Page 74 of Violent Possession

“You don’t understand anything, Lyosha. Money is the least of our problems. What matters is keeping this place going,functioning, while your father—” She hesitates. “While your father?—”

“What?Dies?”

I feel nothing. The humanity someone might have expected from me was lost somewhere between childhood and the first nights I spent outside this house.

Her face contorts into something that could be sadness. I doubt it is.

In the first years, she tried to win me over. Then, she tried to sabotage me. Now, she just wants to ensure my father dies with as little humiliation as possible, and that the inventory isn’t a public carnage. But, in the end, she still hates me because I control the finances.

For me, I despise her because she is a vulture.

She finishes the wine in one gulp, her composure breaking for an instant. She places the glass on the table.

“I didn’t come to steal anything from you, Alexei,” she says. “But I won’t apologize for existing.”

“Then exist in silence.”

She takes a deep breath.

“…You are just like your father.”

Perhaps the comparison would have affected me when I was twenty-two. Now, it’s just a confirmation of what I already know. I am what he always wanted: immune, practical, impossible to drown in cheap sentimentality.

“I am worse,” I say.

Angélica stares. Then, she stands up and adjusts her dress. Her perfume, expensive and invasive, fills the air wherever she goes. She takes the glass to the bar and leaves it there, right in the center, like a trophy. She doesn’t look back. She likes to exit the scene silently, pretending she could force me to go after her. It never works.

The clock strikes four o’clock and two minutes. The house protocol is inflexible—no one enters the patriarch’s room without the team’s consent. Angélica is, officially, the guardian of access to the deathbed. I imagine she revels in the temporary power, knowing that afterward, everything will turn to dust and it won’t be her who decides every item of the inventory.

Exactly three minutes later, Dimitri appears. He gestures to me, and I stand up.Finally.

My father’s bedroom door is ajar. A nurse, seeing me, nods and discreetly withdraws, closing it behind her and leaving us alone.

The heavy blue velvet curtains are the same, the walls paneled with mahogany darkened by smoke and decades are also the same. But now the air is dry with pressurized oxygen, and with each step, tubes, monitors, drippers mounted on steel stands clash with the excessive classicism.

My memory of my father is a sequence of epic frames: bursting through double doors, crushing adversaries, laughing and speaking loudly. Now, it is this man lying on an imported Swiss hospital bed, wrapped in thermal blankets and surrounded by an arsenal of medical devices making specific noises in the rhythm of slow death. The bones of his face are already marked, his mouth already has deep fissures, the little white hair is stuck in tufts to his forehead.

He notices my movement. He turns his head with minimal effort, but his eyes dart,alive, betrayed by his own body. I try to measure the interval between recognition and command. He never calls me son, never allows himself the luxury of investing in affection. Only business. Always.

“Father.”

He ignores the greeting. “Reports on the southern expansion,” he says. His voice is hoarse but still calibrated. The air passes through the nasal cannula, hissing softly.

“They are already on your desk,” I reply. I approach, sit in the vintage leather armchair beside the bed. “The numbers are correct. The margin is forty-six percent above the last forecast. Even with the increase in transportation costs.”

He digests the information without blinking. His gaze always strips my sentences, looking for fat, lies, incompetence.

“The flow?” He doesn’t need to explain. I know he’s talking about the money laundering arms, the international transfers, the hundreds of micropayments shuffled around the world to disguise the origin of the money.

He asks because it’s the only sector he never fully handed over to anyone—only delegated, temporarily, to Vasily, the less brilliant and more predictable brother. Vasily knows how to keep the gears turning, but he wouldn’t invent a new machine if his life depended on it.

“The inflows remain clean,” I respond. “Vasily has done a good job, but I see some redundancies that can be eliminated.”

He looks at me sideways. He must be trying to distinguish if my answer is a kiss of a dagger or just a sign of my boredom with the old way of doing things. Between us, there were never any illusions: I want total control. He knows that. Always has.

His left hand is covered with bluish spots with his fingers stiff, but he still raises one. “Reduce the layers. Too much noise attracts attention.”

“I’m already taking care of it,” I say.