Page 73 of Violent Possession

“M-Mr. Malakov!” she exclaims. “I… I didn’t… didn’t hear you… arri… arriving! S-Sorry, I’ll finish… I… quickly, sir, I promise!”

She stutters, trembling so much she looks like she’s going to faint on top of the equipment.

Her reaction is not a surprise. Employee training here follows its own manual, a bible of micro-rules written by successive generations of paranoid bosses, and rule number one is:disappear before being noticed. The presence of a Malakov is like a fire drill.

I check my watch. I am punctual, same time asalways. She, one minute late.

“One minute, Anna.”

She stares at me. She opens her mouth, closes it. Her hands tremble. She breathes in panic, trying to combine promises of efficiency with the demand to disappear. “I… I… I didn’t mean to… it’s just… I…” She stumbles, literally and metaphorically.

I sigh.

“It’s fine. Finish, then.”

Two hurried figures blur in the side corridor: employees cleaning the glass panels, now vanishing like lizards through cracks. I wonder how many of them have their real names on file, how many managed to avoid the heavy hand of the family HR, how many survived more than a month.

Anna’s polisher bumps against the baseboards. I remember reading, in some report, that she was hired on Angélica’s recommendation, probably to keep someone trustworthy among my father’s eyes and ears. But what Anna sees, she never speaks. You learn quickly in this ecosystem.

It is only when I reach the staircase that Dimitri appears. He is a tragicomic figure of loyalty: always dressed like a Soviet spy,hair slicked back, navy blue tie. The butler who has served this house longer than I’ve been alive.

“Mr. Alexei.” He bows his head. “It’s good to see you.”

“Where is he?” I ask.

“In the master bedroom, sir. With the medical team. Mrs. Malakov asked you to wait for him in the blue salon.”

“Mrs. Malakov” grates on my ear. He refers to Angélica with a title she didn’t earn.

I nod. Dimitri vanishes into thin air, delighted not to have to prolong the conversation.

I walk down the hallway, ignoring the family portraits that adorn the wall: all forged, all posed, all lies. In one of them, my father poses with his first wife. Both already hated themselves and the son they had together, but on screen, they are all smiles and champagne flutes. An artist was paid extra to hide the bruise on my father’s left eye, the result of a fight with a Swiss banker. Tradition.

The corridor goes to the end of the hall, where cobalt blue double wooden doors separate the rest of the house from the “blue salon,” a name that never stuck, despite my stepmother’s efforts to rename everything in here.

I push the door. All the furniture came from Italy, except for the velvet armchair that occupies the center of the salon and which, they say, was taken from Moscow before the revolution. I find it unlikely: it’s too intact.

The coffee table is set with coffee, tea, and two types of biscuits. A pose of civility. No one in this house consumes sugar or gluten.

Angélica glides into the salon with a glass of white wine in her hand. She holds the glass by the stem, her nails painted the most expensive shade the beauty market could invent.

She is twenty-six. She looks even younger. Her blonde hair is impeccable and her blue cashmere dress hugs a body thatthe gym and genetics have kept perfect. She is beautiful, an expensive work of art that my father acquired when she was twenty and he, sixty-five.

“Alyosha, dear. You’ve arrived.”

What a joke.Alyosha. As if, by pronouncing the diminutive, she could rewrite the entire logic of our relationship—who commands, who obeys, who is blood, who is satellite. “You don’t speak Russian, Angélica,” I say. “You don’t even know what you’re saying. Don’t use that name.”

She ignores my order. “Don’t be so formal,” she says, stopping in front of me. “I’ve told you you can call me mother.”

I make a point of looking at her as if she were a stranger. “I am sixteen years older than you.”

She sighs, theatrically. Amartyr. “You and your brother are impossible. I’m just trying to keep this family intact, but no one cooperates.” She takes a sip of wine, sits in the armchair my father chose as his throne decades ago. The scene was staged by her, I’m sure: the arrangement of objects, the color of the wine, the type of biscuit no one will eat. “Speaking of which, has your cousin confirmed if he’s coming? We need to discuss the costs of the new physical therapy team.”

“I will pay,” I cut her off.

“It’s not just about the money, Alyosha.” She corrects herself with minimal force. “It’s about responsibility. About who is here, making the day-to-day decisions, while others only show up once a month.”

“I show uponce a month,” I say, “because I’m the one paying for your wine, the nurses, the doctors, the hydrolyzed collagen you mix into your green juice and post on Instagram. If anyone supports this house, Angélica, it’sme. So, yes, in the end, itisabout money.”