Page 94 of Violent Possession

“I can take care of myself. I get paid to punch people.”

I ignore all the injuries I have now. So does he.

He stands. Walks to the door.

He’s really leaving.

“Hey, boss,” I call out again, and he stops with his hand on the doorknob.

He turns with his eyebrows slightly arched.

“Aren’t you even going to give me a goodbye kiss?”

A slow, almost imperceptible smile pulls at the corner of Alexei’s mouth. He crosses the room back, stops in front of me, leans down, and kisses me. It’s quick and tastes like a promise.

Then, he pulls away, turns his back, and leaves the room without looking back.

ALEXEI

Titan has signed the contract. The champagne is on you.

Iread the message once, twice. It’s a significant strategic victory. The deal solidifies our control over the fighting circuit and injects a corporate legitimacy that wards off unwanted attention. More importantly, it cuts off one of Vasily’s main sources of unsupervised income, further tightening the financial leash I’ve placed on him.

It’s a check. Not a checkmate, but a clean and potentially lethal move.

I should feel satisfaction. But I feel nothing.

The victory registers in my mind like a data point on a spreadsheet, devoid of any emotional weight. It’s a strange anesthesia. And I know, with irritating clarity, what the cause of this system failure is.

Griffin.

His taste—nicotine and a desperate urgency—still lingers on my tongue, something that refuses to be spat out, even after gargling with cognac and washing my face twice. The victorywith Titan feels distant, theoretical. The memory of Griffin’s chaos is immediate, physical.

I sit in my office armchair and run my thumb over my lower lip, where the mark from his teeth threatens to become a bruise. A physical reminder that I lost control, a souvenir of impulsivity.

I never indulge. I never allowed myself the luxury of consuming anything that wasn’t planned, tabulated, accounted for—and, above all,useful.

Indulgence. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Pleasure, for me, was always a tool, a lever; it was currency, or blackmail. I remember a leaden night in Zurich, where an investment analyst opened up about a Swiss vault in exchange for a chemical orgasm and the promise of anonymity; I remember the son of a politician in Moscow, who told me the names and numbers of his father’s undeclared accounts with me between his legs. Sex was a transaction. A contract without witnesses. The body’s pleasure was just a dividend, a disgusting cashback, never the objective or the prize. Until Griffin.

With him, it was consumption, a short circuit, a combustion that left me with nothing but a racing pulse, a hormonal trace, and a shameful lapse in my architecture of control. He makes me careless. I’m so focused on extinguishing the fire in my own veins that I barely noticed the empire outside continues to function.

Mikhail confirmed two days ago that the files are legitimate. Myrddin Griffin is exactly what the records say: a street fighter, an orphan, Welsh blood, a career of violence and failure recycled into a supernatural aptitude. An almost perfect asset, if not for the convenience of his connection to Seraphim.

The bank account number that Kirill, in his last pathetic act, left me, turned out to be a drain. Which only leaves Seraphim as the only direct link, the only living piece I can drag to Vasily as proof of treason in Odessa.

And I need that.

I try to put the memory of Griffin aside and start with the first logical step: I search for Seraphim’s real name in federal criminal records, Interpol watchlists, CIA and FSB files to which I shouldn’t have access.

Nothing.

I expand the search. Global financial records, SWIFT transactions, tax returns, property records. The result is an 87-year-old Lucian Caine retired in Florida and dead for six years. A 19-year-old Lucian Caine with two speeding tickets in Ohio. Garbage.

I go deeper. Mercenary forums. Passenger lists for international flights from the last ten years. Immigration files. Social media, active and inactive, scouring for any facial match to Griffin’s vague description.

Nothing.

There is no man named Lucian Caine with the profile to be an elite enforcer for my brother. There isn’t even the ghost of a man beyond his only initial records of being deleted and spending a subsequent year in a juvenile correctional institution.