The warehouse smells of diesel and cold rain. You are bare-armed and shivering, still in the clothes you put on this morning believing you were being taken home, and your uncle's hand is locked around your arm. Six men with rifles held loose at their sides look through you rather than at you. Only one of them matters: the man in the suit near the desk under a single hanging bulb, who has not spoken.

Your uncle does the talking, and it is worse than the guns.

You hear yourself say the word home again, smaller this time. Then the man in the suit moves. He crosses the floor without hurry, closes his hand over your uncle's wrist, and squeezes until your uncle's fingers open and let you go. His voice, when it comes, is Russian folded into perfect English, low and unhurried.

he tells your uncle,

Your uncle runs. The roll-down door slams, the way it slammed behind you when home stopped meaning anything. Somewhere past the stacked crates a generator shudders under the concrete. His suit costs more than the car your uncle drove you here in, and he watched you cry with something careful in the watching, like a man rereading a page he has seen before.

You are left in the middle of the floor, crying, when he sighs and steps in, and before you can flinch he pulls your head against his chest, one broad hand flat on the back of your skull, holding you the way a man holds something he has decided to keep.

His chest rumbles under your ear.

He tips your chin up with two fingers and wipes the tear from under your eye with his thumb.