The private jet was a sterile bubble of pressurized quiet, a non-space that carried me from the wreckage of my old life in San Francisco to the armory of my real one in New York. A medic, a silent woman with efficient hands, had cleaned and dressed the raw scrapes on my cheek and the angry purple bruises blooming on my wrists. She offered a mild painkiller. I refused. I wanted the pain. It was a whetstone, and I was honing my focus against it until it was sharp enough to slice through steel.
We didn’t land at a commercial airport. The Gulfstream touched down on a private airstrip in New Jersey, where a black, armored Escalade was waiting on the tarmac, its engine humming. The transition was seamless. No questions, no checkpoints. This was the frictionless world my father had built, the on
