Page 24 of A Wolf's Revenge

“A day. Maybe less. Long enough to sleep once.” I turned from the window. “They’ll work the obvious places first — my known addresses, the people I’ve used, the routes I take. We’re not in any of those. That buys hours, not days.” I looked at her. “And the second they decide the deal is dead, they stop sending men with questions and start sending the pack. Edoardo can put thirty wolves on a scent inside an afternoon if he wants to. I’ve seen him do it.”

She took that the way she took everything — directly, without flinching, filing it. “Then we don’t sleep in the same place twice, we keep moving, and you find the thing that makes them stop.” Not a question. She’d already understood the shape of it before I’d said any of it out loud, which was Amy. “What makes them stop, Zimife?”

I took the folder out of my coat and set it on the dresser.

Antonio had built it to send me hunting — a chain of names that started shallow and ran deep, each one a thread to the next, the whole thing engineered to walk me toward Vincent Marr at exactly the pace the Contis wanted. They’d meant it as a leash. Find Marr, deliver him, earn back your family, and never see the sixty hours run out before we settle what we always meant to settle.

I wasn’t going to deliver Marr to anyone.

But the chain still pointed where I needed to go, because the thing that ended this and the thing the Contis wanted were the same man. Marr had spent thirty years sitting on the truth about both families — the partnership, the betrayal, the fire that was an exit strategy dressed up as a war. Evidence that turned the Conti grievance from a holy debt into a story they’d told themselves. A thing you couldn’t shoot your way out of, that didn’t care how many wolves Edoardo put in the air.

If I had that, I had something to put on the table that wasn’t my family.

“There’s a man at the end of this,” I told Amy, “who can make them stop. Not with force. With the truth about what their own grandfather did.” I tapped the folder. “The Contis built me a map to find him. I’m going to follow it before they realize I’m using their own leash to slip the collar.”

“And the man who drove us here?” she said. “Marr’s man. He found us in a dark lot at two in the morning. He can find Marr.”

“No. He can’t.” I’d turned that over in the car and arrived somewhere unpleasant. “Marr’s survived thirty years by never letting anyone hold more than one piece of him. The man who drove us is a cutout — paid through somebody who was paid through somebody else. He can hand me money and a phone. He can’t hand me a location he was deliberately never given.” I looked at the burner. “Marr wants to be found. He wants to be found by me, specifically, which is its own kind of warning. But he’s going to make me walk the whole road to do it, because he needs to know I’m the man who’ll walk it. That’s how a man who’s hidden for three decades decides whether to come out of the ground.”

Amy was quiet for a moment. Outside, a siren ran north and faded.

“Then we have a day,” she said. “Sleep. I’ll take Noah’s side. You take the door.” She didn’t ask which of us would actually sleep. She knew. She put her hand flat on my chest again, briefly, the way she’d done in a holding cell forty hours ago, and this time, I felt her feel the answer come back stronger than it ever had. Something in her face eased a fraction. “Find your road, Zimife. We’ll be where you put us. And we’ll be ready to run if your road takes too long.”

I caught her wrist before she stepped away. “If anyone comes through that door who isn’t me — anyone — you don’t wait to see what they want. You’re a wolf with a pup. You go through the window, you go to ground, and you trust your own nose over anything I told you. Promise me that.”

“I’ve been promising myself that since the restaurant,” she said. “But yes.”

I let her go.

I sat against the door with the disabled detonator in one pocket, Francis’s master key in the other, the folder open on my knees, and I read the first name on the chain until I had it memorized, until the dawn started graying the gap in the curtains, until Noah’s breathing went slow, Amy’s went slower, and the room held, for a few more hours, against the thing that was coming.

Cayo Reyes.

I’d start there.

15

The wolf world doesn’t have addresses. It has territories, the territories have edges, and the edges are where you do business you don’t want done in the open.

Cayo Reyes worked an edge in the South Bronx — a salvage yard on the Conti side of a line that three packs pretended not to argue about, which was exactly the kind of place a man set up shop when he wanted to be reachable by everyone and owned by no one. He was a broker. Not muscle, not product — information and movement, the quiet machinery that let wolves who hated each other still move money and metal across each other’s ground. The folder said he’d done business with Marr “in the past,” which in this world could mean last month or thirty years ago.

I went in the late morning, when the yard was loud with a crusher and a man could talk under the noise.

I had not walked into a wolf territory as a Zorander in three decades. I’d forgotten what it did.

The two at the gate smelled me before they saw me — I watched it happen, watched the bored set of their shoulders change, the way men go still when an old word they only half-believed in walks up in a gray coat. Zorander. The name had been dead in this city since my father died, the pack scattered or absorbed, but a name like that doesn’t decay at the same rate as the men who carried it. It sits in the ground like something radioactive. These two had been children when Aleksander ran the eastern districts. They knew the scent of the line my father came from the way you know a sound from a nightmare you can’t quite place.

“I’m here to see Cayo,” I said. “He’ll want to take the meeting. Tell him a Zorander’s asking.”

They didn’t pat me down. That told me something — either they were stupid, or they were more afraid of touching me than of what I might be carrying. One went. The other stood with his hand near his hip, his eyes not quite on mine, and his scent gone sharp with the particular adrenaline of a man hoping very hard that nothing was going to be required of him today.

Reyes saw me in a container office that smelled of coffee, rust, and the cold ozone bite of a space heater working too hard. He was small for a wolf, wiry, sixty-odd, with the flat unbothered eyes of a man who had survived a long time in a business that killed people younger than him by being useful to everyone and loyal to no one. He didn’t stand.

“Zorander,” he said, the way you’d say a word in a language you used to speak. “I thought you were a ghost story.”

“I get that a lot lately.”

“Aleksander’s boy. The one who walked.” He gestured at the chair across the desk, and I sat, because sitting is its own kind of message — I’m not here to make this physical — and because I wanted his hands where I could see them, and they were, flat on the desk, going nowhere. “You have a brass set, coming onto Conti ground with that name on you right now.”