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“This…” I drop the file folder onto the table. “Is perhaps something you would prefer to discuss with me privately.”

And, you know, without the two dozen guns jammed in my face.

Kodra eyes me for another few seconds before he glances at the same guy again and mutters a few words. The man snaps his fingers and the guns around me lower. The men slowly retreat, giving Kodra and I space, but I can feel every eye in the room still on my back.

“May I sit?”

Kodra’s eyes narrow. “The man responsible for my son’s death is asking if he can join me at my dinner table?” His heavy jaw grinds. “No, Mr. Barone. You may not. What the fuck is in that folder.”

Here goes nothing.

“Proof your son Gaz was a pedophile.”

Kodra freezes. A lethal edge glints in his eyes as he calmly picks up the pruning shears.

I don’t blink as I put both my hands on the edge of the table.

Kodra’s brow arches. “You have a lot of balls, Mr. Barone,” he growls. “To walk in here and look me in the eye, as the man who killed my son, and tell me he was…” His lips curl dangerously. “And now this?” He nods at my hands before his gaze drags back to my face. “You have ten seconds. Then I start taking fingers.”

“Your son was involved in a trafficking ring that targets young girls, mostly Eastern European and under the age of thirteen.”

Fire ignites in Kodra’s eyes.

“The organization is run by a man named Kasper Sorel, and part of his operations involve underlings running…” I grimace. “Brothels, if you can even call them that, where clients come and pay money to sexually abuse children.”

My nostrils flare as I grip the edge of the table tightly.

“Your son Gaz was a client.”

Kodra’s gaze rips into me. His hand clenches the shears, closing and then opening them again with quick, violent squeezes.

“I’m not a father,” I growl. “But if I were, and someone told me my son was involved in something like that…well…” I shake my head. “I’m not sure I’d open that folder. Because there’s proof in there you might not want to see.”

Kodra’s jaw clenches like iron as his gaze drops to the folder between us.

“There are…pictures,” I murmur. “Plus a flash drive with videos, chat logs…”

I’m not bullshitting.

I do my homework before going in for a kill. And I did a horrifying amount of it on Carl Bigsby’s place and his clients before I went there that night to destroy him.

I had evidence, including a whole file on one of Bigsby’s most regular, high-spending clients, who was also a major investor in the place.

The one thing I didn’t have was a name.

Gaz Kodra dying in a fire that took out a pedo club tells you pretty much everything you need to know about him. But it’s still circumstantial, not something you drop in a folder onto Bashkim’s dinner table as “proof”.

Then I found out Bashkim is the one who had my fucking WIFE followed by a man armed with a syringe full of neurotoxin.

So I dug deeper. I took another look. And this time, I found the missing link: a shell company this mysterious high-level client was using to invest in Bigsby’s place.

…A shell company that was opened by Gaz Kodra.

Gaz wasn’t just a member. He was an ardent one. A regular. A VIP. A fucking investor in that goddamn place. And the evidence inside this folder is quite frankly one of the most horrifying collection of documents I’ve ever put together.

Kodra is still staring at the folder and clenching the shears, his knuckles going white.

“Do you have a death wish, Mr. Barone?” he growls. His eyes are flinty when they drag back up to my face. “The last man who insulted my family called my aunt a whore when a game of poker didn’t go his way. Do you know what I did to him? I kept him alive for seven days. And on the eighth, I fed what was left to him to his own dogs, while he watched with his dying breath.” He taps the shears on the table. “You and your girlfriend kill my fucking son, and then you come here and spit on his⁠—”