They knew she’d hacked onto the Wolf’s Den. But did they also know how to find her? If she were them, she’d know how. So were they already on their way to her house?

Lili knew she should go to the police. Maybe the FBI. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She sat frozen. It was as if she were paralyzed.

When the doorbell rang she just about jumped out of her skin. “Holy shit, holy mother! It’s them!”

Lili took a deep breath, then she scurried downstairs to the front door. She looked through the peephole. She could hear her own heart thundering.

Domino’s Pizza! Jesus!

She’d forgotten all about it. It was pizza delivery, not killers, at the front door, and suddenly Lili was giggling to herself. She wasn’t going to die after all.

She opened the front door.

Chapter 42

Chapter 42

THE WOLF HAD SELDOM been angrier, and someone had to pay. The Russian had a long-standing hatred for New York City and the smug and overrated metropolitan area. He found it filthy, foul beyond imagining, the people rude and uncivilized, even worse than in Moscow. But he had to be there today; it was where the Couple lived, and he had business with them. The Wolf also wanted to play some chess, one of his passions.

Long Island was the general address he had for Slava and Zoya.

Huntington was the specific one.

He arrived in the town just past three in the afternoon. He remembered the one other time he’d been here—two years after he had arrived in New York from Russia. Cousins of his owned a house here and had helped set him up in America. He had committed four murders out “on the Island,” as the locals called it. Well, at least Huntington was close to Kennedy Airport. He’d be out of New York as soon as possible.

The Couple lived in a typical suburban ranch house. The Wolf banged on the front door, and a goateed bull of a man by the name of Lukanov opened it. Lukanov was part of another team, one that worked successfully in California, Oregon, and Washington State. Lukanov had once been a major in the KGB.

“Where are the stupid fucks?” the Wolf asked, once he was inside the front door.

The bull Lukanov jerked a thumb toward a semidarkened hallway behind him, and Wolf trudged down it. His right knee was aching today, and he remembered a time in the eighties when members of a rival gang had broken it. In Moscow that kind of thing was considered a warning. The Wolf wasn’t much for warnings himself. He had found the three men who’d tried to cripple him and broken every bone in their bodies, one by one. In Russia this gruesome practice was called zamochit, but the Wolf and other gangsters also called it mushing.