Page 4 of A Wolf's Revenge

The wolf in my chest went very still.

“You want me to find someone for you,” I said.

“I want you to bring him to me,” Edoardo said. “Alive. That is the only condition. What happens after is not your concern.”

“And my family?”

“Returned unharmed the moment Marr is in my possession.”

“And if I find out you’ve hurt them?—“

“Logan.” The old man’s voice was quiet. Almost tired. “I am not a man who hurts women and children. I am a man who wants the person responsible for the murder of his wife and son delivered to him before he dies. Those are two different things.”

I studied him for a long moment. The scent of him told me nothing useful — old grief, old resolve, the particular stillness of someone who had been patient for decades and had learned how to keep waiting. There was no deception in it. Only weight.

Seventy-two hours.

I thought of Amy on that concrete floor. Her arms around Noah. Her eyes open in the dark, waiting.

“I’ll need resources,” I said.

The old man reached beneath the table and placed a folder in front of me.

“Everything I have is in there,” he said. “It isn’t much. But it’s a start.”

I picked it up without opening it. I looked at the man across the table and understood something I hadn’t expected to — that his grief was as old and immovable as anything I had ever seen, and that the only way out of this room was through it.

“Seventy-two hours,” I said.

“Seventy-two hours,” he agreed.

I stood. The man with the burned face was waiting at the door. I followed him out into the corridor, the folder in my hand, the wolf in my chest beginning — very slowly — to move again.

3

I had expected him to walk me back toward the room I’d woken up in. Instead, he turned the opposite direction, deeper into the building, and I followed because the detonator was still in his coat pocket, and Amy was still in a room somewhere wearing a device I couldn’t get to. I was acutely aware of both of those facts with every step I took.

The folder Edoardo had given me was in my right hand. I hadn’t opened it yet. I’d been in that room for less than twenty minutes and I already understood the shape of what I’d agreed to — find Vincent Marr, deliver him alive, get my family back. Clean. Transactional. The kind of deal a man makes when he has no other cards.

What I hadn’t yet fully processed was what it meant that the Conti name was attached to it.

He stopped in front of a door at the end of the corridor and knocked twice. He didn’t wait for an answer before he pushed it open and gestured me through. I read the air before I stepped across the threshold. Same building. Different man.

The room was smaller than Edoardo’s, less staged. No table between us and the power. Just concrete walls, a bare bulb, two chairs facing each other at close range, and a man already in one of them with a cigar burning between his fingers.

He was enormous — broader than the other man, younger than Edoardo, with the same shaved skull covered in ink, but the burns on his face were worse than his father’s. They covered the right side entirely, pulling the skin tight from jaw to temple. His left eye was clear, dark, and intelligent. His right eye was narrow, the socket slightly distorted by scar tissue. He had the look of a man who had been through something that should have killed him and spent every year since deciding it hadn’t.

He looked at me the way men look at the thing they’ve been waiting for.

“Sit down, Lo.”

The nickname landed like a hand around my throat.

Not because it frightened me. Because it meant he knew me from before — before New York, before Amy, before I had buried everything that used to be Logan Zorander under fifteen years of careful, deliberate construction. Only a handful of people in the world knew that name. Most of them were dead. I had made sure of that.

I sat. I kept my face neutral. I put the folder on my knee and looked at him.

He took a long drag of the cigar and let the smoke out slowly, watching me across it. He wasn’t in a hurry. That was the thing about men who had waited thirty years — they had learned how to be still.