33. Wolfe
WOLFE
I met London at the back of a butchered cathedral.
The kind with stained glass that didn’t shine anymore—only fractured the morning light across the floor in bruised shards. The pews had long been cleared. The altar had been scorched. And the air? It still carried the weight of something holy that had long since turned to rot.
It reminded me of the stories.
Whispers about a man London mentioned once in passing. A name that didn’t sound like a name at all—just a warning folded into a curse.
They call him the executioner.
A brutal relic from a dead empire. Cold. Mechanical. Made of silence and precision. He doesn’t take payment. He takes possession .
London said he lives in an old cathedral now. Keeps it like penance. They say he drowned a girl once. In a baptismal font. And when she came back up— she begged him to do it again.
Now he’s hunting the last daughter of the traitor line.
Not to kill her .
But to keep her.
The air here was damp. Cold. It made your lungs ache to breathe it in too deep.
We weren’t in Belgium yet. That would come later. For now, we met where old debts weren’t paid in coin—but in blood. Beneath the city. Under a cathedral that no longer rang with bells.
Only silence.
London stood beside the altar like it belonged to him. Hands in his coat pockets. Eyes sharper than the blade tucked in his boot.
“You came alone,” he said.
“I always do.”
His mouth twisted. Not a smile. Not quite.
“You sent a message.”
“You said ‘say when.’ This is when.”
He nodded once, slow. “So what’s the play?”
I pulled a folder from my coat. Tossed it onto the cracked stone slab where people used to confess.
“This is everyone who touched the subcontractor. Shell companies. Broker aliases. The last three shipments flagged for customs rerouting.”
London flipped through the file without looking down.
“And you want me to what—burn it or trace it back to someone with a last name?”
“Both.”
He didn’t blink.
“You want names? You’ll get bodies.”
I didn’t correct him.
Because I didn’t need names anymore. I needed consequences.
He closed the file and handed it off to the shadow standing behind him. I didn’t turn to look. Didn’t ask who it was. Anyone London trusted in rooms like this didn’t need introductions.
“There’s talk out of Antwerp,” London said. “Someone’s undercutting your channel. Pushing flawed stone into customs with pristine papers. The money behind it isn’t new. It’s someone trying to remind the table they never left.”
I clenched my jaw.
“Erez?”
London nodded slowly. “That’s my guess.”
Erez Melek.
He’d once been a broker. Too ambitious. Too efficient. He cut deals too fast, burned favors too wide.
Barron buried him five years ago.
Or tried.
“You’re telling me the man who lost everything under our heel is slipping stones past EU customs under a ghost proxy?”
“Not just stones,” London said. “Routes. Contacts. Safehouses. Your shadow systems in South Africa are now compromised. Quietly. Almost surgically. That’s not Selene. She wants noise. Erez wants legacy.”
And Cloe?
She’d walked into the crosshairs of a war that was bigger than family.
“She was just the warning shot,” I said.
London didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. Because we both knew what came next. I looked at the altar. At the flickering candlelight pooled beneath what used to be stained glass saints.
“Then let’s start in Belgium.”
The hotel was glass and silence.
Nothing branded.
Nothing trackable.
The kind of place where favors replaced credit cards, and the concierge asked no questions unless he was paid to deliver them later.
London had cleared the floor. Gutted the suite. No art on the walls. No flowers in the vases. There were no beds. Just a long black table that looked like it had been carried in through the freight elevator by ghosts.
Two chairs.
One window.
No blinds.
A single pendant light hung low over the table, casting a perfect circle of illumination that left everything else in the suite shadowed and still.
The man they brought in didn’t wear a mask. He didn’t need one. He sat in the chair like he’d been there before. Not just in this room—but in this kind of reckoning.
Like he knew the rules.
Like he’d helped write them.
London stood at the edge of the room for exactly three seconds. Then nodded once to me. Didn’t speak. Didn’t offer last words. That was the favor. He closed the door behind him with the finality of a coffin lid.
And I was alone.
With the man who moved the money that put Cloe on the floor.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t shift. Didn’t even blink. But he smiled. That slow, smug kind of smile that made my knuckles itch and my heart stop pretending it could stay calm.
I set my coat down.
Rolled up my sleeves.
Didn’t rush.
This wasn’t rage.
It was ritual.
He tilted his head slightly .
“Do you want a confession, or a receipt?”
His accent was clean. Faint trace of Antwerp. Polished like old money.
“I want your hands,” I said.
His smile faltered.
Just for a breath.
“I don’t?—”
“You moved it. Clean. Quick. Like a man who’d done it before. I want to know how fast I can break the fingers that did it.”
The first strike wasn’t with a fist. It was with the chair. I tipped it backward. Let him fall hard. He didn’t scream. Didn’t curse. But his grin disappeared like a light turned off. I pressed my boot to his shoulder.
“Tell me who paid for it.”
He said nothing. So I gave him thirty-seven minutes to think. Every sound in the room was absorbed by the walls. No echo. No mercy. I didn’t shout. Didn’t lecture. Just broke pieces.
Not to kill him.
To remind him that people like us didn’t deal in clean breaks.
We shattered.
And we left what was left behind.
When I walked out, my jaw was bruised. One hit he got in out of desperation. My hands were shaking. Not from weakness. From restraint. My coat was soaked. Elbow to cuff.
London leaned against the hallway wall, arms crossed like he hadn’t heard a thing. Like the screaming hadn’t seeped through the marble.
“Done?”
“For now.”
He handed me a lighter .
“You still smoke?”
“No.”
I lit it anyway.
Watched the flame flicker at the edge of the folder I carried. Watched it catch. The edges curl. Ink turned to ash. Paper to regret.
“We’re not done,” I said.
London nodded once.
“That was just the clean-up.”
We walked out together.
Two shadows made of legacy and ruin.
And I left the ashes behind.
But not the fire.