“You sound just like your mother,” Leonid whispered. “She was brave too.”

She sat across from him. Placed a folder on the desk. Inside: seventeen names, five locations, three dates. And one more thing—a photograph of Sokolov, taken from a distance, shaking hands with a man whose face was blurred but whose insignia was not. Interpol.

That night, she began to write.

Nikita Von James had always been the quiet one in the family, the kind of quiet that made people uncomfortable. Not because she was shy—she wasn’t—but because she listened. She listened to the rustle of secrets in the walls of their old Victorian house, to the whispers her mother pretended not to hear at night, to the tiny, frantic heartbeat of the mouse trapped under the floorboards.

Three months later, Sokolov was arrested at an airport in Monaco, boarding a private jet with a false passport. The evidence against him was airtight: financial records, witness testimonies, photographs, and a signed affidavit from his former right-hand man. The trial was brief. The verdict was life.

Nikita Von James Today

“You sound just like your mother,” Leonid whispered. “She was brave too.”

She sat across from him. Placed a folder on the desk. Inside: seventeen names, five locations, three dates. And one more thing—a photograph of Sokolov, taken from a distance, shaking hands with a man whose face was blurred but whose insignia was not. Interpol. nikita von james

That night, she began to write.

Nikita Von James had always been the quiet one in the family, the kind of quiet that made people uncomfortable. Not because she was shy—she wasn’t—but because she listened. She listened to the rustle of secrets in the walls of their old Victorian house, to the whispers her mother pretended not to hear at night, to the tiny, frantic heartbeat of the mouse trapped under the floorboards. “You sound just like your mother,” Leonid whispered

Three months later, Sokolov was arrested at an airport in Monaco, boarding a private jet with a false passport. The evidence against him was airtight: financial records, witness testimonies, photographs, and a signed affidavit from his former right-hand man. The trial was brief. The verdict was life. Inside: seventeen names, five locations, three dates