Chapter 1Russia
Outside of Grozny
The attic room in the farmhouse was cold and bleak with little light filtering through the ragged curtain covering the grungy window. His fingers throbbed. He didn’t know if he could endure the pain of his injuries and the mental anguish of losing his art. Illya Raphaël Dudayev shivered as he huddled on the bare, thin mattress on the rusty springs of a metal-framed bed. Illya fixed his eyes on the old, bubbled glass, waiting for a signal, someone, something to tell him what to do next.
Illya wasn’t always so unsure of himself. Not too many days ago, he was a proud twenty-three-year-old man. He worked on his art, crafting beautiful mosaic abstracts from ceramic and glass bits. He was an artist of some note in Grozny, despite the fact his mother refused t
