For several seconds, I could only stare at him.
The private jet hummed around us, its engines winding down beyond the insulated walls. Outside the oval windows, black vehicles waited beneath the white glare of floodlights. Men in dark coats stood beside them, motionless against the cold New York night.
Behind me, the cabin door was open.
Freedom was less than twenty feet away.
Yet Nikolai Volkov stood between me and the exit, holding his sleeping daughter as if she were the only fragile thing in a world built to withstand bullets.
“You can’t go home anymore,” he repeated.
