Chapter 3
I had expected him to walk me back toward the room I’d woken up in.
Instead, he turned the opposite direction, deeper into the building, and I followed because the detonator was still in his coat pocket, and Amy was still in a room somewhere wearing a device I couldn’t get to.
I was acutely aware of both of those facts with every step I took.
The folder Edoardo had given me was in my right hand.
I hadn’t opened it yet. I’d been in that room for less than twenty minutes and I already understood the shape of what I’d agreed to — find Vincent Marr, deliver him alive, get my family back.
Clean. Transactional. The kind of deal a man makes when he has no other cards.
What I hadn’t yet fully processed was what it meant that the Conti name was attached to it.
He stopped in front of a door at the end of the corridor and knocked twice. He didn’t wait for an answer before he pushed it open and gestured me through. I read the air before I stepped across the threshold. Same building. Different man.
The room was smaller than Edoardo’s, less staged. No table between us and the power. Just concrete walls, a bare bulb, two chairs facing each other at close range, and a man already in one of them with a cigar burning between his fingers.
He was enormous — broader than the other man, younger than Edoardo, with the same shaved skull covered in ink, but the burns on his face were worse than his father’s.
They covered the right side entirely, pulling the skin tight from jaw to temple.
His left eye was clear, dark, and intelligent.
His right eye was narrow, the socket slightly distorted by scar tissue.
He had the look of a man who had been through something that should have killed him and spent every year since deciding it hadn’t.
He looked at me the way men look at the thing they’ve been waiting for.
“Sit down, Lo.”
The nickname landed like a hand around my throat.
Not because it frightened me. Because it meant he knew me from before — before New York, before Amy, before I had buried everything that used to be Logan Zorander under fifteen years of careful, deliberate construction.
Only a handful of people in the world knew that name.
Most of them were dead. I had made sure of that.
I sat. I kept my face neutral. I put the folder on my knee and looked at him.
He took a long drag of the cigar and let the smoke out slowly, watching me across it. He wasn’t in a hurry. That was the thing about men who had waited thirty years — they had learned how to be still.
“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.
“You were sleeping with her,” Antonio said. His voice had not changed. That was what made it worse — not anger, not heat. Just fact. “For six months, before the attack, my cousin was sharing a bed with an Alpha’s son, and giving him everything he needed to destroy us.”
“She didn’t know,” I said. My voice came out flat. “She had no part in it.”
“No,” he agreed. “She didn’t.” A pause that had weight in it. “That’s the part I’ve never been able to forgive.”
I thought about Amy.
I didn’t mean to — I had been keeping her in a separate compartment since I walked into this room, the way you keep a wound covered so you can still function.
If I let myself think about her for more than a second, about Noah, about the device Francis had described, I would lose the only thing keeping me useful right now, which was my ability to think clearly.
But Antonio had just said Kerra’s name and the compartment door had come open anyway.
Amy had never known about Kerra. There was no reason she would.
That chapter of my life predated her by more than two decades and I had sealed it so thoroughly that there were entire years of my own history I rarely visited.
She knew I had a past. She knew it was dark.
She had asked, once, in the first year we were together, and I had told her the truth in the only way I knew how to tell it — in outline, without the names, without the specifics that would have made her understand what kind of man she had married.
She had looked at me for a long moment after. Then she had said: That’s not who you are anymore. And she had meant it, which was the thing that had undone me more completely than anything else she could have done.
I needed to get back to her.
“Your father wants Marr,” I said. “That’s the deal on the table. I find him, I bring him to Edoardo, I get my family back.”
“My father’s deal is my father’s deal,” Antonio said again.
He leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees, close enough that I could see the full detail of the scarring on his right side.
He had stopped trying to be still. “I have waited thirty-four years, Logan. I was nineteen years old when your father burned my house down. I watched my mother die and I couldn’t get to her because the smoke was too thick and the fire was moving too fast.” His voice was still level.
That was the part that was hard to look at — the absolute control he had over it.
“I survived. I rebuilt. I found my father in Italy, and I spent thirty years helping him plan this, because he is a patient man and he believed in doing this right.”
“And you?” I asked.
“I believe in doing it completely.” His eyes — that single clear one — didn’t move from mine.
“Find Marr. Bring him to my father. That part, I honor. But understand something: when this is over, when Marr is delivered and your family is returned, you and I are not finished. You, personally, Logan Zorander, are not finished until I decide you are.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a fact.” He sat back. “You killed my family. Not your father — you. You chose to put Kerra in the path of something that was going to destroy her. You made that choice and you walked away from it. You built yourself a very comfortable life here in this city, you got married, and had a son.” He gestured loosely toward the folder on my knee.
“Find me Marr and your family lives. But I am not going to let you return to that comfortable life and close the door again. Not this time.”
The room was very quiet.
I looked at Antonio Conti across two feet of concrete floor and understood something I had not fully reckoned with until this moment: he was right.
Not about his methods. Not about Amy and Noah, who had nothing to do with any of this, and whose lives were not his to use as leverage. But about the rest of it.
I had known what I was doing on Evangel Street.
I had told myself at the time that I hadn’t — that I was following orders, that I didn’t know how far my father would take it, that I couldn’t have predicted the fire.
All of that was true, none of it was the whole truth, and I had lived with the part I kept edited out for three decades.
“I’ll find Marr,” I said.
“I know you will.” Antonio picked up the dying butt of the cigar and looked at it. “Because the alternative is your wife and son. And whatever else you are, Logan, I don’t think you’re a man who leaves his family to die for his own comfort.”
He looked up at me.
“Francis will take you out. You have your folder. You have sixty-eight hours now — we used four of them.” A thin pause. “Don’t waste the rest.”
Francis walked me out through a service door at the back of the building and into a narrow lot between two warehouses.
The air outside was cold and raw, the kind of cold that had teeth in it.
A gray dawn was coming up over the rooftops to the east — which confirmed what I’d suspected about the south-facing orientation. Red Hook. Or close to it.
“Car will take you wherever you need to go,” Francis said. He was standing slightly to my left, his hands in his coat pockets. The detonator hand. I had been watching it for hours.
“I want to speak to my wife,” I said.
“That’s not part of the arrangement.”
“Make it part.”
He looked at me steadily. Then he took out his phone — not the detonator hand, the other one — and dialed. He held it to his ear, waited, and then held it out to me.
Three seconds of nothing. Then, “Logan.”
Amy’s voice. Low, controlled, the particular flatness she got when she was frightened and refusing to let it win. I had heard that voice once before, in a hospital waiting room six years ago, and I had promised myself then that I would never be the reason she needed to use it.
“I’m here,” I said. I kept my voice level. I needed her to hear level. “Are you hurt?”
“No. Noah’s fine. He’s sleeping.” A breath. “Are you—“
“I’m fine. I’m working on it. Amy—“
Francis took the phone.
I held myself very still and watched him put it back in his pocket.
“Sixty-eight hours,” he said.
The car was waiting at the far end of the lot, engine running. I walked toward it with the folder in my hand and Amy’s voice still in my ear, carrying what it had always carried — the particular sound of someone who trusted me completely.
I was not going to let her down. Not this time. Not again.
I got in the car and opened the folder.