Page 28 of Violent Possession

“You’re perceptive, Griffin. Excellent. All I will ask of you is to deal with this loose end. Cleanly. No mess,” I say, because Iknowhewillmake a mess. I’m counting on it. “I’ll have a conversation with him today, and tomorrow, while he thinks he escaped unscathed, you will work your magic.”

“You want me to…killthe guy?” he says, with a grimace.

“I want you tosolveit.”

“On the street, that meanskilling. Why not send one of your guys in their pressed suits?”

He’s still suspicious. I lean back in my chair, observing him. “...You see that there is no one else here, not even a security guard. Just you and me. You’re smart, or you wouldn’t have survived this long. Does no justification cross your mind?”

Griffin studies me, trying to dissect my motivations. He doesn’t seem uncomfortable, but he isn’t at ease either; he belongs to a lineage of people who are never at home anywhere, not even in their own bodies. His nature is one of perpetual displacement, instant adaptation, survival by osmosis. And yet, with every second that passes, I feel he has already understood half of what I am not saying.

I lean forward again, closing the distance between us. “Mymen in their pressed suitscome with their own agendas, ambitions, debts to my family... they are rarelymymen for anything beyond a possessive pronoun.”

Griffin, who knows the world from the bottom up, catches the subtext: loyalty is a sham, and violence is a resource like any other. His face softens by half a degree, in an almost imperceptible relief; I’m not bluffing, and he realizes it.

“If I send one of my own, the news of the death would reach the wrong ears before the body even cooled. The message would be distorted, misinterpreted. They would see my hand in it. Butyou have no baggage. You owe nothing to anyone here. Your loyalty, at the moment, istransactional. Simple.”

Of course, his violence is one of the definitive points. When he acts, I can paint whatever picture I want over it. I can make it look like the work of a rival, the cleanup of one of Ivan’s mistakes. The clean efficiency of my men would only give me another problem to manage.

Griffin reconstructs his own role. He doesn’t like it, but he understands. He understands as few do, in fact: everything that has survived this long has been useful to someone.

He finally clicks his tongue, looking at his own bandaged arm. “And what would the task be, in this case? Solving your loose ends?”

I pull up the tablet again, swipe to a hidden folder, and show him the image: a man in his early forties, hair tied back, sunglasses too dark for a cloudy day, and the expression of someone born tired. “He goes by Kirill, but he’s used eight names. He’s holed up in a condo in Arden, but he won’t last there. He never lasts long anywhere.”

He observes the image for a long time, as if wanting to draw the face from the inside out. “Is that all?”

“That’s all,” I confirm. “He’s not with anyone. Leaves no tracks. It’ll be quick and clean.”

Griffin seems disappointed.

He rises from the armchair slowly, testing the balance of his newly patched body. He looks at me one last time, and I think that, behind it all, there is a certain pride in him for reading the entire game without missing a single line.

I offer to shake his hand, and he hesitates.

Griffin stares at my hand for a long second.

It’s no surprise: men like him always expect every approach to be a trap, every cordial gesture a prelude to the next cruelty.

For a second, I imagine what goes on behind those half-closed eyelids: a literature of trauma, entire lines of distrust, encyclopedias of domestic violence, annotated in pencil behind his eyes. The handshake is a minimal ritual, but in the underworld Griffin came from, it’s profane.

When his hand finally meets mine, I feel the geography of his skin: scars crossing the back, a callus on the side that betrays knife training, a little finger that was, at some point, shattered and poorly reset. It’s a hand that has never held anything for very long—except, perhaps, rage.

He looks me in the eyes. Tries to gauge how many levels of lies exist behind my retinas.

“When?”

I release his hand slowly, but I don’t let him escape my gaze.

“Tomorrow night,” I say, and my own voice sounds a tone deeper. “I will be in touch.”

Me, not an intermediary. Myself.

He takes a step back. He glances at me before picking up the untouched glass of whiskey from the table and downing it.

“I have to admit, you surprised me,” he says with a frown, sliding his fingers along the rim of the glass, fitting it back into the wet circle it had left on the wood. “I’ve never been recruited like this before.”

“A first time for everything, isn’t there?”