Page 11 of Violent Possession

My gaze drifts down to the ring. Cleanup crews are already there. Guys with buckets and mops, wiping the dark stains from the worn carpet. The cleaning efficiency is mediocre.

A psycho from the south,Karpov said.A nobody.He sees the world in easy labels. Champion, loser, cripple,psycho. He doesn’t see the architecture of violence.

This type of tool doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It’s unstable. Leaving it in Karpov’s hands is like giving a child plastic explosives. He will, inevitably, blow himself up.

I give a discreet nod to one of my men. He understands. There’s nothing more to be done here.

Karpov doesn’t even notice my departure. He’s still counting the money, the velvet absorbing the heat, and his own stupidity.

The sound of my shoes is the only organized thing in this place. The air grows thicker, dirtier, before I reach the exit.

A fucked-up stump with a grudge against the world,is what he said.

Perhaps.

I watch a grainy video:Sacramento, Los Angeles, Bakersfield… the opponents are always too big, too strong, too confident. And they always make the same mistake.

The metal arm draws attention like a polished diamond on the sidewalk, easy to snatch. His opponents always seem torn between seeing him as an inept brute with no brain, imagining the utility of that piece of metal is the same as a baseball bat.

There aren’t many fight records for the so-called Iron Arm. Most are buried in dark web forums, hidden from the eyesof authorities, and filmed with crappy cell phones and one-megapixel cameras.

His opponents ignore the left hand, the one of flesh and bone. It opens their guard, throws them off balance. That’s the whole point of using it in the first place.

I rewind the video. A fight in a warehouse. The opponent is a giant with tribal tattoos on his face.

Iron Arm takes a beating for two minutes. The audio is ridiculous, blown out. The crowd roars around them, grown men screaming like animals. I mute it. Whoever is filming pushes through the men in front, raises the camera above their heads, and gets a clearer view. He zooms in.

Iron Arm smiles, and he’s wearing that same silver medallion. He’s bleeding, a split eyebrow drenched in carmine red. Thick, black eyebrows. His hair is dyed a faded, lifeless blond that turns almost white under the cheap ring lights. It sticks to his forehead in clumps of sweat and blood. There’s no vanity there. The cut is uneven, and his dark roots are showing.

His facial bone structure is good, raw, but it’s covered by a map of mistakes: the scar tissue over his brow, the nose that’s clearly been broken more than once, and the eyes—one of them circled by an ugly, swollen, and recent layer of purpled skin. Somehow, his irises maintain an ethereal clarity, devoid of malice or calculation. It’s a contradiction. These underground fighters have a hateful glint in their eyes, an ugly, explicit, animalistic hunger. They charge forward with blind confidence, sniffing out the green of dirty money paid for the quality of a second-rate circus show. But not him.

I rewind the video. The zoom on his face, even at 720p, is clear enough to make out his eyes. A clear, pale blue. Sickening the moment he breaks into a bloody smile. I see his teeth—uneven and sharp, with a distinctly crooked, asymmetrical canine.

He lets the man approach. I slow down the video. Rewind. Zoom. He smiles. Then, Iron Arm throws a left jab, a blur in the low quality. The giant’s chin snaps. His body freezes. And the metal arm comes down.

The immediate knockout shakes the camera. The footage blurs and becomes confusing, then it returns to him.

Why does he smile like that? A useless, illogical question. It hammers at me. He looks around the ring with a relaxed smile.

I instructed Karpov to find a professional in hand-to-hand combat, someone who could take opponents down and keep them on the ground.Iron Armhas trouble on the ground. I saw it, in the collection of footage I could find. I want to see if he’ll lose.

I find mentions on obscure dark web forums of an assault charge in Bakersfield that was mysteriously dropped. Another mention confirms what Karpov told me—that he was “banned” from the Los Angeles circuit for “unnecessary brutality”. What, in the hell of an underground fight, could be considered “unnecessary”? They come for the blood. What did he do that even the primates who feed on this considered excessive?

I open Karpov’s proposal files. Sixty percent.

It’s all been settled for hours. I have no reason to stay locked in my office, much less to continue researching some random man.

I go back to a specific video. The bad camera, the zoom before the knockout. The smile.

For the first time, I feel the answer I’m looking for isn’t purely strategic.

There’s another question beneath it all, one I don’t dare formulate out loud.

And the answer is in that goddamn smile.

The door to my office opens without warning, flooding the room with the harsh light from the hallway. I close the laptop. Only two people are stupid enough to enter without knocking.

“Working late, Leshy?”