Page 18 of A Wolf's Revenge

I had spent thirty-four years not letting myself stand inside the Evangel Street house. I had built a whole life out of the not-standing-there. And in that kitchenette, with my son’s too-fast heartbeat ticking against a receiver across the room, and the green bitterness of refined aconite coming off my wife’s breath, the wall I’d built finally failed, and I stood inside it whether I wanted to or not.

Because this was the weapon. This exact weapon. My father had ordered this same poison by the crate and seeded it through the air and water of a house full of people so that when the fire came they could not become the thing that might have saved them. So that a nineteen-year-old girl carrying my child reached for her wolf in a burning corridor and found a hand that had been cut off, and burned as a woman, on foot, because someone had decided she should not be allowed to be anything else. I had told myself for three decades that I’d had no part in the chemistry of it, that the aconite was my father’s doing, a thing I learned about after. And maybe that was even true. But here it was again, a generation later, in my wife’s water, and the symmetry of it was so total and so cruel, that for a moment, I could not breathe around it.

The Contis did not know what they were doing. That was the obscene part. To them it was just suppressant, standard practice, the chemical equivalent of handcuffs — they had no idea they were dosing my wife with the precise poison my father had used to murder the woman I’d loved before her. The war did not even know it was rhyming. It just reached for the same tool, because cruelty is unimaginative, because the machine that ate Kerra was the same machine, still running, still reaching into the same drawer.

“Hey.” Amy’s hand found mine below the level of the counter, out of the guard’s sight, and gripped it hard, and I realized my hands had started to shake — me, not her, the steady one coming apart while the dosed one held on. “Hey. Look at me. Not there. Here.” She knew. Not the details — I’d never told her all the details, not the aconite, not the corridor — but she knew me, eleven years’ worth, and she knew the particular country my face goes to when the past comes up through the floor. “Wherever you just went,” she said, “come back. I need the man who’s in this room. Not the one who’s in 1989. Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” I said. It came out rough. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Good.” She didn’t let go of my hand. “Because I need to tell you something and I need you to hear it as a fact and not an argument.” Her thumb moved once across my knuckles. “I can feel you. Right now. I know you don’t always believe it’s there — I know your wolf got burned down to almost nothing a long time before me, and I know it answers me so quietly you’ve spent eleven years half-sure you imagined it. I’ve never minded. I knew what I was choosing. But I can feel you right now, Zimife, the bond, faint as it is, and it is not imaginary, and it is telling me one true thing, which is that you are going to get our son out of this building.” Her eyes did not waver. “I’m not asking you to promise. I’m telling you what I already know. So go do whatever you have to do, and do not spend one second of it being gentle. Do not carry me up a flight of stairs in your head while you’re doing it. I’m not her. I’m not going to burn. You’re going to get us out, and then you and I are going to have a very long conversation about whatever you just saw on your own face, and we are going to have it because we lived. Are we clear?”

I have been spoken to by a great many dangerous people in my life. My father. Edoardo Conti. Men whose names open doors that don’t have handles. None of them ever frightened the past out of me and put my spine back in the same sentence the way my wife did, dosed, disarmed, and wearing a bomb, in a fourth-floor room with our son three steps away.

“We’re clear,” I said.

“Say it back to me. The part that matters.”

“I’m going to get you both out.” I held her eyes. “You’re not her, you’re not going to burn, and we’re going to have the long conversation because we lived.”

“Better.” Something eased at the very corner of her mouth — not a smile, the structural beam a smile gets built on. “Now, go let them think they own you. You’re very good at letting people think they own you. It’s the most useful thing about you, after the obvious.” And there, even there, was the dry thread of her, the thing that had made me able to love again after I’d decided love was a door that only opened once, and I held onto it like a man holds onto a rail.

The guard said, “Time.”

I kissed my son’s hair, told him to be brave for his mother, and that being brave mostly meant sleeping; which made him laugh, a small wet exhausted laugh, the best sound I had heard in years. I put my forehead against Amy’s for exactly as long as they let me. I did not say goodbye, because goodbye was a word from the wrong story, and I was done living in that story. I said, “Tomorrow,” which was a promise dressed as a time, and she heard it as both.

Then Francis walked me back to my own room and locked the door, and I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall, and I let myself shake for sixty full seconds, on a timer, the way my father had taught me to ration everything, including fear.

And when the sixty seconds were up, I stopped. I drew one long breath in and let it out, and I started, very methodically, to plan.

There would be no fire this time. There would be no corridor, no cut-off hand, no woman on foot because a man had decided what she was allowed to be. Whatever else I had failed at across thirty-four years, I would not fail at this one thing twice. They had shown me my family to make me obedient. They had made a mistake. They had reminded me exactly what I was for.

11

September 4, 2023

I put my hand under my shirt and found the cross.

Cold metal. Thin chain. The kind of thing you don’t notice you’re doing until you’re already doing it. My mother had pressed it into my palm the morning I left for university and told me it would keep me honest if I let it. I had not let it, for a long time. But I had kept it.

I was sitting in the room they’d assigned me — bare, functional, a single window facing a brick wall — and I had been sitting there for two hours, since Francis walked me back from Antonio’s corridor. I had been doing the thing I was worst at, which was waiting. My wolf had been pacing the inside of me the whole time — quiet and restless, the way it had been quiet and restless for thirty years, present enough to want out and too long buried to be of any use.

Amy was not a woman who needed rescuing. I knew that about her. She had run three half-marathons while pregnant with Noah, she had rebuilt a failing practice from the ground up in four years, she had looked at me once early in our marriage when I tried to fix a problem she hadn’t asked me to fix, and said, with great patience and no particular warmth: I’m not yours to manage, Zimife. She had meant it. I had loved her more completely for it.

But she was in a room somewhere in this building, wearing an explosive device my enemies had put on her, and she didn’t know enough about what I had done and what I was to understand why. She would be frightened, would be managing it, would be holding Noah together, and she would be waiting for me to come, which was the thing that was cutting through me steadily, like a blade that didn’t hurry.

I had lost one family in a burning building thirty years ago. I had spent everything that came after building something worth having in its place. I was not going to sit in this room and let history take the second one.

I let go of the cross and thought about Francis’s keys.

They brought me to Antonio in the morning.

He was in the same place as before, same chair, the quality of stillness he had that made every room feel like he’d been there longer than you. A folder in his hands. He handed it to me without preamble.

“Vincent Marr,” he said. “There is a man named Cayo Reyes, who has done business with Marr in the past. He’s in the city. He is the first thread.” Antonio tapped the folder. “Inside, you’ll find his last known address and his patterns. He moves predictably — same routes, same timings. You will find him, and you will get from him the name of whoever is currently running Marr’s protection. That name comes back to me.”

“And then?”

“Then you follow the thread to the next one. And the next. Until you find Marr himself.”