Page 120 of Violent Possession

My phone vibrates in my pocket—the same one as last time, thepersonalone. A long, specific pulse, and a pattern programmed to mean only one contact. The contact no one ignores.

I stop in the middle of the corridor. My men stop too.

I pick up the device. The screen doesn’t show a number, just the Malakov family crest. I answer.

Let’s see the remnants of what Vasily cried to my father.

“Father.”

I wait, counting the average pauses between one breath and another—three seconds, always, until some biological attack forces him to cough violently and remember he is still alive.

“Alexei.”

The next pause is filled with a slow throat-clearing, then the rustle of paper—notes, reports, folders being handled by wrinkled hands, swollen with power.

“About your new... pet. The cripple.” The word is torn from the depths of contempt, charged with intent and disappointment. I absorb the insult without reaction. It’s not a duel yet. Just the humiliation that precedes all true negotiation. “I have some files,” he continues, and now the old Malakov’s voice turns into cut steel. “This fighter... this invalid. He’s a snitch.”

I know what’s coming. It’s not a conversation.

“Come here,” he orders. “Tomorrow. Noon. And explain to me why there is a rat eating at our family’s table.”

The call ends without a goodbye. Just a sentence. I stand looking at the phone, still hearing the echo of the click in my ear.

I want, just by sheer willpower, to crush that device in the palm of my hand and, with it, the entire lineage of conflicts and humiliations that brought me here.

Tomorrow, at noon, I will be forced to sit before his deathbed and defend not only Griffin, but my own existence, because Vasily decided to go crying to daddy.

I put the phone back in my pocket and, for a few seconds, I spin on my own axis, calculating the vector of each threat. Griffin is still free, Ivan is on a leash, Vasily is scheming, and my father is waiting to tear me apart. None of these threats is new, but the patriarch’s morbid pleasure has always been to force his children to compete for their own relevance. With each crisis, he watches who is willing to devour whom. This time, the rat at the table is mine.

Back in the office, my first reaction is compulsion: I open the screen and pull up the telemetry feed. The surveillance interface is blue and red: a map of the city, digital veins running through neighborhoods, heat spots blinking on Griffin’s routes.

I see everything. His movement through the wet streets, his punctual entry into Schmidt’s tailor shop, the timed waiting period. The biomonitoring from the bracelet spiking right after contact—twelve minutes of absolute peak, followed by a sudden calm. The pattern doesn’t lie: he either found what he was looking for, orhewas found. I see his path to St. Jude’s church, from where he leaves with a different rhythm: a dragging foot and an unstable heartbeat. Physical pain or reopening of a wound. Then, a slow path to the hideout north of the train line, to an area I never deigned to go to.

The information piles up in real time: intercepted messages, activated contact networks, resources moved in the shadows. I ignore all the routine reports. I only want to know one thing: if the gamble I made, of releasing Griffin, really worked. If he is loyal enough to his own survival instinct to swallow his pride and give me results before trying to stab me in the back.

The problem is that, as Griffin navigates the city, he becomes less predictable with every minute.

And, with tomorrow’s trial, my margin of error is zero.

I enterthe apartment expecting to find Griffin in the bedroom, collapsed from pain and exhaustion, perhaps sleeping on his stomach with an arm hanging off the side of the sofa. But the first blue flash of screen light reveals that I’m not alone in the perimeter: he is sitting in front of the central terminal.

He doesn’t even turn around when I close the door behind me.

I gave him restricted access. Low-level meetings, logistics, nothing that could compromise the security of my main operations. A tool for him to understand the rhythm of my world, so he could anticipate. And, as expected, he is using it to study me.

“Analyzing my movement patterns?” I ask.

He takes long seconds to react. “Trying to figure out if you have any free time for hobbies. Or ifthisis all your life is.” He gestures to the screens. “Your logistics meeting tomorrow at eight at that fancy restaurant... Do you always meet to talk about crime in a public place like that?”

I approach, stopping behind him, looking over his shoulder at the screen. He’s viewing part of my operational calendar.

“Restaurants are neutral,” I say, taking off my jacket. “Public places are less likely to be ambushed. And less likely for someone to lose their head in front of witnesses.”

He nods, filing the information away. But he doesn’t say anything for a while. He just stares at me, and I notice that something is wrong, something beyond the sarcasm, a background disturbance, a fever of ideas that don’t fit.

I go straight to the point anyway. “You went out. Went to the church. Twelve-minute heart rate spike, then a sharp drop. Report.”

His gaze hardens, but not with the childish anger I expected. He seems... outraged. Not at me, but at himself.