Page 5 of A Wolf's Revenge

“I’ll double whatever you were offered to take my family,” I said. “Name the number. I can move the money in under ten minutes and you have my word it’s clean.” I let a beat pass. “Give me the name of whoever contracted this and I’ll triple it.”

He smiled. It was the smile of a man who had heard something he found genuinely amusing, which was worse than contempt.

“Nobody contracted this,” he said.

I held his gaze and said nothing.

“This is personal, Lo. You can’t buy your way out of personal.” He tapped ash onto the concrete floor. “My father has made you an offer because he is a practical man and he believes in economy. Find Marr. Deliver him. Go home to your family.” He paused. “I made no such offer.”

“Your father gave me seventy-two hours.”

“My father’s terms are my father’s terms.” Antonio’s voice was very even. “I have my own.”

The wolf in my chest coiled. I had learned a long time ago that the most dangerous men in a room weren’t the ones who raised their voice.

“Then tell me what you want,” I said.

He stood. He was taller than I’d registered sitting down, and he moved with the deliberate economy of a man who had spent years controlling what his body did. He walked to the wall behind me and back, slowly, the way a wolf paces a perimeter. I tracked him in my peripheral vision and kept my spine straight.

“Do you know what I remember most about that night?” he said. “Not the fire. Not waking up in the building next door with my lungs full of smoke and my face on fire.” He stopped behind me. “I remember the sound it made. Before. When your father’s wolves were still outside. There was almost no sound at all. That’s what I remember. How quiet it was, right before everything ended.”

He came back around into my line of sight.

“Someone gave him the layout of our home,” he said. “Someone who had been inside. Someone who knew where the exits were, where the guards rotated, where my father slept.” He looked at me with that clear left eye. “Took me thirty-four years to find out who.”

“The twenty-eighth of January, 1989,” he said. “Evangel Street.”

The date hit the inside of my chest like something physical.

I had not thought about Evangel Street in a very long time. I had made a sustained, deliberate project of not thinking about it. There were things I had done in my life that I could be honest with myself about — the ruthlessness, the cold calculations, the years I had spent doing my father’s work before I understood fully what that work was. I could look at most of it without flinching. I had made peace with what I was and was not.

Evangel Street was not one of those things.

I was twenty-three years old. My father had given me a task and I had carried it out because that was what you did — what I did then, before I understood that obedience to a man like my father was not loyalty, it was just another word for complicity. I had told myself what I needed to tell myself. I had not gone back.

I said nothing. I kept my hands still on the folder.

Antonio watched me. He was reading my face the way a wolf reads a room — for the thing that moved when everything else stayed still.

“You remember it,” he said. Not an accusation. Just an observation.

“It was a long time ago.”

“Thirty-four years.” He sat back down across from me. The cigar had burned down to almost nothing. He set it aside. “My mother died in that fire. My eldest brother. Three of my father’s closest men. And Kerra.”

There it was.

The name I had not let myself say for thirty-four years. The name I had buried deeper than any other, in a place where even my nightmares didn’t go. Not because I had forgotten her, but because I hadn’t. Because she was the one thing from that entire period of my life that I could not make clean, could not rationalize, could not file away under the heading of things that were necessary.

Kerra.

I had been in love with her once, or something close to it — as close as a twenty-two-year-old man raised by Aleksander Zorander could get to love. She had been Antonio’s cousin. She had been gentle and sharp and she had trusted me completely, which was the thing I had used.

My father had wanted the layout of the Conti estate. He had wanted to know where the Alpha slept, when the guards rotated, where the walls were weakest. And I had spent six months getting close to Kerra Conti so that I could find out.

She had shown me everything. She had walked me through that house herself, laughing at something I said, her hand in mine. She had not known what she was showing me. She had not known what I was.

She had died in the fire.