Page 115 of Violent Possession

When it’s my turn, I make the rehearsed move: I leave the tray in front of him and, along with it, I slide Schmidt’s card.

The priest feels its presence before he even sees it. He gives a small nod.

“The potato soup is especially good today.” The smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Sit down. Eat. The blessing will find you.”

I went there to deliver a gangster’s message, and, in return, I get a children’s catechism lesson.

I’m tempted to leave, not to eat, to abandon the mission, but that would be the same as spitting in Alexei’s face, and I’m not suicidal, despite what he thinks.

I sit at the end of one of the tables, between an old man with a tuberculous cough and a mother trying to shove food down her four-year-old son’s throat.

The priest finishes serving people and disappears through a side door. The volunteers collect plates, restock the piles of bread, clean up the crumbs. No one seems to notice my presence, and yet I’m nervous, my skin burning with the certainty that Alexei is watching me somewhere—or, worse,analyzingmy performance and judging every protocol error.

Time drags on. I wait for the “contact” arranged by Schmidt to appear.

And nothing.

I start to think the information was bad, or that I was thrown in as bait on purpose. I look at the line still forming at the door, at the groups alternating at the tables, at everyone’s eyes. No one stands out. No one approaches me.

Maybe that’s it, I think: maybe the message has already been delivered, and the card was just a prank to take me out of circulation for a few hours. Maybe Alexei is laughing now, testing my loyalty, forcing me to crawl through the underworld again just to be sure I haven’t lost my touch. The old man with the cough starts to tremble next to me, coughing until tears well up, and the mother on the other side puts down her spoon to gently pat the old man’s back. The boy takes advantage of the interval to eat part of the old man’s bread. The circulation of survival.

I’m about to get up when the chair in front of me scrapes on the floor, and a heavy tray lightly hits the table.

“May I?” a voice asks.

I don’t even look. Just another fucker in the soup line. I make a “whatever” gesture.

He sits down. The old man between us calms his cough and starts breathing through his nose again, the sound getting fainter and fainter. The boy next to him watches everything with the eyes of a rat.

“The nuns used to say that pain purified the soul,” the voice of the man with the tray sounds. “I always thought it was just a shitty excuse to let us bleed.”

My body freezes. It’s a phrase I haven’t heard ina decade.It has the smell, the taste, the sound of a past I forcibly killed years ago. Only one person in the world would say that, in that way, with that tone, in this situation.

I raise my eyes and look at his face for the first time. It makes me dizzy: not because of the surprise, but because of the confirmation of a fear that has been with me since childhood. Time has passed, but the eyes are the same. The eyes of someone who has seen hell, survived, and came back to visit. Eyes of an abyss, eyes of a reptile, the eyes of Cain.

“...Cain?” I say.

The noise of the soup kitchen—the coughs, the children’s screams, the sticky sound of plastic trays hitting the rusted metal of the tables—diminishes. First muffled, then suffocated.

There’s nothing holy in this refectory, except perhaps the absolute certainty of the final judgment.

Cain. Who would have thought? His face is thinner; the deep dark circles under his eyes create dark valleys, and his red hair, which was always cut in a military style, now grows at a strange angle, typical of someone who hasn’t seen their own reflection in weeks.

He’s wearing a cheap sweatshirt, the cuffs stained with pen ink, and his hands—thosehands—rest on the countertop. Hisskin looks gray, covered in freckles. But his gaze is the same, rust under ice.

And it’s that gaze, fixed on me, that rips me out of my body and throws me back tothat night.

None of this should affect me anymore. The trauma should be a muscle atrophied by routine, not a beast that wakes up every time I’m seen as a victim. But Cain is not just anyone, and time, in his case, only served to distill the essence of what was rotten and preserve what was beautiful.

I see it all again: the dimly lit basement, the smell of oil and blood, the wet sound of the blade, his look—of mercy, not sadism—when he positioned the machete on my arm. He cried. I saw it. And I never knew what to do with that fucking piece of information.

Now, I see the same hesitation, but it’s smaller. Tamed. Something tells me that if it were up to him alone, he wouldn’t be here. Not today, notever. But I didn’t come here to pretend we’re friends. I came to understand what the fuck kind of pattern Alexei wanted me to decipher.

“Myrddin,” he says, almost inaudible over the refectory noise. His eyes fall to the prosthesis, and there’s the hesitation, the shame, the quick calculation of how many words it would take to explain the inexplicable. He doesn’t try. “Nice arm. Theother sidetreats you well.”

He’s drawing the line in the sand. His world, andAlexei’sworld.

The old man next to us, sensing the change in atmosphere, gathers his pieces of bread, shaking his head like someone who’s seen this movie before. The boy’s mother also picks up her things and moves the kid to the end of the table.