Page 102 of Violent Possession

I try to guess what he expects to hear. But I don’t know.

“Instinct,” I repeat the word.

He laughs. “Instinct is dangerous, boss. It can take you places you never come back from.”

With that smile, the same one that captivated me in the first footage I saw of him, he looks at my mouth. Then back to my eyes.

I feel the impulse to kiss him, to break the logic of tomorrow, but I hold back.Not now.

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” I say.

My instinct is to retreat, to re-establish the distance, but his smile holds me in place. A smile that is part challenge, part invitation.

I force myself to focus on the reason I accelerated this meeting. I step back to close the case.

“You were supposed to have a week to get used to the prosthesis,” I say. “Locked in here. Safe.”

“And what changed?” he asks, his voice still too close to my back.

“My cousin is not only an imbecile but decided to be one in public.”

“Oh, you’re talking about Karpov?” he says, and suddenly his tone is no longer intimate. Even without looking at him, I can feel the smile in his voice. “My agent won’t stop texting me about this shit. He’s terrified. Thinks the Malakovs are going to kill everyone.”

“The panic is justified.” I turn to face him completely. “The hand that stirred him up belongs to my brother, who is quiet, with no movement at all. And his only weapon that I can’t track is, coincidentally, the same one that could prove his treason to others. Seraphim.”

The mention of the name erases the smile from his face. The change is instantaneous.

“We’ve already had this conversation,” he says, seriously.

“Yes. And I can’t trust you when it comes to him. But the situation has changed. Seraphim has a network in vulnerable areas, and I need to figure out how to dismantle it.”

I wait for his reaction, and I don’t have to wait long: Griffin observes his newly attached hand, the hypnotic movement of the carbon fingers, and then looks back at me, with that look of someone who was born breathing deception and never believed in a single altruistic gesture. The smile he gives is a personal offense, a death sentence to the possibility of naivete between us.

“Ah. Now I get it.” He gestures with the prosthesis. “I get why all this. The upgrade.”

The accusation isn’t just in his tone, but in his entire body, in the way every muscle tenses for combat.

“No,” I say, cutting the air between us with a word harsher than necessary, but I don’t allow myself to correct it. “The prosthesis was inevitable. I had already decided that before. What changed was thetiming, not the reason. Now, I need you out of this room. Your usefulness is a convenience, not the condition for your well-being.”

He makes a sound like a laugh, dry, annoyed. “You talk as if I were born to serve you.”

“You were born tosurvive.”

“What are you getting at, Alex?”

I want to get to the confession he’s been avoiding since we first met. I want to dig until I find the root of the poison, thebeginning of the rivalry with Seraphim, the unspeakable trauma that turned the eight-year-old Griffin into the man who now defies me. But that’s impossible: there is no better digger than Griffin himself, and he digs his own holes with pleasure and destroys every trail behind him.

He continues, “If there’s a secret army of Seraphim’s, do you really think I wouldn’t have heard the rumor? You don’t get it, man.Iwas the rumor. If there’s anyone who knows how the shadows of this city work, it’s me.”

“Exactly,” I retort, and he gets angry because he immediately sees the trap in the argument. “Youwere the rumor. You were part of the mechanism. Seraphim plants debts of gratitude in individuals, makes people feel like they belong to him. Including you.” His glare cuts me, but there’s something vulnerable there, a painful recognition that he knows exactly what I’m talking about.

When he speaks, his voice loses some of its venom. “You think I’m his puppet.”

“I think you’re the product of a method.”

“You’re wrong. You don’t understand what that was. When we met, we wereeight. There was no method. Just two fucked-up kids, thrown away like trash in a shitty orphanage. You’ll never understand, Alexei.”

Eight years old.