Page 114 of Violent Possession

He opens the refrigerator door, the cold white light spilling onto the floor. And he just stands there, as if in the parallel universe of the open door, he could find an answer to anything.

I get up, with difficulty, and follow him, dragging my leg and leaning with my good elbow on the kitchen doorframe. A test of territory.

“You’ve only got vodka and water in there,” I state, and I can’t keep the laugh in.

He doesn’t turn around. “Yeah.”

I laugh for real, and the whole thing echoes, because I bet no one laughs like that in his house. Not him, not the shadows, not any guest who lasts more than five minutes.

The all-powerful Alexei Malakov, prince of the mafia, owner of half the ports and one hundred percent of the corpses that have fallen in this city in the last five years, has fuck all to eat at home. This breaks something in me, or fixes it, I don’t know.

Slowly, he closes the refrigerator and turns to me. A real smile. Small, hesitant, cracking that hard, cold surface.

“What are you laughing at?” he asks, and his voice has a... human lightness to it. He must feel the strangeness of the situation, too.

I shrug, still smiling, and say nothing, because the answer is everything and nothing at the same time.

I cross the kitchen, ignoring the pain in my body, and stop inches from him. By reflex—or because he always wanted to—his hands find my waist, squeezing firmly enough for me to know exactly what he wants.

I kiss Alexei.

The taste of whiskey and cigarettes, mixed with the smell of freshly washed, expensive skin, invades me with a clarity that makes me lose my balance. He pulls me close, and I feel the heat of his body dissolving the cold of everything around. My hand goes up, finds its way to the nape of his neck, and I tangle my fingers in his soft hair. His hand moves up from my waist to my back, and I feel every finger, every line.

“Order food,” he whispers against my mouth. “Whatever you want. Use my card. The number is saved in the terminal.”

Then he pulls away, the mask of control sliding back into place, but not completely. His eyes are still soft.

“Say it’s for the gallery on the ground floor. I need to make some calls,” he says, returning to Alexei Malakov mode, CEO of the underworld. But now it’s impossible to unsee what was exposed.

He turns his back, crosses the hallway, and I’m left alone in the center of the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator, feeling the latency of his touch burning on my waist.

Fuck, this man...

Deep down, I know: of all the dangerous shit that has ever happened to me, this strange calm is perhaps the most dangerous of all.

St.Jude’s Church is not far from the condominium, but every step toward it is a grain in the hourglass running out on my patience. The car Alexei lent me—a black, unlicensed Audi, the smell of leather and French perfume stinking up the interior—takes me to within a block of the address before I decide I don’t want to arrive in that piece of shit car. It would be like entering a brothel in a communion dress: wrong in the inverse proportion of the universe.

I park in a random spot, activate the Malakov’s GPS blocker (a gift from the boss, of course), and get out into the drizzle that turns the city’s sidewalks into a mosaic of trash, cigarette butts, and mud.

St. Jude’s is a primordial bunker of darkened bricks, a parenthesis between the betting shop and the pawn shop that shares a facade with a fifth-rate tobacco store. The rusted sign announces that, here, salvation happens at three daily times, all of them incompatible with the clock of the condemned.

The hum of cars, of horns, of peripheral traffic, turns into white noise as I approach the line forming on the side of the building. They are ghosts of the night shift: beggars wrapped in plastic bags, mothers with three-day-old dark circles under their eyes, restless kids, old people coughing up lungs destroyed by the cold and the city’s ancient plagues. The smell is unmistakable. Potato soup, fermented sweat, and a nuance of old urine that impregnates everything from here to the altar.

I get in line. No one gives me a second look, not even the old woman with one tooth who tries to sell blessed tissue paper for ten cents each. Here, I’m just another one. Better this way.

The dead weight of my left leg forces me to walk slightly sideways, and the stump of my arm throbs, but I walk with my head held high because I need to catalogue Alexei’s so-calledpattern.

I don’t see any familiar faces, no glazed eyes of Russian mobsters or casino fronts. Maybe the pattern is desperation itself.

The entrance to the underground soup kitchen is guarded by a nun who stops the more agitated ones and pulls by the collar anyone who tries to cut in line. She sizes me up and decides quickly: looks like trouble, but not the kind that will make troublefor food.She gives me a number, a blue piece of paper scrawled with a market marker, and waves me inside.

The smell of soup is now bordering on toxic. Too many people in a minimal space, steam from the cauldron, and the breath of huddled humans.

A group of teenagers in public school uniforms occupies half the refectory with jokes and laughter. In another corner, two immigrants—one Arab, the other probably Polish—argue quietly, each twirling a wooden rosary between their fingers.

I grab my tray and get in the buffet line. Three volunteers serve the portions: a ladle of soup, a hard piece of bread, and an oxidized apple. At the end of the line, the one distributing the bread is the priest. A worn brown cassock, a faded smile, white hair cut short.

He doesn’t look me in the eyes, doesn’t look at anyone. He just repeatsthank you, thank you, thank you.