Page 3 of A Wolf's Revenge

The name landed in my chest like a coal.

Conti.

I had been twenty-three years old. I had done what I was ordered to do and I had never looked back, because looking back was the thing that destroyed men. I had filed it away with everything else from that period of my life and I had gotten out. I had spent years rebuilding the life I had now.

Amy. Noah.

The door opened.

The man from the bathroom walked in carrying a suit on a hanger. He looked worse than he had earlier — I’d done some damage to his jaw that was still visible, and he was holding himself slightly left where I’d landed the blow to his ribs. He dropped the suit on the floor in front of me.

“Change,” he said. “My boss wants to see you.”

“I want to see my family first.”

“After.”

“Before.” I looked up at him from the floor. “I need to confirm they’re unharmed or I’m not moving.”

His jaw tightened. He reached into his coat.

I watched the detonator come out of his pocket and felt my wolf go dangerously quiet inside me. That silence was worse than the rage. It was the part of me that had done the things that had brought this man to a bathroom in Manhattan with a gun and a mission. That part of me recognized the device immediately for what it was.

“Your wife and son are both wearing explosive devices,” he said. His voice was flat. The kind of flat that meant he had already decided he could live with pressing the button. “One call. That’s all it takes. So I’d suggest you get dressed, Logan, and come speak to my boss — because he’s the only one who decides whether your family lives through this.”

I looked at the detonator for a long moment.

Then I reached for the suit.

They walked me through a building I committed to memory as I moved — a warehouse, industrial district, south-facing from the angle of light through the high windows. Still New York. My wolf cataloged every exit, every guard, and where they stood. I counted six. All wolves. All carrying. All trained to the kind of stillness that told me they hadn’t been put on the payroll last week.

Whoever the Conti family had become in thirty years, they had built something serious.

The room at the end of the corridor was lit differently — warmer, deliberate. A single wooden table, two chairs. A man already sitting in one of them.

He was old. Seventy, at least, maybe more, though age worked differently on wolves. His hair was white and cut short, and his eyes, when he raised them to mine, were the particular gray of old ice. He had the face of a man who had outlived most of his grief and arrived somewhere past it — not peaceful, nothing so soft as that. Just finished. With slight scars on the right side of his face.

He looked at me the way you look at a debt that has finally come due.

“Sit down, Logan,” he said.

I sat.

“You don’t know who I am,” he said. “But your father did.”

I said nothing.

“My name is Edoardo Conti. In 1989, your father’s people burned my home and killed my wife and my eldest son.” He said it without inflection, the way you state a fact that no longer requires decoration. “My surviving children and I were given twenty-four hours to leave the country. We did. We have spent thirty-four years rebuilding what was taken from us.” He folded his hands on the table. “I have no quarrel with you personally. You were a child. But the blood debt belongs to the house, and you are the last of that house.”

“My father is dead,” I said.

“Yes.” A pause. “I know.”

“Whatever he did?—“

“Is not my concern,” Edoardo said. “What is my concern is this. There is a man in this city. He was present the night my family was destroyed. He gave the order. He is not a Zorander — he used your father’s house as cover and then vanished when it served him.” He leaned forward slightly. “His name is Vincent Marr. He operates under a different name now. I have spent thirty-four years trying to find him and I cannot. But you can.”

I looked at the old man across the table.