The engines hummed like a lullaby beneath him, deep, even, and unfaltering.
At 30,000 feet, the world below ceased to matter. Deserts, oceans, borders, all of them disappeared beneath a blanket of clouds, as if the world itself were trying to forget its divisions.
Bruno sat reclined in the rear cabin of his personal aircraft, legs crossed, fingers gently curled around a crystal tumbler of finely aged cognac.
A record player built into the cabin wall whispered Wagner's Siegfried Idyll through the luxury speakers. No aides. No war council. No crises. Just him and the sky.
He let his head rest against the polished leather headrest, eyes half-lidded, and sighed.
Sixty.
Almost sixty.
He would be sixty in no less than four years.
It hadn't hit him until this trip, the creeping, cloying awareness that the years were now sprinting.
Where once he felt like a juggernaut forged in youth, now he felt the subtle erosion in his bones. Not weakness, no, not yet.
