Page 29 of Violent Possession

Maybe he’s pondering if he’ll hunt me down one day. Maybe he’s already decided. I realize that, for some reason, I am tense too.

I don’t usually feel this.

“For me, yes,” he says.

He turns and walks out without looking back. I’m left alone in the silence of my office. The tightness in my chest does not ease.

My eyes fix on the bloodstain on my Tabriz rug. The mark he left.

It’s a stain that will never come out, and I know this for a fact because I feel no desire whatsoever to call for it to be cleaned.

Some investments require you to accept the loss. And, in this case, perhaps the loss is the asset itself.

This city,at night and through the window of this temporary apartment, is ugly—a myriad of dead lights. The office was on the thirtieth floor of the most anodyne building imaginable, with a beige marble facade and a stainless steel elevator. Perfect for someone who needed to disappear among the numbers of others.

A knock on the door: three taps, as arranged. Kirill Denisov. The man who, hours before, was just a pixelated face in Griffin’s dossier, now trembles in the flesh in my office. His blazer is wrinkled, stained with sweat under the arms. His loose collar is the beginning of a downfall.

Kirill enters. He avoids my gaze, preferring to analyze the walls, the furniture arrangement, even the generic paintings on the walls. With every second, the distance between his pose of self-sufficiency and his real desperation grew.

“Sit down, Kirill,” I say, pointing to the old armchair in front of me. He hesitates.

“I’d rather stand,” he says, forcing dignity.

“As you wish.”

I pour myself a whiskey, purposefully not offering him any. The trick is simple: if he asks for one, he’s trying to seem less vulnerable; if he refuses, he’s trying to show self-control. Hechooses the latter, with his arms crossed and one foot slightly behind the other, ready to flee. But without the courage.

“Who are you? Were you the one who called? The one who warned me about Ivan’s man?”

I drink slowly, in no hurry to answer. “I’m the reason you’re still breathing,” I say. “Isn’t that enough for now?”

He lets out a nervous laugh. “Nothing is enough when you have a price on your head.”

“If I wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be talking,” I continue, enjoying how he swallows his pride in silence. “I would have let Ivan settle your debts the old-fashioned way.”

Sweat drips down his temple. “What do you want, then? Money? I don’t have?—“

“I know exactly how much you have,” I cut in, before he could try any bargaining. “Vasily Malakov paid for your silence after the disaster in Odessa. Which leads me to the question that must be keeping you up at night.”

I watch Kirill squirm, a man so used to lying that he no longer notices when he’s being manipulated in return.

“Why would they send an animal to slit your throat, if Vasily had already paid you to disappear?”

He has no answer. His pupils dilate. His nostrils flare, searching for air. The panic is genuine, but what really disarms him is the doubt: doIknow more about his own fate than he does?

“You don’t know, do you?” I continued. “It’s because you don’t understand how my family works. Ivan is an idiot, Vasily is a traitor. You were just an unlucky bastard caught in the middle of this fight.”

“I don’t know about any betrayal,” he tries, but his tone betrays the failure even to someone who has never heard him lie before. “The deal in Odessa went wrong. It happens. There was a federal informant.”

“Vasily doesn’t make that kind of mistake. That was deliberate sabotage.”

He takes a step back, finally sitting down. His whole body is shrunk, his eyes trying to identify in me the source of his death sentence.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he mutters, “they already paid me. Whyeliminateme?”

I omit that this is my fault. Instead of telling him it’s becauseIstarted a story about a declared enemy of the family planning to question him, I say, “Who knows. Vasily might have changed his mind. Decided he couldn’t take a risk with you.”

He narrows his eyes, trying to find some logic. Finally, he just says, “What do you want from me?”