Page 40 of Violent Possession

But I don’t fight.

He adjusts the grip of my metal fingers around the pen with a precision I can never achieve. His other hand rests firmly on my shoulder, pinning me in place. His breath brushes my neck. My heart hammers against my ribs.

“Relax,” he commands.

The pen slides better now, obeying the calibrated force of his hand. He guides the movement of my carbon fingerprints, the stroke clean, firm, too beautiful to be mine. The name appears on the paper: a hybrid script, part mine, part his.

When we finish, he doesn’t let go immediately. He presses his thumb on a metal joint as if he wants to imprint his signature on me. I smell him—cedar, leather, and mineral vodka—and my face is burning. Anger, perhaps shame, perhaps… somethingobscene, a desire in wrong proportions.

“See?” he murmurs, too intimately, his warm breath on my neck. “We make a great team.”

It’s unbearable.

I pull away sharply, pushing the chair back with a harsh sound on the marble floor. I stand up, and he straightens, adjusting his shirt sleeve with a calm that fills me with hatred, as if he hadn’t just invaded every inch of my space.

“You should have that prosthetic maintained,” he says, casually.Casual. “The calibration seems off.”

The observation is so clinical, so… normal. He could have called meinept,and it would have been better.

“I’m not one of your machines, Malakov.”

He stares at me for a long second, and instead of mockery, I see that genuine, fucked-up curiosity in his eyes.

“Of course not,” he says. “A machine wouldn’t have a pulse.”

He definitely felt it when he was pressed against me. This shit is humiliating.

“Then don’t treat me like a pet.”

“That was never my intention. I don’t treat my animals with such interest, Griffin.”

He gestures towards the door.

“Go rest. You will have obligations with the Circuit soon.”

I hate his control, I hate the way he reads me, and I hate, more than anything, thisthingthat his proximity ignites in me.

I pick up the key and the card from the table and leave without another word.

This goddamn hellholeis infested with cameras. And the son of a bitch Alexei didn’t even try to hide it.Again.

I walk into the bathroom and laugh. On the ceiling, right in the center. A camera in the bathroom. Seriously? What’s his deal? Does he expect to see me taking a dump? Or does he have a shower fetish?

Does he really watch this shit? I imagine the all-powerful Alexei Malakov, on his goddamn marble throne, in the middle of a conference call with the Japanese mafia, and suddenly he raises a finger. “One moment, gentlemen.” He presses ‘mute’ and minimizes the smuggling spreadsheets to open the bathroom camera feed, just to see some fucked-up guy with a black eye brushing his teeth.

The place is exactly like Alexei’s, just two floors closer to hell. Minimalist, cold, impersonal. There isn’t a single item out of place, a single sign that anyone has ever lived here.

I throw myself back onto the king-size bed. The mattress is firm, the sheets are made of cotton that probably costs more than my last month of life. Everything here is made to be comfortable, but all I feel is the barbed wire of a cage.

I pull the black card from my pocket. Nameless. Cold. It’s chic, smooth plastic, and fits perfectly between his fingers. In mine, it feels like desecration. Fine bourgeoisie that at least doesn’t pretend to be good people. This shit isn’t for me, it’s forhim.

Alexei’s hands. Thin, long fingers. Hands that never had to break a nose or throw a punch. Hands that only touched money, crystal, and, apparently, my fucking prosthetic.

I bet he’s never broken a nail in his life. Never landed a punch. Doesn’t even know the sound of a bone cracking. I’d like to see it. Just once, Alexei Malakov losing his composure and raising his hand to someone. Him, in that tailored suit, trying to punch a guy. It should hurt him more than the other person.

But would his anger be like that,clumsy? I want to find out, I want to break this fucking control he thinks he has over me.

I imagine him. Grabbing someone’s collar, pushing the guy against the wall. That seems more like him. A sudden outburst of violence. It’s what happens when someone holds back too much.