Page 110 of Violent Possession

If he’s really alive, it might be out of pure stubbornness.

“Thank you,” I say, the word sounding strange in my mouth.

“God be with you, my son,” Schmidt says, and there is an infinite sadness in his eyes. “And tell our angel... that we are still praying for him.”

I leave the tailor shop, the little bell ringing behind me. Back on the street, the world seems different. Sharper.

Cain.

Those who carry much guilt never die. Cain carried the guilt of us all.

I put the paper in my pocket. It’s the only thing anchoring me to the present. I have a name. I have a place.

As I turn the corner from the tailor shop, a sharp, hot pang shoots up my thigh, so strong it makes me stop in the middle of the sidewalk and inhale sharply.

I look down. My jeans are dark, damp. A stain that wasn’t there before.

Fuck.

I press my hand against the wound and lean against the wall of a building. I need a public restroom and some paper towels.

Afterward, I can go somewhere safe to patch myself up.

And, considering that in the fucked-up universe I now inhabit, there’s only one, I’d rather delegate as much as possible.

I wakeup to a dry click, a noise that pulls me from a dream where I was back at the orphanage and all the boys had Alexei’s face and were stuffed into suits.

It takes me a few seconds to realize where I am, even longer to accept it. The click wasn’t from the dream—it’s real, it’s the sound of a magnetic lock disengaging.

Adrenaline attempts to force me up, but my body is glued to the sofa’s surface by a mixture of exhaustion and the throbbing pain that radiates from my thigh as if they’d left a white-hot iron bar between the muscles.

Before I can coordinate my limbs to get up, I hear footsteps echoing from the entrance hall, crossing the polished wood floor with a confidence that recites the owner’s name in every step.

All that goes through my head is: I wasn’t the one who unlocked that door. And no one but Alexei would have the panel’s password. Still, something inside me prepares for the worst, and I do a quick inventory of improvised weapons within reach: a glass of whiskey on the coffee table, heavy enough to crack someone’s head; a hardcover book; the prosthesis itself, which I had taken off hours earlier and left on the rug, and which might serve as a club. But I don’t move.

If it’s an assassin, at least I’ll die in my sleep.

Earlier, the house was empty when I arrived, which was lucky. Because, bleeding like that, and with fatigue eating me from the inside, I would have lost any duel to Alexei. Or to whoever he sent to greet me.

The first mission was to find a place where I could sit and treat the wound, and the second was to make sure there wasn’t a trap in the way.

In the living room, the black leather sofa was too hard, and it had that new, never-used smell that forced the feeling down your throat that this was anything but a home.

That’s exactly what impressed me: the apartment seemed like a staged theater, enacting the life of someone who never put their ass in their own armchair, but there were traces. The bookshelf, at least, had Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, treatises on facial expressions, and behavioral psychology. The fridge had half a bottle of vodka and bottles of water, and one of the glasses in the cabinets had an almost invisible crack.

The bathroom was a capsule of brushed steel, with a medicine cabinet that seemed to have been assembled by a paranoid pharmacist: antibiotics, latest-generation painkillers, suture kits, gauze, self-adhesive bandages. I allowed myself the luxury of using everything I needed, tearing my jeans to expose the wound and washing the blood with fresh water. I cleaned it as much as I could, cut the threads of the old stitches, and replaced them with new ones. The whole process took half an hour, during which I trembled so much I thought I was going to pass out.

Then I rinsed the stump of my arm, which was already inflamed and shining a sickly red, the result of a full day without breaks with a new prosthesis. I tried to ignore the smell of heated flesh that emanated from the skin, and just changed the liner and put on more ointment.

Alexei’s house was also a pit of temptations. I couldn’t resist the curiosity to snoop in his room.

The bed looked like an altar, too big, dark gray sheets stretched to perfection, like a Russian barracks in a war movie. There were no clothes thrown around, no smell of perfume, just that absence of anything human. On the nightstand, a black-covered book and, next to it, a clear glass of water.

I sat on the edge of the bed. It was so firm, so unyielding, that my weight barely sank into the mattress.

After that, I stumbled to the living room sofa, turned on the television just for the noise, and let my mind float on the white noise of news reports and vodka commercials. Sleep caught me in the middle of a report about a nightclub fire.

Now, awake, the television is still on. The bluish light cuts out the silhouette approaching down the hallway. A tall man in a dark suit. His step is absolutely controlled—no hurry, no hesitation.