Page 28 of A Wolf's Revenge

Jeff.

Jeff, who had broken my face over a girl in a schoolyard when we were nine and decided afterward that anyone who’d take a punch like that was worth keeping. Jeff, who had been my right hand. Jeff, who had called my father on a January night in 1989, and told him about Kerra, who lived, and walked out of a burning building while she didn’t.

Jeff was alive. Jeff was in the life. And Jeff had sold me to the Contis the same way he’d sold Kerra to my father — by deciding, again, that he knew better than I did what I could afford to lose.

“He’s alive,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

“He’s more than alive.” Jones was watching me with something close to pity now, which from Jones was almost unbearable. “He’s connected. After your father died and the pack came apart, Jeff went freelance — fixer, broker, the guy who knows the guy. He’s careful, he’s good, and he’s the one who reaches Voss. You don’t get to Sera Voss in this climate without going through somebody she trusts, and she trusts Jeff.” A pause. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what the job was for. I swear to God I didn’t know they’d put a bomb on a kid.”

I picked the gun back up off the desk.

“Logan.” Careful now. Not pleading — Jones didn’t plead. Just asking the question directly, the only thing he had left to offer. “What are you going to do?”

I thought about Amy in a hotel I’d already decided we had to leave. The zip-tie marks on her wrist she hadn’t mentioned once. Noah pretending to be fine.

“You’re going to close this down tonight,” I said. “The block, the supply, the arrangement, all of it. And then you’re going to disappear somewhere the Conti network can’t reach, because when they work out you’re the leak that let me slip them, they’ll come, and they won’t send a broker.” I paused. “That’s everything I’m giving you, Jones. Don’t make me regret it.”

He nodded once. His eyes were steady.

I dragged the man from the wall clear of the door, checked his breathing — slow, even — and left them all where they were. I went out the back, through the alley where the two from the block were starting to stir.

I should have felt the thing falling into place. The chain had a shape now: Jones to Jeff, Jeff to Voss, Voss to Marr. A clear road, every link confirmed.

I understood that the road to ending this ran straight through the one man I had promised myself I would never have to look at again.

I’d have to look at him.

18

I came out of Jones’s building into the blue hour before dawn with a name in my head and the Jones’ Jeep keys in my pocket, and I knew I’d been made before I reached the end of the block.

It wasn’t a sound. It was the absence of one — the particular hush a street gets when something has gone still in it that should be moving, a hush my wolf read off the air a full second before the front of my brain caught up. Two of them. Downwind, which meant deliberate, which meant not opportunists who’d stumbled onto my scent, but hunters who’d been set on the Heights and told to wait for me to surface. The bounty had grown a brain overnight. Somebody — Conti money, almost certainly — had stopped trusting the city’s noses to do the work by accident and started positioning them on purpose, and they’d guessed right about Jones. Now there were two wolves between me, the Jeep, and no river anywhere near enough to save me.

I kept walking. A man who’s been made and shows it gives away the only half-second he’s got. So I walked like a man with nowhere to be. I let them commit, and they did — peeling off a recessed doorway thirty feet back, closing with the unhurried confidence of hunters who’ve counted the math and like it two-to-one. I turned down the side street toward where I’d seen the Jeep, because the side street had a chain-link fence along the lot and a fence is a wall you can’t be flanked through, and if I was going to have to do this, I wanted my back against something.

They were good. Not great. Great would have taken me on the open avenue where I had nowhere to set my feet; these two followed me into the cul-de-sac of my own choosing because they were young, the number was big, and they could already taste it. I let them get close enough to talk.

“Zorander,” the front one said. “Nothing personal. You’re just worth a house.”

“Walk away,” I said. “Both of you. I’m not what they told you I am, I’m having a worse week than you can imagine, and I am asking you — once — to walk away and let me get in that Jeep.”

He smiled. That was his answer.

I want to be honest about what happened next, because the version where it’s clean is a lie, and I’ve told enough of those. There is a thing my father made me into, and it does not require my permission, and when the front one’s weight shifted onto his back foot, the thing came up out of me without being asked, and took the half-second the smile had cost him. I was inside his reach before he finished moving. I am not going to write the choreography of it. It is enough to say that my father spent my childhood building a weapon, the weapon still works, there is no part of me prouder of that than ashamed, and that both of them were on the ground against the chain-link inside twelve seconds, one not moving, and one trying to and failing.

And then, I stood over them, in the blue light, with my heart going and the wolf roaring up the back of my throat for the rest of it — finish it, two witnesses are two descriptions, two descriptions are a map straight to the bolt-hole, finish it, it’s arithmetic — and the wolf was right. That was the worst of it. The wolf was completely right. The clean play, the professional play, the play my father would have made without breaking stride, was two more bodies against a fence in a city that wouldn’t miss them, and a trail that went cold because dead men don’t describe you to the next crew.

I didn’t do it.

I crouched down instead, close to the one who was conscious, the front one, the one who’d smiled, and his eyes were full of the understanding that he’d guessed wrong about the whole evening.

I said, very quietly, “Here’s what worth-a-house gets you. It gets you this. Go home. Get your friend to someone who can set that. And the next time a rich pack puts a number on a man’s head and tells you he’s a monster, ask yourself why they need you to do it, if he’s so easy.” I stood up. “I’m letting you live because I’m trying to be a different thing than the man who taught me to do that to you. Don’t make me wrong about it.”

Then I got in the Jeep and drove. I made myself not check the mirror. The whole way back across the bridge, the wolf paced and seethed and told me, correctly, that I had just traded my family’s safety for the privilege of feeling like a better man.

Because that was the arithmetic, and I knew it even as I chose it. Two living men had seen my face, heard my voice, watched which direction the Jeep went. Two living men would, within hours, sell what they’d seen to the people who’d hired them, because information is the only thing worth more than a bounty and they’d want something to show for a broken night. I had been merciful, and mercy is not free. I was not the one who’d pay for it.

I told myself it was worth it. I told myself a man has to draw a line somewhere or there’s no man left to save anyone. I believed it. I still believe it.