Page 19 of A Wolf's Revenge

I looked at him. “You could have given this to any of your men.”

“I could have,” he agreed. “But my men don’t know Marr’s world the way you do. You were a Zorander. You ran in the same circles, at the same level, during the same years. You will open doors that my people cannot.” He leaned back. “And there is the other thing.”

“The other thing,” I said.

“You are motivated.” His voice was flat. “My men do this for money and loyalty. You are doing it because your wife and son are wearing devices that will detonate if I give the order. Motivation of that quality produces results.”

I held his gaze and said nothing.

“Francis will escort you out and ensure you return. You have sixty hours remaining. Don’t use them explaining to me why it can’t be done.”

He stood. The meeting was over.

I took the folder and sat with it after Francis walked me back. I read everything in it twice. The task itself was real — the address, the patterns, the chain of names — it was the work of someone who had been building toward this for years and needed a specific instrument for a specific lock. That part was genuine.

But the shape of it was wrong.

Sixty hours to find a man who had been hidden for three decades, through a chain of intermediaries that could run four or five deep, with Francis watching my every move and reporting back. Even at my best, running cold in a city where I had no active network, that timeline was designed to fail. And the Conti code had not changed in thirty years — I had learned it the hard way, from the inside. They did not release debts. They settled them.

The exchange wasn’t the point. The exchange was a leash.

They needed me moving in a direction they controlled, away from Amy and Noah, visible and trackable, until the sixty hours ran out and Antonio had whatever justification he needed to do what he had intended to do from the beginning.

I closed the folder.

I needed to get my family out before the sixty hours started to matter.

I had two things going for me.

The first was the wallet I had lifted from Francis in the bathroom two days ago. I had gone through it again that morning in careful detail — the ID, the photograph, a security card with a magnetic strip on the back whose logo I recognized as a private facility management company that handled warehouse and industrial properties in the outer boroughs. A facility access key, in other words. Which meant Francis was not merely Edoardo’s grandson and bodyguard, but his building manager, and the building we were in was on that company’s books, and that was information.

The second was the key ring.

Francis carried it on his left hip — a heavy cluster, eight or nine keys, one of which I had clocked on the first day as a master key by the distinctive bow and the wear pattern on the blade. The kind of key that opens multiple locks in a single building. He had used it on my room door that morning without looking at it, the automatic reach of someone who did the same action dozens of times a day.

My car keys were in my jacket pocket. A BMW fob — similar weight to the master key, similar size, the right shape to not register as wrong in the half-second of a palm pass.

The three components of any good switch: proximity, distraction, and the right moment. I had been building toward all three since the first corridor walk.

Tonight, Francis would walk me back from the evening check-in. The corridor to my room was narrow — narrow enough that a man Francis’s size couldn’t walk beside me without one of us slightly ahead. He always went first. Which meant his back was to me. The key ring was on his left hip, the corridor was lit by two overhead bulbs, the second of which I had spent the afternoon loosening by a quarter turn every time he left me alone in the room with the chair that could reach it.

It was not a complex plan. The best ones never were.

The evening check-in lasted twelve minutes. Antonio didn’t speak to me. He looked at me the way he always looked at me — assessing, patient, a man in no particular hurry — and asked if I had questions about the task.

“Yes, do I get a phone, or howI said no. He nodded and Francis walked me out.

The corridor.

I counted steps out of habit, the old instinct that had kept me functional in situations where thinking was a luxury. Thirty-two steps to my room from the stairwell. Francis’s pace was faster than mine by design — he always kept a half-step ahead, which put the key ring just inside my reach if I closed the gap.

Twenty-eight steps.

I had the BMW fob in my right palm, warm from being held for the last ten minutes.

Twenty-two steps.

Francis slowed slightly to type something on his phone, his attention divided, and I matched the slowdown precisely — not too smooth, nothing that registered as deliberate.