Page 6 of A Wolf's Revenge

“You were sleeping with her,” Antonio said. His voice had not changed. That was what made it worse — not anger, not heat. Just fact. “For six months, before the attack, my cousin was sharing a bed with an Alpha’s son, and giving him everything he needed to destroy us.”

“She didn’t know,” I said. My voice came out flat. “She had no part in it.”

“No,” he agreed. “She didn’t.” A pause that had weight in it. “That’s the part I’ve never been able to forgive.”

I thought about Amy.

I didn’t mean to — I had been keeping her in a separate compartment since I walked into this room, the way you keep a wound covered so you can still function. If I let myself think about her for more than a second, about Noah, about the device Francis had described, I would lose the only thing keeping me useful right now, which was my ability to think clearly.

But Antonio had just said Kerra’s name and the compartment door had come open anyway.

Amy had never known about Kerra. There was no reason she would. That chapter of my life predated her by more than two decades and I had sealed it so thoroughly that there were entire years of my own history I rarely visited. She knew I had a past. She knew it was dark. She had asked, once, in the first year we were together, and I had told her the truth in the only way I knew how to tell it — in outline, without the names, without the specifics that would have made her understand what kind of man she had married.

She had looked at me for a long moment after. Then she had said: That’s not who you are anymore. And she had meant it, which was the thing that had undone me more completely than anything else she could have done.

I needed to get back to her.

“Your father wants Marr,” I said. “That’s the deal on the table. I find him, I bring him to Edoardo, I get my family back.”

“My father’s deal is my father’s deal,” Antonio said again. He leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees, close enough that I could see the full detail of the scarring on his right side. He had stopped trying to be still. “I have waited thirty-four years, Logan. I was nineteen years old when your father burned my house down. I watched my mother die and I couldn’t get to her because the smoke was too thick and the fire was moving too fast.” His voice was still level. That was the part that was hard to look at — the absolute control he had over it. “I survived. I rebuilt. I found my father in Italy, and I spent thirty years helping him plan this, because he is a patient man and he believed in doing this right.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I believe in doing it completely.” His eyes — that single clear one — didn’t move from mine. “Find Marr. Bring him to my father. That part, I honor. But understand something: when this is over, when Marr is delivered and your family is returned, you and I are not finished. You, personally, Logan Zorander, are not finished until I decide you are.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s a fact.” He sat back. “You killed my family. Not your father — you. You chose to put Kerra in the path of something that was going to destroy her. You made that choice and you walked away from it. You built yourself a very comfortable life here in this city, you got married, and had a son.” He gestured loosely toward the folder on my knee. “Find me Marr and your family lives. But I am not going to let you return to that comfortable life and close the door again. Not this time.”

The room was very quiet.

I looked at Antonio Conti across two feet of concrete floor and understood something I had not fully reckoned with until this moment: he was right. Not about his methods. Not about Amy and Noah, who had nothing to do with any of this, and whose lives were not his to use as leverage. But about the rest of it.

I had known what I was doing on Evangel Street. I had told myself at the time that I hadn’t — that I was following orders, that I didn’t know how far my father would take it, that I couldn’t have predicted the fire. All of that was true, none of it was the whole truth, and I had lived with the part I kept edited out for three decades.

“I’ll find Marr,” I said.

“I know you will.” Antonio picked up the dying butt of the cigar and looked at it. “Because the alternative is your wife and son. And whatever else you are, Logan, I don’t think you’re a man who leaves his family to die for his own comfort.”

He looked up at me.

“Francis will take you out. You have your folder. You have sixty-eight hours now — we used four of them.” A thin pause. “Don’t waste the rest.”

Francis walked me out through a service door at the back of the building and into a narrow lot between two warehouses. The air outside was cold and raw, the kind of cold that had teeth in it. A gray dawn was coming up over the rooftops to the east — which confirmed what I’d suspected about the south-facing orientation. Red Hook. Or close to it.

“Car will take you wherever you need to go,” Francis said. He was standing slightly to my left, his hands in his coat pockets. The detonator hand. I had been watching it for hours.

“I want to speak to my wife,” I said.

“That’s not part of the arrangement.”

“Make it part.”

He looked at me steadily. Then he took out his phone — not the detonator hand, the other one — and dialed. He held it to his ear, waited, and then held it out to me.

Three seconds of nothing. Then, “Logan.”

Amy’s voice. Low, controlled, the particular flatness she got when she was frightened and refusing to let it win. I had heard that voice once before, in a hospital waiting room six years ago, and I had promised myself then that I would never be the reason she needed to use it.