Page 122 of Violent Possession

He shakes his head, slowly. “It’s just what happens when people like us don’t have the luxury of your money.” He stares at me, and there is no more anger, just a cold, hard fact. “It’s an old story, Alexei. And it’s not mine to tell.”

I could pressure him. I have the tools for that. But I look at him—the stained bandage on his leg, the exhaustion in his shoulders...

I know how to recognize a defeat in an open field, so I do what I have never done in years of negotiations: I accept his word as the final sentence.

I nod a single time.

“Alright,” I say, getting up. The business conversation is over.

What remains is the logistics of having a wounded man bleeding on my Italian leather sofa.

“You did a mediocre job of dressing that wound. Change it or it will get infected.”

I approach, stopping in front of him. He stares up at me, his chin raised in an exhausted challenge, waiting for the next order, the next analysis.

“Afterwards, go to the bedroom,” I say. “Sleep.”

Confusion ripples across his face. He looks at the corridor, then back at me. He has snooped around the apartment. He knows.

“Your bedroom?” he asks with genuine suspicion.

“It’s the only bed in this apartment,” I reply. “And, at the moment, it’s more useful for your recovery than for my sleep.”

I turn, walking towards my office.

“What about you?” he asks. There is something in this question that never existed before: a hesitation to say more, an impossibility of letting go of the now.

I don’t turn around. “I have work to do,” I say. “My brother is making an effort to affect my reputation. It’ll be a long night.”

I close the door behind me, leaving him alone in the room with an order that was not really an order, but an invitation. A permission, perhaps.

This time, unlike the others, I resist the urge to monitor his telemetry, to access the hidden cameras in the ceiling, or check the sensors on the bedroom door. I want to see if Griffin knows what to do with a space where there is no supervision, where no one expects him to fail.

The office is dark, and for a long time, I only hear the hum of the security system and the muffled sound of the wind on the triple-glazed windows. I try to work, but the reports and charts dissolve before my eyes. My brain goes back to the image of him bleeding on the couch, fierce and humiliated, refusing to accept that his own dignity can be bought.

I wonder at what point in my life I lost the ability to feel shame for it.

When I leave the office, it is already dawn. I walk through the living room in silence, avoiding the place where he was. The corridor to the bedroom is dark, but I recognize his shoes, lined up together next to the door.

I open the door slowly, not to wake him. He’s there. The metal arm rests on the dresser, and he sleeps with the most relaxed expression I’ve ever seen on his face.

I don’t know what I intended to see here. Maybe I expected a gesture of sabotage, an attack, or at least a nightmare worthy of his tragic biography.

But all I see is a man sleeping with his wound exposed.

I force myself not to touch him. But I observe him. I just don’t know exactly why.

He’s a variable I threw onto the board without having the slightest idea how to calculate the result. And, for the first timein a long time, the uncertainty—hisuncertainty—doesn’t bother me.

I didn’t sleep.Sleep is a luxury I can’t afford when there’s a war being fought on three fronts: one against Ivan’s stupidity, another against Vasily’s cunning, and a third, more confusing and irritating, against the anomaly currently sleeping in my bed.

I am the heir to an empire designed never to rest, but I hadn’t foreseen the kind of insomnia that sets in when someone starts to occupy a real space in your existence.

The silence in this apartment has always been carefully maintained and unaltered, but now it’s different. It carries the muffled echo of another body breathing. Griffin occupies the house with an unclassifiable presence, an energy that repulses and attracts, that contaminates the air with something I don’t know if I can name.

I get up from the leather chair. I spent the night working and drawing up scenarios for today’s meeting. I need a coffee.

I find Griffin in the kitchen—up earlier than I thought he would be. He’s in front of the coffee machine, wearing only gray sweatpants with his torso bare, despite the cold, displaying his dozens of scars. He’s barefoot, limping slightly, and stares at the machine with the same confused hostility that a caveman would stare at a smartphone. For the first time since the emotional disaster that was our last conversation, I feel like laughing.