Page 22 of A Wolf's Revenge

“No.” Amy’s voice was low and steady. “The devices — they put something on us?—“

“I have the detonator. It’s disabled.” I pulled back enough to look at her. “Listen to me. Neither of you can turn until we’re clear of this floor — they’ve treated the air. So we move as people, quiet, and we don’t fight unless I say. The second we’re out, you’ll have your wolf back. Not before. Can you walk?”

“I’ve been walking for three days, Zimife.” The edge in her voice was the best sound I’d heard since the restaurant bathroom. It meant she was herself. It meant nothing essential had broken.

The devices were zip-tied, not hardwired — meant to intimidate, which confirmed the detonator was the single point of control.

“Stay close,” I said. “Don’t speak unless you have to.”

Amy took Noah’s hand. I took hers. We moved.

The utility corridor on the ground floor ran north along the interior wall. The service door at the end had two locks. The master key took the first. The facility card took the second. The door opened onto a narrow lane between the building and a chain-link fence, open to the sky, the cold river air hitting us all at once.

Outside.

I heard Amy exhale — a single, controlled breath, three days of held tension moving through and out. She did not stop walking.

I pulled them both left, away from the building’s front approach, toward the waterfront where the foot traffic was thinnest and the darkness deepest. I had the master key, the facility card, the disabled detonator, the folder, and nothing else. No phone, no car, no support.

What I had was enough. And for the first time in thirty years, walking out of a building with the woman my wolf had claimed and the son we’d made, I let myself feel the thing in my chest that had gone quiet in a fire — not all the way awake yet, but no longer dead. Waiting.

We were two blocks from the building when I heard it.

Footsteps. Unhurried. Matching our pace at a distance that said deliberate rather than coincidental.

I stopped us at a corner and turned.

The man was standing twenty feet back in the shadow of a loading bay, hands in his pockets, entirely still. He was not one of Antonio’s men — I had cataloged every face in that building and this was not one of them. He was watching us with the particular patience of someone who had been waiting here and knew he would not need to wait much longer.

He took his hands out of his pockets. Empty. He held them out slightly at his sides — a gesture I recognized. Not a threat. An offering. The body language of a man who had come to deliver something, not to take it.

I stepped in front of Amy and Noah.

The man crossed the distance between us without hurrying, stopped two feet away and said, quietly: “Vincent Marr sends his regards, Mr. Zorander. He’d like a conversation.”

I looked at him.

“He’s been expecting the Conti’s to find you eventually,” the man continued. “He’s been watching them watch you for six months. He thought you might need a way out.” A pause. “It appears he was right.”

Behind me, I felt Amy’s hand find the back of my jacket.

I kept my eyes on the man in front of me and thought about the paper in my breast pocket, the chain of names Antonio had given me, the other hours left that had just become irrelevant.

The man I had been sent to find had found me first.

“Where?” I said.

He tilted his head toward the waterfront. “Car’s waiting.”

I took Amy’s hand. I did not let go of it.

“Lead the way,” I said.

13

Marr’s man drove like a man who’d done this before — no lights, no speed, the unremarkable competence of someone whose whole profession is being unremarkable. He took us north and east through the sleeping borough in a panel van that smelled of motor oil and old cardboard, and for the first four minutes, nobody in the back said anything at all, because we were still inside the part of an escape where speaking it might unmake it.

Then we crossed some invisible line in the man’s private map of safe distance, and he said, without turning his head, “You’re clear of their net for about an hour. Use it. Whatever you need to do back there, do it now,” and I understood he meant the vests.