Page 23 of Violent Possession
Ivan was furious that I didn’t show up for his “big night” with Karpov. He accused me of not having the “balls”, of hiding behind numbers. I let him scream. His anger is loud, fleeting, and easily redirected.
On Monday night, Ivan showed up earlier than scheduled. He slammed my office door open so hard it knocked a bottle of whiskey off a cabinet. He waited for an explanation as to why I wasn’t by his side at the Sacramento event. A matter of honor, as he made sure to repeat, loudly, for anyone with functional hearing.
I could have told him the truth, but Ivan wouldn’t know how to digest that kind of priority. To him, anything that exists outside the family trench is a waste of time, a luxury for those who’ve never been shot in the back.
I leaned back in my chair that day, waiting for the shouting.
“You left me alone, Leshy!” He spat the nickname as if it were an accusation of cowardice. “EvenKarpovwas waiting for you. It’s ridiculous I had to represent usboth. What, are our dealings no longerworthyour presence?”
“You were right, Vania.” The word felt like poison in my mouth, but I insisted on it to guarantee the effect. “I should have been there with you. My apologies.”
Ivan always expects resistance, never conciliation. He’s disarmed by a gesture of affection; he doesn’t know how to handle an apology, unsure whether to accept it or be suspicious. So, for the first time in weeks, he fell silent.
“So you admit it,” he finally said, a mix of scorn and relief in his voice.
“I admit my interest in Karpov’s circus wasn’t about the fights,” I explained, opening my laptop on the desk with the screen turned toward him. “It was about one of the fighters. Iron Arm.”
Ivan pulled over a chair, dragging it across the carpet with unnecessary violence. He shoved his face so close to the screen the pixels probably burned his retinas. “The cripple? What about him?”
“He’s one of the Volkovs’ men, planted in Sacramento. I just don’t know why yet.”
A complete lie. Iron Arm has no connection to the Volkovs or any other relevant Russian cell. All I could find was that he arrived in the city with a fake passport and a reputation for killing for sport. The rest, I invented. For Ivan, a single spark is enough to ignite his paranoia.
He turned pale, then red. Hating the Volkovs is his favorite sport, even more than boxing. They are the distorted mirror of our own family; someone my father picked a fight with years ago, and Ivan is all about honoring the elders.
I could see his brain working, stitching the supposed betrayal together with all the resentments he’s accumulated since childhood.
“And the strangest thing, Ivan, is that he appeared in the city around the same time as thatlossfrom Odessa.”
That was all I needed to say. I didn’t have to suggest a connection. Ivan’s paranoid and simplistic mind did the work for me. He left my office with fire in his eyes.
Hours later, an “anonymous leak” about Kirill’s exact location reached his ears—getting around Vasily’s mediocre surveillance of Kirill to create this opportunity and track him down was the easy part. He was staying in a three-star hotel, in the room right next to the one I sent Griffin to. Even someone as stupid as Ivan could make the correlation: the Volkovs placed an agent on the Odessa witness to gain leverage—therefore, he had to kill the agent, and maybe Kirill if he’s dumb enough, before they found out something real. I rely on Ivan’s idiocy. It proves itself every time. If he had waited to tell Vasily, who knows if Vasily wouldn’t have come up with a smarter plan than unleashing Vladimir and sending him straight to an almost certain death.
The possibility of Vladimir killing the one-armed boy was real, but manageable. The answer wasindeedin that smile.
I spend twenty minutes analyzing the replay of the fight in the hotel: Griffin disarms Vladimir with an unlikely armbar (literally, in his case), then uses the prosthesis as leverage to break his opponent’s neck. But it’s the post-act coldness that truly impresses me. He simply wipes his hands, checks for a pulse, and heads to the bathroom to wash his face.
I make notes on possible approaches: promises of money, emotional blackmail, veiled threats. With a profile like Griffin’s, none of the traditional strategies would work for long. The challenge is finding the most sensitive pressure point.
So, I don’t wait long. My men receive a simple order: “Bring him in.” They know cooperation is not a likely variable.
Then, within twenty minutes, a sound starts in the hallway. By this point, Griffin’s hotel room is already empty, because he’s been dragged out. From there to here, there are these animalistic noises, the scuffing of shoes on the carpet, and the firm voice of one of my men saying, “No resistance”.
My office door bursts open. Two outsourced security guards, men who only know isolated and selected contexts, enter, dragging a force of nature.
They drag Griffin down the hall as if he were an animal for slaughter, except no one ever dragged a slaughter animal like this—not with so much fear of losing it along the way. The two guards are large, paid by the hour, and used to scaring addicts and thieves, not handling people like Griffin. He’s bleeding from his eyebrow, tearing wounds into his own arm, fighting against my men, and an aura of menace surrounds him like a magnetic field. The smell of sweat and hatred arrives before he does.
When the guards try to throw Griffin onto my office floor, he spins, sinking his teeth into one man’s forearm. The bite is deep, painful. The guard writhes, but Griffin doesn’t letgo immediately. The other one nearly loses control, trying to immobilize him while screaming curses and threatening to break his neck for real.
The result is Griffin on his knees in the center of my Persian rug, mouth smeared with blood, eyes wide and alive, even with one of them nearly swollen shut. The gleaming prosthesis is secured behind his back with improvised plastic ties because no one trusted handcuffing thatthingdirectly.
He is exactly as I saw him on the cameras, only more...alive. He’s shirtless, the muscles of his chest defined under a thin layer of sweat that reflects the light, marked by scratches that only accentuate every curve of his anatomy. His hair is plastered to his forehead, framing a face sculpted by years of fighting.
Then, he lifts his head. Pale blue eyes find mine. And they burn.
“YOU!” he snarls. “You’re Karpov’s man?!”
He spits a mixture of blood and saliva onto the rug, just inches from the leather of my shoe.
