Reading his silence, Wolf understood what Jack refused to say and sighed. Accepting his actions were not up for discussion.
“Someone has been digging, Jack.” He got to the meat of the matter. “Searching for sealed juvenile records, financial trails, and old business deals that suddenly vanished.”
“Who?”
Wolf reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded paper pinched between two fingers. “A fifth-generation aristocrat by the name of Hadrian Welles. Old money, Cambridge educated, father sat on two boards?—”
“I know who he is.”
Wolf raised a brow, leaned forward, touched the corner of the paper to the candle on Jack’s desk, and dropped it in the amber ashtray. “Why is he after you?”
Visions from the hunt flashed in his mind. “Because I let him live.”
A long silence absorbed the confession before Wolf made a sound between acknowledgment and disapproval. “Leniency is a messy thing.”
No question about what the other man had done.
There never was.
Wolf trusted Jack’s judgment the way he trusted his own instincts, completely and without sentimentality. If Jack said a man deserved to die, the man deserved to die. If Jack said he let him live, there was a reason, even if Wolf considered it a poor one.
He steepled his liver-spotted fingers. “Could you kill him?”
Wolf wasn’t asking about Jack’s capability. He could dismantle Hadrian Welles in a dozen different ways without ever touching him. Wolf knew that.
What he was actually asking was why Jack had not.
He’d planned to. Just like he erased every other predator that revealed itself to him. But first, he liked to make them suffer. Financial ruin had a certain sting that death did not. Humiliation didn’t make it to the grave, and he liked to give that gift before his targets were gone.
But his conscience was fucking with him.
In the end, he settled on the truth. “Yes. I could kill him.”
Wolf flicked an invisible piece of lint from his sleeve. “He’s involving others in his crusade. Making legal threats, hiring investigators, talking to a journalist. I suggest you figure out, one way or another, how to make this little issue go away.”
Jack’s mind was already turning over appropriate consequences. It wasn’t about protecting himself. Jack wasn’t afraid of anything Welles thought he could do to him. It was about the reason he’d made it onto his list in the first place.
Daisy.
She might never want to look at him again, but Jack still had to face himself. This was the ugly truth of who he was. Who they made him into.
The holiday was over.
It was time to get back to business. He’d dismantle Welles, as planned. Strip his assets, sever his connections, and leave him in ruin. At that point, pricks like him typically begged for death. Chances were, he’d put a gun in his mouth and do the messy part himself.
It didn’t matter to Jack. The only thing that mattered was that he never preyed on another helpless person again.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Good.” Wolf rose from the chair with the deliberate grace of a man who never rushed. He rested his fist against the desk in a gesture that was equal parts farewell and command. “The world needs punishers, Jack. They keep the order of things fluid. Don’t let morality weigh you down too much, or you’ll drown.” He met his stare with those pale grey eyes. “I’d hate to find you floating in a pool of your own making one day.”
Wolf didn’t wait for a response. Didn’t need one. He’d said what needed to be said, and then he was gone.
Jack knew what he needed to do.
Chapter Thirty
Surfacing
