Page 151 of Violent Possession

He roars, retreats. The goon from before comes at me again, and I smash his face with my metal forearm, and the sound of his crushed cheekbones is comical. But Vania doesn’t play fair.

From behind, he grabs me again, bends me over the table, and, using his own body, tries to crush me there. The impact shatters the pool table’s top.

My metal arm is trapped. I can’t get out. Vania takes advantage: he pushes my prosthetic fist even deeper into the table’s torn felt, his other hand free to punch me in the face or crush my windpipe whenever he feels like it. He hits with domestic anger, family hatred, with that sick talent for violence that you only learn from being beaten by your own relatives. The audience doesn’t even breathe. In the entire bar, there are only the cracks of bone and Vania’s low laugh.

“You’re nothing,” Vania says softly. “A broken dog my cousin pulled from the trash. And it’s to the trash you’ll return.”

My left arm, the flesh one, isn’t responding right. All my joints creak. The right one, metal, only serves as a lever to pin me to the table. With each punch, my vision fades a little more.

For an instant, I see flashes of my childhood: the smell of the woods behind the orphanage, the nuns’ scoldings when I skipped mass with Seraphim, Seraphim teaching me to shoot at empty beer cans. Then the smell of gunpowder, the smell of blood, the bloody rings, and Alexei’s gaze swearing loyalty to me.

The world spins, the faces become a blur, the bar’s light fades at the edges of my vision.

He whispers, “Only those who learn to like getting hit survive.”

I don’t have the strength to answer, but I laugh. Because it’s true.

And in the darkness that begins to swallow me, I think that I need to survive this shit, just so I can see Alexei’s son-of-a-bitch face when I tell him the joke.

ALEXEI

In the silence of my office, I restore order. Capital flows, supply lines, digital bets, surveillance cameras, salaries paid in cryptocurrency miles away—all converging here, where order is absolute, entropy contained by my will.

Rotten palaces fall because kings get distracted.Inever get distracted.

The mess at the Krestoran is already under control. The manager, media, and police were paid enough to keep their mouths shut for a whole year. The witnesses were located, tagged in databases, and, when necessary, threatened. Vania’s goon broke the code of silence and gave me enough to prove that Vasily was using him to get information on me. He’s now folded up on a gurney in a public ER, with his nose stitched up by someone who doesn’t know how to ask questions.

The evidence provided will help convince my father. Griffin’s disobedience is comforting in its stubbornness, but his usefulness has truly surpassed my most optimistic projections. He is a force of nature: ugly, unpredictable, destructive, impossible to ignore. I invested in this aberration, bet high, andthe results started to appear even before the dividends. Griffin is the spark that could set everything on fire, including myself.

But the bastard is impossible to control. And I hate losing control.

So, I decided… totrust.

A strange and intrusive word for me.

I’m surprised by the speed at which everything unraveled. Vasily, always so discreet, was the first to move after the commotion, sending coded messages through his men. He knows the walls are closing in on him.

In the end, what matters is who bleeds and who collects.

I finalize an acquisition contract for a space that looks like a ring. Something large, luxurious, that can project a professional presence instead of sharing the garage-circus aesthetic that Karpov insists is better. Until all initial investments are maximized, I will ensure a renovation and proper structure that passes legal inspections without major headaches. Illegal fights keep their bettors fixed with their impersonal brutality, but I can maintain it under a legal facade. Iwillmaintain it.

The logistics are almost entirely complete and communicated when my secure phone vibrates.

An unsaved number.

I answer without taking my eyes off the monitor.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Malakov,” the voice on the other end is a rushed, terrified whisper. Boris. Ivan’s goon. “It’s Boris. Sorry to call like this, but you said…”

“I know what I said, Boris,” I cut him off. “Get to the point.”

“It’s the boss. Ivan,” Boris stammers. “He… he found out about what happened at the restaurant, with the… the fighter. He got some of the men together. He’s furious, sir. He said… he said he was going to rip off the cripple’s other hand and send it to you as a gift.”

I stop everything I’m doing.

The news isn’t exactlyunexpected—Ivan was never subtle, and the hatred between us was old, visceral, triggered by decades of idiotic competition and family grudges. But has his hatred escalated to the point of ignoring my warnings about Vasily? Hearing the death threat delivered like this makes me feel a pang of risk.