” He forces a disdainful half-smile that doesn’t hold.
The image is grotesque and poetic: a dynasty where the only currency of value is power, and the only way to inherit love is to turn everything into war. I think of how many times I’ve heard stories about fucked-up families, but nothing comes close to this.
Alexei sets the glass on the table and runs a hand through his hair, messing it up. I can’t remember seeing him like this before.
“After being exiled, Vasily told me today that… in Istanbul, he failed. Yes, he betrayed me now, but before that, everything he did was just a way to force me to see him as an equal.” He pauses. “That was it. This whole fucking thing… just to prove to me that he could pull the trigger too.”
I try to think of something to say. Any answer seems ridiculous. What kind of father puts two sons in a game of Russian roulette? is what comes to mind. In practice, I just say, “Fuck.”
Alexei smiles, transparently, so strange on someone like him. “Fuck indeed,” he repeats, and lets out the air with five years of tension.
I look at him again, try to see the boy from the safe room, the same one who later became this man who almost swallowed me whole. It doesn’t scare me. It saddens me, and maybe it brings me even closer.
I’m tempted to touch his hand on the table, and I content myself with just looking. I try to relax. I breathe in. “You never told me,” I say, a bit awkwardly. “About your father.”
Alexei shrugs. “My mother died young. He was the one who provided for us. Even in abuse, there is closeness.”
I understand. Not in the same way, but I understand. To feel indebted in the same measure that you hate the one who raised you.
For a while, we just drink in silence, each of us sifting through our own wreckage.
Something has rebalanced here. A kind of trust.
I think of everything we still haven’t discussed, everything that was left suspended before he left.
“So…” I begin, still hesitant, testing the weight of each word before letting it fall.
The silence between us is full of static energy.
I try to decipher the new map of the world by looking at his face, but Alexei is a wall, a mask of neutrality that only gives way at the finest edges.
Still, he turns slightly. “About what you said before you left…”
I leave the rest in the air, because I don’t know if I want to explicitly call in the promise, nor if it was really a promise or just a war tactic. But he understands me. He always understands.
Alexei leaves the champagne glass on the counter. Now comes the bureaucracy of victory. The balance sheet of the newly shed blood.
“I will keep my word,” he confirms. “But… the map has changed a bit.” He pauses.
The truce before the bad news, or maybe just the fear of admitting that something has escaped his control.
“My father intervened. To avoid a civil war between me and my cousin, he divided the territory. My cousin got the East, the traditional operations. I got the West. The finances, logistics, expansion.”
A nearly dead king, two crown princes, a kingdom split in half. A classic.
“So, when you say ‘leave’…,” I let the sentence hang in the air. Again. And, again, he understands.
“It means you can leave this apartment. You can have a house in the mountains, a condo on the beach, whatever you want. As long as it’s on my side of the map.”
He speaks so practically, so objectively, that I wonder if he has already thought about the details.
I give a lopsided, crooked smile, feigning mockery. “Why are you only talking about me?” I try to make it sound casual, but the heat that rises from my chest to my throat betrays me, and I feel that old panic of abandonment: the fear of being left behind again. “I’m going where you go.”
It’s a threat, depending on how it’s interpreted.
He stops, and it seems like he’s going to argue, but he doesn’t. His face softens. He gives me a small, gentle smile and says, “Are you, really?”
“I am,” I confirm, and take a step closer, just to make sure he feels the gravitational field shifting between us. “So what’s on the map? West of Sacramento?” I try to lighten the mood, but the question is real; I want to know where ‘our’ territory begins, how far we can go without being hunted.
Alexei gestures with his hand, drawing an imaginary continent. “West of Malakov activities. It’s vast. California, Vegas, Mexico, Vancouver. From Asia to Moscow.” He recites his list of infinite possibilities.
I let out a long, deliberately dramatic sigh. “Not Switzerland?” I tease, making the most disappointed face in the world. “What a shame… I was already planning everything.”
Alexei raises an eyebrow, giving me that look of someone a little tired, a little fascinated. He knows I’m teasing. He likes it when I tease.
“I swear,” I continue, invigorated. “I even had the design for our little cabin in the Alps, in the middle of nowhere, where no one knows us. A wooden cabin, a fireplace, a big, stupid, fluffy dog running through the snow. You, in an apron, learning to make sourdough bread. I was even going to teach you how to knit a scarf.”
The image is so absurd, so ridiculous, so outrageously domestic that it could only be possible in another universe.
A universe where two guys like us could exist without the constant threat of death, without having to look over our shoulders, without the ghosts of our fathers or brothers or ourselves.
A universe where the worst worry was the dog getting fleas or the bread not rising.
Alexei’s reaction is instantaneous, and I recognize the micro-movement of his lips, the lifting of the corners of his mouth, and then he laughs. A puff of incredulous air that soon turns into a real smile. He shakes his head, picks up his glass again, and takes a step in my direction.
“You know how to knit?” he asks, his voice low, intimate. The simple fact of imagining it is already an invitation to mockery—or, who knows, a plea for normality.
I laugh. “I only have one arm, Alex. Take a guess.” I lean close to him until I can smell his aftershave and the champagne. I say against his mouth, as if it counts as foreplay, “I bet we could raise goats, make cheese, and sell it all on the black market.”
He holds me by the waist with a gesture so automatic and sure that it’s easy to forget that, hours ago, it could have all ended with a gunshot or an order over the phone.
I feel the heat of his hand through the fabric of my shirt, incinerating any doubt.
His mouth finds mine in a short, electric collision. As if it were the first time.
I realize, as I kiss him, that the feeling is a certain kind of surrender. I feel permission to lower my guard, to laugh at a stupid fantasy, to dream of a tomorrow that doesn’t end in blood. It’s precarious, ephemeral, but it’s real. And, for some reason, it’s enough.
I bite his lip, lightly, and then pull back just enough to look into his eyes. The exhaustion is still there, but underneath it, there’s something I’ve never seen on Alexei Malakov’s face before: peace.
“And now?” I whisper.
Alexei tilts his head and kisses me again. A slow, deep kiss that speaks of silent promises and an uncertain future that we are both willing to face.
He pulls away, and the smile on his lips is now just for me. “Now,” he says, in a low voice, “we have dinner.”
And as he turns, the smell of raw kibbeh and Thai food filling the multi-million dollar apartment, I realize that I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
I don’t know if we’ll have the cabin, the dog, or peace someday.
But that uncertainty doesn’t scare me. Because the “we” he just said…
is the only territory that matters to me.
And that is enough.