Page 25

I grab him by the throat. I lift him off the couch with one hand, no effort, his feet leaving the ground and his hands clawing at my wrist. I bring his face close to mine. Close enough for him to see my eyes, which I know are gold, which I know are burning, which I know look like the eyes of something that is not human.

“She is mine,” I say.

I say it in the voice the wolf uses. Not a human register. Lower. Rougher. A frequency that vibrates through the chest and reaches something ancient in the brain. The man in my hand stops struggling. His body goes limp, the surrender of a creature that knows it’s been caught, and his bladder releases.

I don’t let go. I tighten my grip. I feel the cartilage of his trachea compress under my fingers, feel his pulse hammering against my palm, feel the exact moment when his airway closes and his heartbeat begins to stutter. His eyes bulge. His mouth opens and closes without sound. His hands drop from my wrist and hang at his sides.

I hold him there. I count his heartbeats as they slow. One every second. One every two seconds. One every four.

Roman is behind me. I can feel him watching. He doesn’t intervene. He doesn’t speak. He knows what’s happening and he’s letting it happen, and the silence from my brother is the loudest endorsement he’s ever given me.

The man’s heart stops.

I hold him for three more seconds. Then I open my hand and he drops to the concrete floor in a heap, limbs folding under him at angles that don’t look like sleep. Just a body, lying on a warehouse floor in Cicero because he talked about a woman who belongs to me.

The room is silent except for the sound of my breathing. I’m panting. My chest is heaving, my shirt soaked through with sweat and blood, the bullet wound in my shoulder throbbing in counterpoint to my heartbeat. Blood is running down my left arm and dripping from my fingertips onto the concrete. My body is singing with the aftermath of violence, every nerve lit up, every muscle trembling with spent adrenaline.

I look at the other three. The one on the card table is conscious, curled on the floor, his face gray with pain. The one I threw against the wall is sitting up, dazed, blood running from a cut above his ear. The one Roman put down is on his hands and knees, retching.

“Tony DeSanto,” I say. My voice is ragged, wrecked from the wolf register I used moments ago. I have to breathe between words. “You’re going to tell him what happened here tonight. You’re going to tell him that the South Side belongs to the Voronov family. You’re going to tell him that the West Loop is ours. He doesn’t move men, guns, money, or product through either one without my permission. And you’re going to tell him that if he sends anyone near my buildings again, what happened to your friend here is going to happen to him.”

I look down at the body on the floor. I don’t feel remorse. I feel the absence of it like a hole where a moral should be, and inside that hole there is only the wolf, satisfied and sated and licking its teeth.

“Well,” I hear my brother chuckle, “There he is.”

I bend and retrieve the old steel from the concrete. Blood streaks the worn metal, dark in the grooves generations of Voronov hands have polished smooth. I close my fist around them and walk past Roman and out the back door into the cold night air. I stand in the parking lot with my hands on my knees and my head down and I breathe. Deep, ragged breaths that fog the air in front of me. The bullet is working its way out of my shoulder, the wolf’s healing pushing it toward the surface, and I can feel the metal shifting under my skin like a splinter being expelled. It hurts. I let it hurt. The pain is an anchor, something physical and real to focus on.

I killed a man because the image of him slowing down his car to look at Sophia while she ran along the river in the October dark put a red film over my vision that didn’t lift until he was dead.

Roman comes out a few minutes later. He stands beside me in the dark and doesn’t speak for a long time. The silence between us is different from what it was three hours ago. Something has realigned. Not the fundamental tension over leadership and authority and the direction of the pack. But the question that’s been sitting underneath all of it, the question Roman has been asking with every challenge and every push, has been answered.

Are you still what we need you to be?

Yes. Under the suits and the strategy and the careful, controlled exterior, yes. I am still a wolf. I am still capable of the violence that holds this territory. I’ve just been keeping it locked in a room that’s getting harder to close.

“You should do that more often,” Roman says.

I straighten up. Spit blood. The bullet pops through the skin of my shoulder and drops onto the asphalt with a small metallic clink.

I don’t answer. Roman looks at the blood on my hands and the hole in my shirt where the bullet went through and the gold that’s still fading from my eyes, and he understands.

We drive back in silence. Roman drops me at my building. I ride the elevator to my penthouse and walk into the bathroom and turn on the light and look at myself in the mirror.

Blood on my shirt, mine and theirs. Blood on my hands, drying in the creases of my knuckles, caked under my fingernails. The old steel sits on the counter beside the sink, dark blood caught in its scars and grooves. The bullet wound in my shoulder has closed to a puckered scar that will be gone by morning. There’s a cut above my temple where the bottle connected, sealed now to a thin pink line. My eyes are still gold. They fade as I watch, the amber bleeding out of my irises and the gray seeping back in, the human mask reassembling itself over the animal underneath.

I peel off the ruined shirt. In the mirror I can see the bruise where the bullet entered, already yellowing at the edges as the healing accelerates. My chest and arms are streaked with blood and sweat. I look like what I am tonight. Not a businessman. Not a strategist. A predator who found prey.

I wash the blood off my hands. I watch it swirl pink in the white sink. I scrub under my nails until the water runs clear. I think about the man on the warehouse floor, the way his heartbeat slowed under my fingers, the way his body went heavy when the life left it, and I don’t feel remorse. I feel my wolf, satisfied and sated and quiet for the first time in weeks. I rinse the steel last, then dry the knuckles carefully and carry them back to the desk.

The pressure that’s been building, the compressed need and frustration and hunger, it’s not gone. But it’s thinner. The violence took the edge off in a way that nothing else has. My body is spent. My muscles ache. My hands throb. I’m tired in a way I haven’t been in months, a physical exhaustion that goes all the way to the bone, and underneath the exhaustion there is something that feels dangerously close to peace.

I strip and step into the shower.

I killed a man tonight because he looked at my mate and said he wanted to touch her. I strangled the life out of him with my bare hand while my brother watched and said nothing. And the peace I feel now, standing in my bathroom washing a dead man’s blood off my skin, is the most honest thing I’ve felt since Sophia Marchelli walked into my office and turned my century of control into rubble.

I think about tomorrow. About Sophia.

She’s going to find out what I am eventually. She’s too smart and too determined to stop digging before she hits the truth.