Page 176 of Violent Possession

“About him?” I say, softly.

The mood changes. I feel it. Alexei looks like the one I first met: all ice, polished and impenetrable. Except he’s not. It’s a different gaze, with no more possible defenses. I can imagine him dismissing me, throwing out one of those glass aphorisms about how the past “doesn’t matter”, about how there is only the now. The silence between us is longer, stranger.

He holds the champagne glass with one hand, watching the bubbles.

“My father,” he begins, “taught us a lesson when I was twelve. He took us, Vasily and me, to the safe room. There was a pile of money on the table. A million dollars. He placed a gun there. He told us that the business world was simple. The man who was willing to shoot first, to eliminate the competition without hesitation, would get the money. The other… would get the lesson.”

I can hear the hum of the lightbulbs, or maybe just the blood pounding too loudly in my head. Two boys. One gun. A fortune.

“I didn’t hesitate,” Alexei says, and he finally raises his gaze to me. “I picked up the gun, pointed it at my brother’s head, and pulled the trigger.”

I feel an instant nausea, as if the scene were happening now, in this room, between him and me. I see myself as a boy, I seehimas a boy, I see Vasily there—even not knowing what he looks like—, and I want to cross time and take the gun from his hand. But there would never be time.

“It was unloaded, of course,” he concludes, with a humorless half-smile. “Vasily cried for a week. I… I haven’t cried since that day.” He takes a sip of champagne. I don’t know if I’m still breathing. “…There was an operation in Istanbul, years ago. Vasily was in charge. It almost sank us completely. I didn’t doubt it for a second. In my head, the boy who trembled in the safe had finally found the courage to pull the trigger. I condemned him right there, on that dock. It all added up. I was sure he was a traitor, I just never found the definitive proof. But Iknew. Seraphim… tried to tell me it was just incompetence, not betrayal. But what could a stranger know about my family?” He forces a disdainful half-smile that doesn’t hold.

The image is grotesque and poetic: a dynasty where the only currency of value is power, and the only way to inherit love is toturn everything into war. I think of how many times I’ve heard stories about fucked-up families, but nothing comes close to this.

Alexei sets the glass on the table and runs a hand through his hair, messing it up. I can’t remember seeing him like this before.

“After being exiled, Vasily told me today that… in Istanbul, he failed. Yes, he betrayed me now, but before that, everything he did was just a way to force me to see him as an equal.” He pauses. “That was it. This whole fucking thing… just to prove to me that he could pull the trigger too.”

I try to think of something to say. Any answer seems ridiculous.What kind of father puts two sons in a game of Russian roulette?is what comes to mind. In practice, I just say, “Fuck.”

Alexei smiles, transparently, so strange on someone like him. “Fuck indeed,” he repeats, and lets out the air with five years of tension.

I look at him again, try to see the boy from the safe room, the same one who later became this man who almost swallowed me whole. It doesn’t scare me. Itsaddensme, and maybe it brings me even closer.

I’m tempted to touch his hand on the table, and I content myself with just looking. I try to relax. I breathe in. “You never told me,” I say, a bit awkwardly. “About your father.”

Alexei shrugs. “My mother died young. He was the one who provided for us. Even in abuse, there is closeness.”

I understand. Not in the same way, but I understand. To feel indebted in the same measure that you hate the one who raised you.

For a while, we just drink in silence, each of us sifting through our own wreckage.

Something has rebalanced here. A kind of trust.

I think of everything we still haven’t discussed, everything that was left suspended before he left.

“So…” I begin, still hesitant, testing the weight of each word before letting it fall. The silence between us is full of static energy. I try to decipher the new map of the world by looking at his face, but Alexei is a wall, a mask of neutrality that only gives way at the finest edges. Still, he turns slightly. “About what you said before you left…”

I leave the rest in the air, because I don’t know if I want to explicitly call in the promise, nor if it was really a promise or just a war tactic. But he understands me. He always understands.

Alexei leaves the champagne glass on the counter. Now comes the bureaucracy of victory. The balance sheet of the newly shed blood.

“I will keep my word,” he confirms. “But… the map has changed a bit.” He pauses. The truce before the bad news, or maybe just the fear of admitting that something has escaped his control. “My father intervened. To avoid a civil war between me and my cousin, he divided the territory. My cousin got the East, the traditional operations. I got the West. The finances, logistics, expansion.”

A nearly dead king, two crown princes, a kingdom split in half. A classic.

“So, when you say ‘leave’…,” I let the sentence hang in the air. Again. And,again, he understands.

“It means you can leave this apartment. You can have a house in the mountains, a condo on the beach, whatever you want. As long as it’s on my side of the map.”

He speaks so practically, so objectively, that I wonder if he has already thought about the details.

I give a lopsided, crooked smile, feigning mockery. “Why are you only talking about me?” I try to make it sound casual, but the heat that rises from my chest to my throat betrays me, and Ifeel that old panic of abandonment: the fear of being left behind again. “I’m going where you go.”

It’s a threat, depending on how it’s interpreted.