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Then my phone rings. I look at the screen and frown. Why is Manon calling so soon? I strip off a glove and answer.

For a moment there's nothing—just breathing and a car engine somewhere behind it. Then a man starts to speak, and I catch the accent right away.

It’s from the old country. Not the American-raised sort, but the kind belonging to someone who comes over with blood already on him.

"Mr. Novak, we have your wife."

I want to bark at the man that she is not my wife, but the air leaves my lungs. For seven years I kept her at arm's length so no one could ever do exactly this—reach me through her. I let her back in last night. And here it is already, the nightmare I have convinced myself that could never happen.

I put the scalpel down.

"I'm listening," I say.

As he speaks, I rule out Polish. I think Russian, at first, but I've done enough business with men from that part of the world to hear the difference. It's Ukrainian. Fuck, I got distracted again. I thought I had time to resolve the Ferro situation. The wild card. The person behind every problem I currently have.

"Good." A slow breath, almost bored. "Here's how your morning goes, Mr. Novak. There's a scrapyard off Kearny. I'm sure you know the place I'm talking about. Three PM sharp. You come alone, and we talk about your lovely wife. Anything else, and I send her to you in a box."

I don't say a word because I'm listening to the bastard, to the noises in the background—the engine, the road noise, trying to gauge how far they've already driven.

"They told me you’re a serious man," he says, when I stay quiet. "Three nights ago we sent you a girl. You worked on her yourself, I hear. That was us saying hello."

The fire. The girl I spent a whole night worrying she was Manon. I'd told myself it was someone else's mess, bad luck, a body that wasn't my business. They were testing me, and I did not get it.

"Three PM. Alone." The line dies.

I give myself one second. One, where I let myself picture her in the back of a van, in distress. Terrified.

I'm pulling my coat on when the phone goes again. This time it's fucking Henri.

I answer while walking to the car. "I know and I'm taking care of it."

"You know." He seems angry, but that's understandable. "My man watched three of them put my daughter in a van twenty minutes ago and could do nothing but call it in."

I stop on the stairs. "Your man. You kept someone on her."

"When I heard she didn’t have a security detail, I decided to be proactive." I should be mad at him for his unspoken criticism, but not today. "Whoever took her didn't waste time. They grabbed her off a busy gas station lot in daylight. She was going in for coffee."

"And your man sat in his car and watched. So we've both failed her this morning. Save the rest for later and tell me what he saw."

He wants her back more than he wants to fight with me right now, so he ignores my jabs. "Grey panel van. Half a plate, six, two something. Three men. They went east, toward the river."

Henri said east, but the meeting location the kidnapper gave me is at Kearny, which is west. If they were holding her there, they'd have driven her that way. But they drove the opposite direction.

So Kearny is where I'm supposed to walk in alone and get shot. She's east, by the river and there's one building out there that belonged to Ferro. A dead cannery. I have kept tabs on Ferro assets for years.

I call Rafe. "Six men to the Kearny scrapyard. Let them see you coming, but not a minute before three. I want them counting heads, sure I'm about to walk through the gate." I'm already in the car, my man in the passenger seat. "Tomek's with me. Nobody goes near the waterfront until I call."

I don't wait for an answer. I drop the phone in the center console and pull into the road, driving east, toward my wife, toward a danger that exists because I loved her enough to leave her unguarded.

They should have thought twice about doing this.

Now I'm coming for them, the Laszlo Novak they’d never want to meet.

CHAPTER 38

Manon

Someone pulls the blindfold off my face and the light goes through my skull like a blade.