Page 155 of Violent Possession

He doesn’t answer. He just stares at me.

“I asked if you understood,” I repeat, more quietly.

He nods. Short and spasmodic. “Understood.”

“Leave,” I order. “Take your men and get out of my sight before I change my mind.”

Ivan hesitates, but the survival instinct overcomes his pride.

He looks at his henchmen. They jolt out of their lethargy and follow, dragging themselves like drenched dogs, unable to look at anyone nearby. Ivan doesn’t speak, doesn’t turn, doesn’t dramatize: he just leaves.

The bar door slams behind them. The neon sign starts flickering again, a cockroach crawls over a pool of blood, andonly then do I realize that all the other customers are hiding under the tables. No one dares to get up.

I breathe, relax my shoulders. Ivan’s blood is now mixed with mine on my clothes, on the floor, on the tables, and with Griffin’s, in a disgusting metaphor for what Malakov life has always been: all together, all contaminated, all with no way back.

After gathering my courage, I turn and go to Griffin.

He looks at me, but says nothing; he just waits, as if I were going to decide right then and there whether he lives or dies.

I crouch beside him. I lower the gun.

I brush a lock of bloody hair from his face, so I can see the damage. It’s ugly. One eye is swollen shut, his lip is split in three places, and there’s a deep cut on his forehead that won’t stop bleeding, in addition to injuries from other fights in the days prior.

“Can you stand?” I ask, quietly.

Griffin spits some blood on the floor before answering. “Give me a minute,” he mutters, his voice a rasp.

I don’t have a minute. My men will be here any second, followed by a cleanup crew that will make this place disappear from the records. I look around at the customers still huddled under the tables.

Witnesses. Another expensive problem.

“This was stupid,” I say to myself.

Then, without another word, I holster the gun. I put one of his arms over my shoulders, hold him by the waist, and ignore the protests of my own bruised body. I lift him from the floor. He is heavy, a dead weight of muscle and bone, and he groans in pain when I move him, his head lolling against my shoulder. He uses what little strength he has left to lean on me.

I carry him out of the bar, past the wreckage of my family war. No one dares to lift their head. No one says a word. Icarefully place him in the seat of my car. The immaculate white leather is immediately stained with his blood.

And I find that I don’t care.

The suture needleenters the skin above Griffin’s eyebrow with firm precision. He doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound. The muscles in his shoulder tense. In the apartment, the only sound is my breathing and the click of the forceps as I change instruments. Griffin’s blood no longer pulses, just flows, resigned, onto a cotton cloth folded in the palm of my hand. The cut on his forehead is deep, a perfect red line, fading from crimson to rust as it coagulates.

I’ve already cleaned the worst of it. The blood, the filth from that wretched bar. Now, the repairs remain. The cut on his forehead, the split lip, the abrasions on his face.

I work under the bright light of my desk lamp, which I dragged into the middle of the living room. He is sitting in a chair, bare-chested, a map of new and old bruises across his body.

Every wound I clean, every stitch I make, is a personal affront. Ivan not only dared to touch him; he forced me to intervene, to expose myself, to turn a private settling of scores into a circus spectacle for anyone on the pier who had the misfortune of being there. The idiot didn’t understand the basics: in a public duel, it’srespectthat is lost.

I finish the last stitch and cut the thread. I pick up a gauze soaked in antiseptic and move to clean the area, and Griffin is already watching me with a crooked smile, half cynical, half stunned.

“It’s going to sting,” I warn, in as neutral a voice as possible.

“I’m already stinging,” he replies, hoarse. They are the first words he’s said since we got here.

I press the gauze against the cut, and he hisses as his whole body tenses. He looks at me with one swollen eye and the other clear and defiant. He watches me work with a confidence that borders on insanity. He saw me almost kill my cousin for him, and now he sits here, allowing me to patch him up.

I finish cleaning, cover the suture with a bandage. I take a step back. The damage is contained. He will survive. On the outside, at least.

Griffin takes a deep breath, once, then another. He raises his hand, slowly, perhaps expecting me to push it back. But I don’t.