Epilogue #4
He’s probably thinking about how he could improve the dish, industrialize the seasoning. Turn it into a luxury product.
“So?” I provoke, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. “Did you survive?”
He picks up a paper napkin and wipes his fingers with a dignity that does not belong in this place. “It’s… edible,” he says, after a second. His voice is completely neutral, with no emotion.
I start to laugh. Alexei looks at me, and at the corners of his lips, I see it. A micro-movement, almost imperceptible. A real smile.
Alexei’s phone, that ridiculously expensive model with security armor and biometrics, vibrates on the table. The screen lights up with an encrypted message. It’s just a number, no name.
I watch Alexei read the message, and even after the screen goes dark, the words seem to float on his face, a glazed sheen that has nothing to do with stock charts or blood.
When he finally puts the phone away, I feel like the news is still burning in his jacket pocket—and even an emotionally illiterate idiot like me can tell that this is more than just a gang logistics problem.
“Trouble in paradise?” I tease, already chewing on half a kilo of sticky rice.
“No. Just the angel reporting that one of his lost sheep has crossed the border safely.”
Angel. Lost sheep. He doesn’t need to say who it is: Seraphim, the shepherd of lost boys, the old rival of mutual respect, the almost-master, and the people who follow him.
Free. Free, perhaps, even from my guilt.
Thanks to him. Thanks to the man who gave me a golden collar and then taught me it could be an anchor.
I see the man who stayed awake for three nights just to ensure that a group of unknown children arrived alive in another city.
I see the man who literally pulled his own cousin off me in an ugly fight, and then spent a week pretending he hadn’t broken three fingers in the process.
The man who eats cheap stew in a clandestine restaurant just because I asked, and on top of that, wipes his hand on a napkin as if it were nothing.
I don’t know if it’s the beer, or the food, or the fact that there is no threat of imminent death.
But I allow myself to relax, to let my shoulders drop, to breathe deeply.
I wonder if he feels the same, or if it’s just my projection, the neediness of an abandoned dog.
I get the impression that he’s also trying to prolong this moment as long as possible.
Maybe even he, the son of a bitch, is afraid to leave here and find that real life has returned to normal.
He holds my hand under the table, very quickly and with no pressure, just a touch of confirmation. A short, objective gesture, but one that goes right through me.
“You seem lighter,” I say, hearing the intimate tone of my own voice.
He doesn’t answer me right away; he thinks, as always. “Peace has its benefits,” he says. “Dividing the territory means I no longer have to worry about Ivan trying to sabotage my operations out of pure spite. The men know who they work for. There is… clarity.”
Clarity. I don’t think I’ve ever had that in my life, but I admire those who try. But something else catches my attention—the same name Marcus told me more than six months ago. Ivan.
“Who’s that?” I say.
He looks at me in a way that mixes astonishment, confusion, and contempt. “What do you mean, ‘who’s that’?” he says, slowly, in case I’m really that stupid. “My cousin. Ivan.”
I almost choke on my beer. “No,” I retort, “your cousin is Vania,” I say with the confidence of a drunk who has just had a religious revelation.
The gears of Alexei’s brain, that supercomputer with legs, freeze on a blue screen.
He stares at me for three seconds, and then he starts to laugh.
Not a discreet smile, not a restrained chuckle—a full-throated laugh that shakes his whole body, that forces Aunt Mary to peek out of the kitchen window with a bread knife in hand, ready to break up a fight.
“What is it?” I ask, offended and fascinated at the same time.
“Vania…” he tries to explain between laughs, his face turning red, “Vania is a diminutive. A nickname. For Ivan.”
I stop. Vania. Ivan. Ivan. Vania. The whole fucking time. Cursing him in my head. Referring to him to Alexei. By his cute little fucking nickname.
“Holy shit,” I let out, after an eternity. “But what the hell does ‘Vania’ have to do with ‘Ivan’?”
“It’s Russian,” he says, and after a moment, “it’s complicated.”
I just stare at him for a while, mesmerized by the way everything cracks.
There’s something infinitely ridiculous about this—and wonderful, too. And I realize that I don’t mind being the butt of the joke one bit.
The ride home is made of the comfortable exhaustion of two sons of bitches who have walked through hell hand-in-hand and are now parading around. The city lights pass by the window. I no longer feel like a prisoner. I am just… coming home.
I feel my legs go numb, the adrenaline dissolving, and a strange climax of wanting this night to never end. I even wonder if I’m having a dream, the kind you wake up from with a moral hangover and wonder how the hell you lived so much in so little time.
But it’s real. All of it.
The car no longer glides into an anonymous, dark parking spot, hidden from the eyes of Alexei’s own relatives or the rival mafia.
Now, we stop almost at the door of the private elevator, where the night shift security guard—Raul, who already calls me by my name—nods to Alexei with the reverence only given to those who are truly in charge.
The elevator is clean, with no smell of old booze or cheap weed, and the ambient music is jazz, a saxophone improv that fits perfectly with everything that came before and what is yet to come.
When we enter the apartment, it no longer has that five-star hotel chill.
It smells like home. We swapped the white leather sofa for a shameless black monster that makes you want to die hugging it.
There are books on the table, but not just the ones on strategy and the ones he reads to remember how Stalin killed so many; there are poetry books and an old Bukowski with coffee-stained pages.
There’s a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and I remember that I was the one who finished off the other two-thirds.
Even the fake plants look less pathetic.
A bit of my mess has infected Alexei’s miniature castle, and he, instead of suffocating the plague, has let it bloom.
Small signs of life, of chaos, of me, infiltrated into his perfect order.
I kick off my boots and toss them in the corner, without a second thought.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” he comments, just like he’d say it’s going to rain today or that the stock market will open down, turning on one of the side lights, the kind that make the room look less like a dentist’s office and more like a retired mobster’s den.
“And you talk too much. Are you worried about my liver now, daddy?” I scoff, testing the ice sheets between us, pushing the sarcasm to see if I slip or fall. If it were any other day, or any other man, maybe I could even provoke a smile.
I drop my coat on the wrong chair, because that’s what I do. Always the bourgeois wannabe homeowner, organizing even the chaos, and me, the ruin he insists on bringing inside. The jacket falls crookedly on the backrest—still warm from my body, smelling of cigarettes—and he straightens it behind me.
“You do this on purpose,” he says. “Provoking.”
I laugh. “Maybe I just want you to stop pretending you don’t like it,” I say, and it’s true.
He crosses the room without rushing, without looking around. His suit is still impeccable, wrinkled only at the elbows, and his hair is still perfect, even after a whole day.
I know when he’s decided that I’m going to regret what I put him through today.
And I want to.
“Griffin,” he says my name the way only he can: like a sentence. “Kneel.”
Fuck. Just that. And my body is already moving.
I drop to my knees in the middle of the living room, the cold of the marble floor against my jeans, and I laugh again. The whole room smells of alcohol, leather, and his expensive cologne.
“Not even a glass of water first? You’re going to make me swallow it dry, is that it?” I provoke, feigning bravado, but my mouth is already watering, and my dick gives a single, uncomfortable throb under my jeans.
Alexei doesn’t answer. He just takes off his tie, rolls it up slowly. He could strangle someone with it if he wanted to. Maybe he does. I pray he does.
When he stops in front of me, I look up, my chin raised, trying to maintain my pride. He takes my face without rushing, with his strong fingers, and forces my gaze to meet his.
Alexei’s eyes aren’t really blue in the artificial light, but they always seem to be—two pieces of ice melting under the yellow lamp.
“If it’s too much,” he says, “you tap my leg twice. Understood?”
A glimpse of care in the middle of the hurricane. He always does this. I’m genuinely flattered before my dirty brain takes over.
“Too much for me, boss?” I whisper. “You’re going to need a lot more than that to make me tap out.”
He sighs. Alexei’s eyes gleam with a dark fire. “You don’t shut up,” he says, softly. “But…” he clenches my jaw until it hurts, and a crooked smile tears across his mouth. “I like that gutter mouth of yours. It’s all it’s good for.”
That solidifies my erection just hearing it.
I open my mouth, my tongue sliding over my teeth, ready to reply, but he simply shoves two fingers between my lips. He forces me to suck, to lick my own saliva, to swallow my pride. His taste is metallic, and I almost come just from that.
When he lets go, I’m panting. His self-control is an affront, because mine is already down the drain.
“Use my mouth,” I say, hoarse. “Give me work. I want to choke on you.”