The women and I huddled up to talk about the place. The women all loved it for all the obvious reasons, including it being less than two miles from to...n. I liked the place a lot, but had reservations because of its small acreage.“I don’t want to operate a feed lot, and the place is too small to graze more than forty or fifty head of cattle,” I argued.Belle said that it would be perfect for our main or city house, and we could breed and raise a few dozen horses. We could still look for a big. And you are going to do it, yes?”There was a long moment of complete stillness. I knew this was a defining moment as I sat motionless and holding my breath. Except for Niki’s involuntary shaking, neither of us spoke or moved for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only 20 seconds. But then, she sealed her own fate. This Italian floozy, this faint-heart from Fiat-land, fell into her own ‘fait-accompli’.“Ok”, she breathed in the faintest of whispers, and I exhaled a sigh of relief.. The skim to Albany is quick and the skylanes nearly devoid of passing cars outside of the Seven Burroughs. The facility is a four story blacked glass sprawl, covering at least fifty acres of prime woodlands. You are ushered in to a meeting room and told to wait by a blank-faced security guard who treats you like you're practically a prowler he caught in the lobby. A few minutes pass and a trio of dark suited figures enter the room. The youngest is a dark-haired woman with sharp Eastern European. I had learned how to live with my actions and my thoughts as a purely survival instinct, and it was that alone that kept me from ending my own life. Surviving at any cost had been drilled into me mercilessly that fighting against my conscious had become second nature. The nightmares hadn’t started yet, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the small amount of sleep I got would be disturbed by images I would soon rather forget. I knew this for a fact because keeping those images.