Page 2 of A Wolf's Revenge

The scent hit me first — musk, earth, and something wilder underneath, the smell of a man who wore his wolf close to the surface. He was standing three feet behind me, gun pressed to my spine, and the only reason I hadn’t already taken him apart was that the barrel was cold and his finger was calm on the trigger. No tremor. No hesitation. Whatever this man had come here to do, he’d decided it long before tonight.

The bathroom at Sam’s Kitchen was all white marble and quiet. The kind of quiet that money buys. I’d been washing my hands when he slipped in from somewhere I hadn’t bothered to watch — a mistake. One I wouldn’t have made years ago.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You don’t remember me.” Not a question. His accent was Italian, smooth, the vowels rounded in a way that belonged to a particular region of the country. Northern. Old family.

I studied his reflection in the mirror above the faucet. He was enormous — a shaved head covered in tattoos that ran down his neck and disappeared into the collar of his black coat. His face was partially charred on the right side, the skin pulled tight and waxy. A man who had been inside something burning once. A man who had survived it.

I didn’t know him. I was certain of that. I had a wolf’s memory for faces and scents, and this man was a stranger.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “You have the wrong person.”

He said nothing. The gun didn’t move.

“We have your wife and son.”

The words landed like a fist.

Amy. I’d spoken to her three hours ago. She’d been in the kitchen — I could hear the radio in the background, her voice slightly distracted because she was trying to stop Noah from pulling all the books off the bottom shelf again. She’d laughed at something he did. That laugh — low and easy, like she had all the time in the world — was the last sound I’d heard before I walked into this restaurant.

My wolf lunged against the inside of my chest. I pressed it down by sheer force.

“If you’ve touched her?—“

He reached into his coat and held a phone up to the mirror.

The room in the video was dim. Concrete walls. Amy and Noah were huddled together on the floor, my wife’s arms wrapped tight around our son, her head bent over him like a shield. She wasn’t crying. That was the thing that cut the deepest — Amy never cried. She was pressing her lips to the top of Noah’s head; her eyes were open and dark and I knew that look. She was calculating. She was afraid but she hadn’t given in to it yet. She was waiting for me.

I gripped the edge of the faucet. Porcelain. Cold.

The video stopped.

“You have seventy-two hours,” he said. “And I suggest, Logan, that you take that time and think very carefully about who you were before you became whatever this is.” He said the last words with quiet contempt, and I understood what he meant — the suit, the restaurant, the life I had built here in New York out of nothing but ruthlessness and restraint. “Because somewhere in your past, you destroyed my family. And now you’re going to answer for it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You will.”

His movements were sudden. I hadn’t expected them — I’d been watching his hand, his shoulders, the angle of the gun, and I still didn’t see it coming. His free hand closed around the back of my head and he drove my face into the mirror. The glass cracked. The world cracked with it.

I came back slowly.

The first thing I registered was concrete. Cold, rough, the smell of old damp. My cheek was against it. The second thing was the dark — not total darkness; a thin strip of light bled under a door somewhere to my left, enough to understand I was in a room with walls close enough to touch.

The third thing was the silence where Amy’s voice should have been.

I stayed still and let my wolf sort through the scents. Several men. At least four in the building, maybe more beyond. The half-burned man was among them. There was another scent I couldn’t classify yet — older, deeper, weighted with authority. A wolf of significant rank. The one he worked for.

I sat up. My head felt like something had been rearranged inside it but the wound had already closed — the only evidence was dried blood along my temple and the memory of the mirror shattering. I checked my jacket pocket out of habit. My phone, as expected, was gone.

What I still had was the wallet I’d lifted during the fight.

I turned it over in my hands in the dim light. Thin. Black leather. Inside: a single ID card, an Italian driving license, and a photograph so worn at the edges from where it had been handled hundreds of times. I tilted it toward the strip of light under the door.

The photograph was old. Black and white. A family — a man, a woman, two boys, a girl — standing in front of a building I didn’t recognize at first. Then the stonework. The particular arch above the door.

I turned the photo over. On the back, in faded ink: Famiglia Conti. 1987.