Page 26 of Violent Possession

“Is this armchair a Tabriz original too, boss?”

I smile back.Boss—the word suits his voice.

“No. Stain it, please.”

For a few seconds, he just breathes.

The silence between us stretches into a tightrope, and I realize he’s measuring exactly how much of his own pain he can still use as currency.

“…You got another good doctor?” he says suddenly, his voice low and serious.

I nod. “The best. Do you accept?”

He looks at the empty glass, then at me. The flame in his eyes flickers, contained behind a wall of pure, pragmatic survival instinct.

Then he says, with the absolute honesty of someone who can no longer bluff with their life, “I accept.”

“Do you keep a stock of these?”Griffin asks, looking at me, testing if he still has anything left to lose. “One for each type of wound? Is this one thestab specialist?”

The doctor, oblivious to the irony, begins to clean the cut on Griffin’s ribs. He’s different from the one who treated Griffin at the hotel.

“The other is a general practitioner on retainer for emergencies. This one is a surgeon,” I explain. “A man only needs to know what is necessary for his function.”

The doctor irrigates Griffin’s cut with a clear liquid. The smell of antiseptic mixes with blood, sweat, and the damp leather of the upholstery. I think Griffin is going to scream. But he just sinks deeper into the armchair, gritting his teeth.

“You know,” he says, as the doctor readies a needle and thread. “Since we’re trading business secrets, can I know your name? Or do you prefer to keep playing the game?”

The provocation is a demand for equality, a final push before surrendering control completely. I decide to grant him this coin, even if its value was debased centuries ago. “Alexei,” I say, without a single muscle moving in my face.

Griffin repeats it, chewing on the name, testing it in his mouth. “Alexei.” He shakes his head, almost respectfully. “Didn’t they give you a last name, Russian?”

I appreciate his insolence. He has no idea what he is asking.

“Malakov,” I say.

The doctor continues stitching, but time itself seems to hesitate, waiting to see what Griffin will do with this information.

Nothing. It’s as if I had confessed to being a “Smith” or a “Kowalski”. He just stares at me, his eyes dry, pupils dilated, with no visible reaction. He is either truly that ignorant of the world he intends to survive in, or there is something so monstrous within him that not even the Malakov family name strikes fear into him.

The doctor begins to clean the wound on his stump, a notoriously sensitive area. He cleans the inside of the stump, where small fissures threaten to become infected. That’s when the facade crumbles.

Griffin chokes. It’s involuntary, a strangled cough, and he raises his good hand to rest it lightly on the doctor’s forearm. A gesture of interruption, almost...polite.

The doctor pulls back, respectful. Griffin completely loses his footing.

He leans forward. His gaze lowers, slow and heavy, to the center of my office. To the grotesque red stain he left on my rug. To his “unique piece”.

And I understand everything. The choke, the gesture, the fixed stare. He’s rewinding the tape, replaying his ultimate act of defiance—the blood smeared with contempt—and calculating the new,astronomicalcost of that gesture: soiling the ground of aMalakov.

The realization of the sheer scale of his own recklessness is suffocating him from the inside.

The “sorry” he murmurs is so low the doctor doesn’t even react. Only I hear it. He continues, “What did you say?”

I allow myself a minimal smile. “Malakov. I thought the name might be familiar in your line of work.”

“Malakov.”

He swallows.