24. Wolfe
WOLFE
We’ve been arguing for two hours and neither of us is remotely close to winning.
It’s past midnight. Eva paces my room at the house, barefoot with her arms crossed and her jaw locked. Her hair hangs around her shoulders, tousled from raking her hand through it more times than I bothered to count.
Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin void of all color because hours earlier, she heard the news that her brother unknowingly accepted a meeting with a Russian gangster who is desperate enough to hurt him…or worse….as a fucking power grab.
“I’ll call Sal,” she says for the third time. “And tell him to cancel.”
“And then what? When he asks why, what the hell are you going to tell him? That a Russian criminal engineered his debt, used it to recruit his sister, and is now setting a trap inside his own restaurant as a revenge play?”
Eva’s eyes flash, her lips twisting into a grimace. “I’ll figure out what to say.”
“Okay, great. You’ll figure out what to say. And then Sal will do exactly what you would do. He’ll try to fix it himself. He’ll go looking for answers. And Dmitri’s people will be right there waiting for him.”
She stops pacing and turns toward me, firing off a glare that could melt a glacier. She presses her palms against her temples. “Then I’ll go to the meeting myself. I’ll be at the restaurant Thursday night. If someone shows up, I’ll be there.”
“That’s exactly what Dmitri wants. You, vulnerable and out in the open. Away from us. Unprotected. Don’t you get that?”
“I’m not unprotected. I have you.”
I let out a deep sigh, pull off my glasses, and scrape a hand down the front of my face. “Eva, I can’t fight a group of guys in the back of a restaurant by myself. The man outside Rosario’s yesterday was alone and sloppy as fuck. Dmitri’s real people won’t be.”
Sparks shoot from her eyes. “So what am I supposed to do while this is happening? Hide? Sit in a room and wait while my brother walks into a trap that might get him killed?”
“No. We will make sure that meeting doesn’t happen. And then we’ll take down the entire operation so nobody walks into anything ever again.”
She stares at me. “How the fuck do you expect to do that?”
I sink onto the edge of the bed. “I’ll spoof a call from Andersen’s number. Reschedule the meeting. Push it to next week. Sal thinks the investor had a conflict. No suspicion.”
“That buys us days, not a solution.”
“It buys us Thursday. And Thursday is when we hit everything at once.”
I lay it out...everything I’ve been putting together since we left Rosario’s.
My whole decommissioning strategy. To break Dmitri, we need to take apart his network, piece by piece.
Without it, he’s nothing. And it has to be a coordinated strike.
We hit the Albanian network, Hoxha’s businesses, the lending operation.
Everything Dmitri built, dismantled in one night while he thinks the Sal meeting is his final play to get exactly what he wants.
By the time he realizes what happened, the infrastructure is gone and he’ll be stripped down to nothing.
No money, no muscle, no loyalty when his men see that he can’t deliver to them whatever bullshit he promised.
“What about Dmitri?” she asks.
“We don’t touch him.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because he’s Viktor Kozlov’s nephew. No matter what, they’re blood.
If we take Dmitri out, Viktor will retaliate.
He’ll have to, because it’s still family.
Fucked-up family, but family all the same.
And you don’t turn your back on family. Nobody will survive that kind of war.
” I hold her gaze. “So, we strip everything around him instead. Every partner, every resource, every piece of leverage we can find. Then we package the evidence and hand it over to Viktor. Show him that his own nephew went rogue and challenged his position, operated without authorization, threatened established families. We clean up the mess for Viktor as a show of good faith in our arrangement.”
Eva raises an eyebrow. “You’re counting on Viktor being rational.”
“I’m counting on Viktor being a businessman. He has interests in Boston that depend on stability and the agreement he came to with Adriana months back. Dmitri was a threat to that stability. We give Viktor a clean exit. He cuts Dmitri off without losing face.”
“And Dmitri walks away?” She folds her arms over her chest. “Come on.”
“Viktor will make sure of it. And Dmitri will walk away with nothing. No network. No Albanians. No leverage. And most importantly, no protection from his uncle.”
“Men with nothing are dangerous, Wolfe.”
“Men with nothing are also alone.”
She lets out a long breath and sits on the bed next to me. Our shoulders touch. We sit like that for a while, both of us silently staring at the floor.
“I need to be somewhere safe during this whole thing,” she says, finally seeing the plan take shape.
“Yeah, you can’t stay here. It’s the Molloy family estate. It’s a known address. If anything goes wrong Thursday night and Dmitri decides to push back when his plan goes sideways, it’s the first place he’ll send people. And at that point, he won’t give a damn if it starts a war.”
“So where?” she asks. “Where won’t he look for me?”
“I have a cabin north of the city. It’s off the grid. There’s no paper trail to me as the owner, no connection to my name or my family. Nobody has ever been there except me.”
“You have a secret cabin.”
“It’s where I go when my brain needs to shut down.”
“Of course you have a secret cabin for brain shutdowns.” She almost smiles but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “And you want me to go there.”
“I want us both to go. Tomorrow. I’ll work the operation setup from there. But when it’s time to execute on Thursday, I’ll need to be back in Boston. Cillian will pick me up. You keep the car.”
“Why do I keep the car?” Her eyebrows knit together.
“Because I’m not leaving you anywhere without a way out. That’s not protection. That’s a prison.”
She looks at me, her eyes softening the slightest bit, but enough for me to know she appreciates what I just said.
“Your laptop,” she says. “I need it so I can see what’s happening.”
“It’ll stay here with you. You’ll have full access and eyes on everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t speak for a while. I watch her process what I’ve just unloaded on her. Her brain runs through scenarios the same way mine does…logging every angle, looking for gaps, trying to find the flaw that means this whole plan falls apart.
“If anything happens to Sal,” she says finally, “I will never forgive you.”
“I know.”
She twists the ends of her hair, her eyes pleading with mine. “Give me a fact, Wolfe. Not a promise.”
“Your brother will be safe on Friday morning. That’s a fact.”
She nods once and lets out a shaky breath. Then she gets up and starts packing without another word.
I watch her move around the room shoving clothes into a bag and my chest aches like it’s being split in two.
She’s choosing to trust me. With her brother’s life, with her own life, with the belief that the man she’s following to a remote cabin in the woods is the same man who sat on her stoop weeks ago and told her the truth about her situation.
I am the same man. The plan is real. Sal will be safe.
But there are pieces she doesn’t know about.
I grab my phone out of my pocket when it rings. I frown at Ronan’s name on the screen and sneak a look at Eva, who seems lost in her own world right now.
Stepping into the hallway, I pull the door mostly closed.
“Is she on board?” he asks.
“She’s packing.”
“Good. We need to discuss what happens after Thursday.”
I grit my teeth because I know what’s coming. He’s been circling this for weeks. He doesn’t trust Eva. She’s a loose end, and to him, loose ends are liabilities.
He doesn’t like liabilities. And he sure as hell doesn’t like to keep them hanging around with enough insight on his organizations to put him in prison for the rest of his life.
“After Thursday, Dmitri’s operation is done,” I say. “Eva’s role will be finished.”
“Exactly. Her role will be finished. Which means we need to figure out what happens with her.”
“She stays, Ronan.”
“She’s a convicted felon who knows the inside of our operation, the DiMicheli operation, and Dmitri’s entire network. She’s the single biggest informational liability walking around Boston.”
“She’s not a liability. She’s the reason we have a plan at all to save everything we’ve built.”
“Your attachment to her is the liability. It’s compromised your judgment, and you know it.”
“My judgment hasn’t been compromised. My priorities have shifted. There’s a difference.”
“Not from where I’m standing.”
My jaw locks. I can hear Eva moving in the room behind me. The zipper on her bag. A drawer opening and closing.
“She stays,” I say again. Harder this time. “That’s not negotiable.”
“Everything is negotiable. That’s how this family survives,” he bites out.
“Not this. Not her.”
Silence. Long. The kind of silence Ronan uses when he’s deciding whether to push through a wall or go around it.
“We’ll finish this conversation after Thursday,” he says. “But it is getting finished.”
“Fine.”
“And Wolfe? Don’t let this be the thing that breaks you and me. Remember where your loyalties lie. This is bigger than what happened with Dad. This could blow everything open for us.”
He hangs up after a second of me not answering. I stand in the hallway, the phone hanging from my hand, my thumb tapping against my thigh.
I told him she’s staying. But I know my brother.
The battle is coming, and I honestly don’t know how it will end.
I scroll through my phone, heaving a deep sigh. The texts from Ronan go back weeks, ever since he found out that the ghost is Eva. He’s been circling this conversation since the warehouse hit, sending me short, cryptic messages between operational updates.
We need to discuss her role.
What’s the exit plan?
Figure out what you’re doing with her before I do.
Handle it or I will.
And my responses. I shake my head. Fuck.
I’ll take care of it.
She won’t be a problem.
Let’s get through Thursday.
On the phone just now, I told him she stays. But in these texts, I sound like a man who hasn’t decided yet.
I have decided. My mouth knows it. My texts just haven’t caught up.
I rake a hand through my hair, my shoulders slumping as I walk back into the room. Eva sits on the bed next to her packed bag. Her dark eyes narrow at me.
“Who was that?” she asks.
“Ronan. He had a few questions about the Thursday timeline, and he didn’t want to wait on them.”
Her brows furrow and I shift under her penetrating gaze.
“Your voice changed out there,” she says. “Through the door. I couldn’t hear what you said but you sounded...” She pauses. “Tight.”
“I’m tired. It’s been a long night.”
“That’s not what tight sounds like. Tight sounds like someone pushing back against something they don’t want to do.”
She’s too damn perceptive. She didn’t hear the words, but she heard everything underneath them.
“Ronan and I don’t always agree on strategy,” I say, rubbing the stress knot lodged at the base of my spine. “That’s nothing new.”
She lifts an eyebrow. I hold her gaze, knowing she’s debating about whether or not to push me, but thank fuck, she lets it go.
Not because she believes me, though. Because she trusts me enough to let the lie sit for now.
“Come to bed,” she says. “We have to leave early.”
I lie down next to her. She curls into my side, laying her head on my chest. Her hand rests on my stomach. Soon, her breathing slows.
I’m still wide fucking awake; my heart racing as I stare at the ceiling.
I can’t let her go. I won’t. And Ronan is going to have to deal with it.
But my brain still doesn’t settle because that’s how it works.
It plans for every outcome. The good ones.
The bad ones. The ones I’m fighting against. And right now, at two in the morning, with Eva asleep on my chest and Ronan’s voice ringing between my ears, my brain is doing the thing I wish I could stop it from doing.
It’s building the contingency.
Not because I want it. Because my brain doesn’t give me a choice. It sees unresolved problems—what happens if Ronan won’t budge and forces Eva out? What happens if keeping Eva puts the family at risk?—and it automatically builds a new plan.
I get up, careful not to disturb Eva.
A deep sigh shudders my chest. I sit at the desk, open my laptop, and document everything I’ve been formulating in my mind over the past couple of hours.
A whole relocation framework for Eva in a new city.
I list out all of the new identity documents she’d need, along with a timeline and logistics.
It will be a clean break that starts Friday and has her out of Boston in seventy-two hours. So she will be safe and protected.
I build the plan the way I build everything. Every piece is precise, thorough, and detailed. Every variable accounted for; every step is mapped out.
My stomach knots as I stare at the complete, executable plan for removing Eva Moreno from my life.
I’ll never use it. No fucking way in hell. The plan on my monitor only exists because my brain demanded it exist, not because my heart would ever let me execute it.
I save it to the encrypted folder where I saved the case file I pulled on her almost two years ago—the one where I found holes in her conviction and figured out that she was innocent. The one I closed because chasing it would have exposed Molloy operations to federal scrutiny.
Because I chose loyalty to my family over a stranger.
But she’s not a stranger anymore.
And my loyalties have shifted.
I close the laptop, get up from the chair, and lie down next to Eva.
Eva rolls back into me without waking, the heat of her breath warming my chest. Her fingers curl into my shirt like even in her sleep, she’s afraid to let go.
The strike my brothers and I discussed is three-pronged. First, Lochlan’s team hits Hoxha’s physical locations in Revere. Second, I take down the digital network remotely, and third, anonymous tips hit law enforcement about the lending operation.
By Friday morning, Dmitri’s operation will be in ashes. Sal will be safe. And Ronan and I will have a conversation I’m not ready for, but will win, because she stays.
She stays.
I close my eyes and try to imagine Friday without her. Then Saturday. Then a week.
I can’t. The entire system crashes. There’s no output, no solution for the hole losing her would put in my heart.
Eva is the quiet and the peace I didn’t know I was looking for. Without her, it’s just noise.
And I will fight every person in my life to keep her.
Including the ones who share my last name.