Chapter 1
Caleb
The world's worst men shake the most hands.
The movie star who violates children.
The CEO who traffics them.
The politician whose foundation supplies both.
The spotlight doesn't expose monsters—it blinds you to them.
Before me are two walls of monitors with two very different scenes.
On the left wall of monitors we have Dimitri Volkov. Friends and enemies alike call him Volk—Russian forwolf. I consider myself to be both friend and enemy, so I call him Volk as well. It suits him in ways he's never understood.
OurfriendVolk is a philanthropist of the highest order.
An art collector specializing in Renaissance paintings.
A shipping magnate worth four-point-seven billion dollars according to Forbes—though the actual number, buried in shell companies and offshore accounts, is closer to seven.
Friends with senators, oligarchs, and A-list celebrities.
Married twenty-eight years to a former ballerina who pretends not to know what he is.
Three grandchildren he bounces on his knee at charity galas while photographers capture his grandfatherly smile.
OurenemyVolk… well, he's the architect of the largest child trafficking operation in Eastern Europe.
The orphanages he funds aren't orphanages. They're Recruitment centers.
Those art acquisition trips to Prague, Budapest, Kyiv are sourcing missions.
His shipping empire doesn't move luxury goods across borders, it moves flesh.
Currently, Volk is naked and blindfolded. Steel cuffs around his wrists have him locked to the cage floor in absolute darkness about three miles from here.
The night-vision feed shows him testing the restraints again. Pulling at them methodically, intelligently.
Still believing this situation is salvageable.
That his lawyers, his political connections, his billions will extract him from this.
They won't.
I'll deal with him later.
The right wall of monitors holds my attention now.
Scarletta stepping off the Gulfstream onto Story Island's tarmac. She's still wearing my old Harvard t-shirt and black sweat pants.
The February sun is turning her hair gold as the Caribbean wind catches it, blowing it across her face. Not in some romantic, photogenic way, either. The gusts are whipping those dirty blonde strands so violently that she has to hold both sides of her head with her hands just to see where the hell she's going. Walking almost sideways down the stairs, squinting against the brightness after hours in the plane's dim cabin.
To call the vibe radiating off her body languageannoyedwould be a dramatic understatement.
She's pissed.
