Page 100 of Shadow Of Sin

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll figure it out.”

He said the same words about the debt. Always so certain even in the face of uncertainty.

But this is my brother’s life we’re talking about. And even if Dmitri doesn’t kill him, he will do something to hurt him because he knows it’ll hurt me.

And again, I’m about to become the cause of my brother’s pain.

He just doesn’t know it yet.

I stare out the window, clenching and unclenching my fists. Outside, the streets become a blur of colored lights. My stomach is in knots and my jaw aches from clenching it so hard.

Sal is in danger because of me. Because I defected to the “enemy” camp. Because I chose the Molloys. Because every choice I make to save myself puts the person I love most at risk.

Wolfe doesn’t speak for the rest of the drive. But his thumb doesn’t tap. His jaw doesn’t twitch. His whole body has gone into that terrifying stillness I’ve only seen once before…right before he threw a man into a brick wall.

Whatever he’s building in that silence, it’s going to either be the thing that saves my brother or the thing that destroys us.

Maybe both.

CHAPTER 24

WOLFE

We’ve been arguing for two hours and neither of us is remotely close to winning.

It’s past midnight. Eva paces my room at the house, barefoot with her arms crossed and her jaw locked. Her hair hangs around her shoulders, tousled from raking her hand through it more times than I bothered to count.

Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin void of all color because hours earlier, she heard the news that her brother unknowingly accepted a meeting with a Russian gangster who is desperate enough to hurt him…or worse….as a fucking power grab.

“I’ll call Sal,” she says for the third time. “And tell him to cancel.”

“And then what? When he asks why, what the hell are you going to tell him? That a Russian criminal engineered his debt, used it to recruit his sister, and is now setting a trap inside his own restaurant as a revenge play?”

Eva’s eyes flash, her lips twisting into a grimace. “I’ll figure out what to say.”

“Okay, great. You’ll figure out what to say. And then Sal will do exactly what you would do. He’ll try to fix it himself. He’ll go looking for answers. And Dmitri’s people will be right there waiting for him.”

She stops pacing and turns toward me, firing off a glare that could melt a glacier. She presses her palms against her temples. “Then I’ll go to the meeting myself. I’ll be at the restaurant Thursday night. If someone shows up, I’ll be there.”

“That’s exactly what Dmitri wants. You, vulnerable and out in the open. Away from us. Unprotected. Don’t you get that?”

“I’m not unprotected. I have you.”

I let out a deep sigh, pull off my glasses, and scrape a hand down the front of my face. “Eva, I can’t fight a group of guys in the back of a restaurant by myself. The man outside Rosario’s yesterday was alone and sloppy as fuck. Dmitri’s real people won’t be.”

Sparks shoot from her eyes. “So what am I supposed to do while this is happening? Hide? Sit in a room and wait while my brother walks into a trap that might get him killed?”

“No. We will make sure that meeting doesn’t happen. And then we’ll take down the entire operation so nobody walks into anything ever again.”

She stares at me. “How the fuck do you expect to do that?”

I sink onto the edge of the bed. “I’ll spoof a call from Andersen’s number. Reschedule the meeting. Push it to next week. Sal thinks the investor had a conflict. No suspicion.”

“That buys us days, not a solution.”

“It buys us Thursday. And Thursday is when we hit everything at once.”

I lay it out...everything I’ve been putting together since we left Rosario’s. My whole decommissioning strategy. To break Dmitri, we need to take apart his network, piece by piece. Without it, he’s nothing. And it has to be a coordinated strike. We hit the Albanian network, Hoxha’s businesses, the lending operation. Everything Dmitri built, dismantled in one night while he thinks the Sal meeting is his final play to get exactly what he wants. By the time he realizes what happened, the infrastructure is gone and he’ll be stripped down to nothing. No money, no muscle, no loyalty when his men see that he can’t deliver to them whatever bullshit he promised.