Page 106 of Violent Possession

My cigarette finishes and I light another, just to have something to do with my hands. The new arm is heavy, strange. Sometimes I feel like it moves on its own.

I look at my own fingers, testing the sensitivity. Each metallic alloy phalanx responds with precision. I squeeze the cigarette very slowly and hear the delicate creak of the joints, almost inaudible. No one will ever take this from me, I think. And, paradoxically, it washewho gave it to me. My private kidnapper, my patron, my executioner.

I catch myself smiling. Marcus is going to freak out when he sees the arm. I want to see his reaction in real time.

When he finally appears at the corner, I recognize his hurried steps from afar, running, the collar of his overcoat turned up as if to hide half his face beneath it. He looks like a penguin. He crosses the street without looking both ways, stumbles over two bottles, and is almost hit by a taxi. The driver curses in Romanian, but Marcus doesn’t understand a thing.

“Holy shit, Griffin!” he hisses, stopping in front of me with his hands in his pockets and his face pale. “Do you have any idea what kind of shit you’ve gotten yourself into? Karpov! They broke Karpov inhalf!”

“I heard,” I say. “Ten guys saw it, that’s what you said.”

“Ten, twenty, it doesn’t matter! It waspublic! It was astatement! And you’re right in the middle of it! Those Malakovguys arecrazy,stumpy, they say shit got real after that fuck-up in Istanbul and they’re evenmorefucking violent. What were you doing? Where have you been?” His gaze travels down my body, looking for injuries, and then it stops.

He freezes. His eyes widen, fixed on my right arm.

“What. The. Fuck. Is. That?” he whispers.

I don’t know shit about Istanbul, but I pull up my sleeve, slowly, exposing the arm up to the elbow. The red light from the bar reflects off the metal plates, creating an illusion of muscle and bone, but with no flesh at all. Marcus backs away, taking a half-step back.

“An upgrade,” I repeat Alexei’s words, flexing the metal fingers. The hum of the servos is almost inaudible.

“An upgrade? That looks like something out of a science fiction movie, stumpy! Where did you get that? Who gave it to you?” He takes another step back. “It washim, wasn’t it? The Malakov.”

“A gift from the firm.”

“Whatfirm, Griffin? The firm of assassins that kidnapped you?” he’s shouting. “They break you and then rebuild you better? What kind of sick deal did you make?”

“I gotpromoted,” I reply, laughing. “I’m now officially an instrument of the Malakovs.”

He shakes his head, disbelievingly. “You’re kidding. You’re always kidding. But that thing,” he points to the arm, “that’s no joke.”

I rotate my wrist, flex my fingers; each movement is perfectly articulated, human. “Like it?”

Marcus runs his hands through his hair, on the verge of a breakdown. “No!”

I ignore him. “Nice. But Marcus,” I interrupt his panic. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

“How can it not be?! What else is there?—“

“You know everyone, right? I need a favor.”

He looks at me the way you’d look at someone on death row. He even says with pity, “Okay. Anything, kid, you know that.”

I roll my eyes and light another cigarette. “Forget the Malakovs for a second. I want you to tell me about saints.”

“Aboutwhat?”

“Saints.”

“Like... John the Baptist?”

“No, fuck. You know what I’m talking about,” I say. “It’s just... look. I’m going to tell you something personal.”

Marcus braces himself, expecting the worst. “...What did you do, Griffin?”

“It’s not that. It’s just... a while ago, before I met you,” I start. The feeling of telling something like this to Marcus, ofallpeople, is horrible, “I was part of a... a group. It wasn’t really a gang, it was like... the leader used to say that property was a joke as long as one man could own an entire building while others slept in the rain. We just... corrected the joke. With a crowbar.”

Marcus is frozen for a moment, with that look of someone who doesn’t understand a thing.