Page 20 of A Wolf's Revenge

Sixteen steps.

The second overhead bulb was dark. The corridor dimmed exactly where I needed it to.

Ten steps.

I let my foot drag slightly on the tile, a half-stumble, and walked into Francis’s back with just enough weight to feel accidental. His shoulder hit the metal door frame with a dull knock and he swore under his breath, turning half-around to look at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t see you slow down.”

He assessed me for one second. I held the slightly embarrassed expression of a man who had tripped, hands visible, nothing in them.

He turned back to the door.

The master key was in my left palm. The BMW fob was on his hip.

I kept my breathing even as he unlocked the door, where he got that key I have no idea, and pushed it open, and I walked through it and heard the lock engage behind me, and stood in the center of the room in the dark and opened my left hand.

The key was heavier than the fob. Old brass, worn smooth at the bow. One key that opened the rooms in this building and, if I was right about the facility management card, the exterior access points too.

I closed my fingers around it.

Amy. Noah.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the folder and began, very carefully, to build a second plan — one that did not end with sixty hours running out and the Conti code settling what it had always intended to settle.

I had one night. I intended to use it.

The facility access card told me the building was registered to a company with a Red Hook address. I had passed through Red Hook on the way out, back when Francis had walked me to the car that first morning. The industrial waterfront, the particular smell of the river, the direction of the dawn light. I had been right about the location from the start.

Which meant the building had exterior access points at ground level — loading bays, service doors — and the master key opened at least some of them. Which meant if I could get Amy and Noah to a ground-floor exit, I had a way out that didn’t require going through Antonio’s men.

On the second morning, a current of air had carried something up the stairwell that stopped me mid-step — faint under the damp concrete and the machine oil, but unmistakable. Amy. And under hers, smaller, Noah. A moment later, I’d heard him too: a child’s voice, brief, cut off quickly, the slightly-too-fast cadence Noah got when he was frightened, as if volume were a form of courage. Scent and sound agreed.

Below me. West side of the building. Two floors down, based on the carry of the sound through the structure.

I had the key. I had the location. I had the layout I had been building in my head since the first corridor walk.

What I didn’t have was the detonator.

Francis carried it. He had shown it to me twice — a deliberate display, a reminder — but he had not let it out of his immediate possession. It would be on him now, in his room or on his person, and getting to it meant getting to Francis, and getting to Francis before I’d secured Amy and Noah meant the risk of him triggering it before I could stop him.

I lay down on the bed fully clothed and set my internal clock for two in the morning, the hour when even disciplined men ran thin. I held the key in my hand and thought about Amy’s voice.

I closed my eyes and waited for two o’clock.

12

Two in the morning. The building had settled into the particular quiet of a place where everyone who was going to sleep had slept.

The Conti’s hadn’t bothered to dose the upper floors; they didn’t need to, with my family two floors down wearing devices, and Francis carrying the only key. They’d treated the holding wing and left the rest of the building clean, which was a tactical decision, and also, I would come to understand, the mistake that cost them.

Because up here, in clean air, I could still reach a little of what I was.

Two floors down. West side. The thread pulling at the part of me I’d told myself was dead.

I stood up.

The sequence had to be right or none of it worked.