Page 84 of Violent Possession

I try to look away, but his gravitational pull is impossible to deny. His eyes—cold, analytical, predatory—map my face, looking for signs of weakness, hesitation, lies. The feeling of absolute exposure makes me want to tear off my own muscles.

“He warned you,” Alexei begins, “that my brother was coming after you. Was that it?”

I swallow hard. I should lie. But the exit plan has already been destroyed, along with my reputation, my shoulder, and what’s left of my pride. I look back at him, without answering. The silence grows, alive, like athingbetween us.

“Did he pay you?” he continues. “Was there any transaction? Money, information?”

I shake my head. A silent “no”, a nod that, at best, is pathetic.

“Did he give you any instructions? Any orders? Something you were supposed to do or report?”

“No,” I manage to say.

He nods. He watches me for what seems like too long, and I know the pause is strategic. He wants me to imagine what’s coming, for me to build the torture myself. It works.

Then he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“What do the snitch and the man he snitched on talk about after a decade?”

Snitch. The label I spent years trying to bury, recalculate, erase from the records of the universe. The label that burned my skin and turned me into this. A wave of heat takes over my chest, a shame that burns inside, all the way to my face. It’s so intense it makes me nauseous.

I open my mouth to answer, to say that he doesn’t know, that he wasn’t there. But the words don’t come. My voice is cut off in my throat, and I find myself looking away at the clean sheets, at the monochromatic pattern of the room, at anything that isn’t that frozen, judging gaze. I, who always had an answer foreverything, who always managed to turn even pain into a joke, am empty. No armor, no provocation, no shield.

“You don’t understand,” I whisper, and the phrase is so childish that I feel disgusted with myself.

I feel the weight of his gaze. “Then explain it to me, Griffin.”

Anger is the only thing I have left, so I grab it like a weapon. It’s the last fraction of me that Alexei hasn’t yet taken possession of. Seraphim keeps me anchored to my own identity, it’s sacred ground. It’s my reminder of who I am—or who I used to be. I couldn’t forgive myself.

“No,” I say. “You already have all the rest of me. My body, my struggles, my fucking freedom. This story ismine.”

I expect him to lose his composure. For him to retaliate, shout, threaten, break something. It would be easier, more predictable. But Alexei does none of that. Of course not.

He stares at me with that sociopathic calm, a frozen lake without a ripple. He stands up, adjusts his jacket, and goes to the window, opening the blinds to let the city light flood the room. He looks outside, searching for answers in the distant lights, or perhaps just gathering enough patience not to kill me.

“Everything that affects my investment is my business, Griffin,” he says. “All of these are variables that I need to understand. You are giving me a damage report that I demand to keep you alive.”

He turns to me. His voice is even colder.

“I’m not asking.Explain.”

The ridiculousness of it all: being forced to distill my life into a damage report, line by line. An object.

The table between us becomes magnetized: all that I am, all that I once was, stacked in that space between the armchair and my bed. I never thought that if I ever spoke about this shit, it would be to this guy; but there’s nothing left.

I shouldn’t talk. Not now. But his silence pushes me. And Alexei is the only possible recipient.

“Explain what?” I stare back at him, holding his gaze, because if I falter now, I know he’ll break me. “That he... that he was going to kill himself? That he had a shitty plan, a glorious and suicidal plan to take over the city, and that he was going to drag everyone in his circle to hell with him?”

I crush the sheet, trying to find an anchor.

“I tried to warn him. I begged him to be the man I thought he was, and he wouldn’t listen to me. He was so blinded by the myth of his own fucking name that he couldn’t see anyone else. I idolized that son of a bitch,” my voice cracks. “He was the only fucking light I had, and I wasn’t going to watch him go out in a hail of bullets because of his own pride.”

My head hurts. I run my tongue over my teeth and taste old blood, because that’s what this shit is: an open wound that never properly healed, and which he is,again, shoving his damn fingers into.

“The only fucking way out I could think of was that. Fucking stupid. But I was seventeen.”

I take a deep breath. The air is clean in the room, but the scent that invades me is that of a basement, blood, sweat, and the bitterness of that night. I remember Seraphim saying,I can’t kill you. Not you.