On a beautiful summer evening in upstate New York, FBI Senior Special Agent Connor “Molotov” Romano’s life ended in a white-hot fireball.
He’d been heading home after another day on the job, feeling damned full of himself, too. He’d get a bonus for this one. No question. Maybe get that swimming pool Wendy had been teasing about. Or the mini-ATVs the boys had been asking for.
Thinking about his family made him remember to call home. He hit the phone button on his in-dash touchscreen, then got a little nervous when it took Wendy so long to answer. But that was the deal these days. Two kids made answering the phone fall very low on his wife’s list of priorities.
She finally picked up on the third ring. “Still alive, I take it?”
He grinned. She was only half-teasing. He knew she worried every time he had a dangerous mission, and while he could never tell her the details, he always let her know the risk. That was something she’d insisted on from the start, and a concession he’d reluctantly made. She needed to be prepared for the worst, she’d said. Today had been risky. Big time risky.
“Still alive,” he confirmed. “I don’t think I could be this hungry otherwise.”
“Stop for food, then, silly.”
“Nope. In too big a hurry to get home.” Brushes with death always left him with a gnawing need to hold his little boys in his arms. Four-year-old Justin and Jackson, at only two, seemed to wipe out the darkness and dirt he dealt with for a living.
“The boys are in a hurry for you, too. They’ve been asking when you’re going to be home every ten minutes for the last three hours.”
“How are the little rugrats today? Drive you nuts?”
“Perfect angels like always. Jack made you a gorgeous self-portrait on the bathroom wall with a black Sharpie, and then to celebrate its completion, tried to flush a couple of pounds of Legos. Justin couldn’t wait to tell on him.” He laughed while she went on. “They’re in the back yard now. I was just about to call them in to get cleaned up for dinner. So it went okay?”
He nodded. “Couldn’t have gone better. Chalk up another win for the good guys.” Today he had thwarted a plot to blow up the capital building in Albany by remotely detonating the explosives while they were still in the terrorists’ van. Took out six of the bastards in the process and really pissed off their handler, the mercenary known only as Mr. White. And not one single civilian casualty. Getting innocents killed was not an acceptable outcome to him. Never had been. And in the Bureau these days, there was always a risk.
“And you’re all in one piece?” Wendy asked.
“Intact. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna leave you to raise our monsters alone.”
She laughed softly. “How far out are you?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“I’ll put the lasagna into the oven. Should be ready about the time you pull in.”
Wendy was a fabulous cook and a terrific mother. He loved her as much as he was capable of loving anyone. His little boys being the one exception to that. He loved them like the sun.
Their marriage hadn’t been the result of any great romance, but rather the result of a potent cocktail consisting of alcohol, libido, and carelessness. But they were making it work for the kids, and in the process they’d become best friends.
“Saw your boss today,” she said. He could hear the pan sliding into the oven, the door closing, the soft beeps when she set the timer. “He looked guilty as hell when he saw me. Flu my ass.”
“Darren? Where’d you run into him?”
“Gas station on the way to Chuck-E-Cheese for a play date. He was talking to the oddest looking—oh, hey, Justin’s hanging upside down from the monkey bars and hollering at me to come out and see. Gotta go. See you when you get here.”
She hung up the phone. The radio came back on. Old school Metallica filled the car, the bass booming so loud it could be heard from outside, and he stepped on it, his stomach growling in anticipation of Wendy’s lasagna.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled onto their neat suburban lane, slowed down to the speed limit, and watched for kids on bikes and skateboards, and other kids walking with their eyes glued to their device screens. Not too many outside at the moment. It wasn’t quite dark. The summer sun was just getting ready to set. When his house came into sight, he smiled. It was a one-level, ranch-style haven, with a huge fenced-in yard for the boys, a back deck with a giant barbecue grill, and a basketball hoop above the garage door.
Wendy must have heard the telltale purr of his powerful engine, because she opened the front door and smiled at him, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. He waved at her, put on his signal and waited for another car to pass between him and his driveway.
And then there was a blinding flash, a deafening explosion, and a percussion that knocked him sideways in the seat. When he lowered his arm, and came upright, a rainstorm of debris was falling all around him. The shockwave had shattered the car windows. He grappled with the door and stumbled out of the car, deafened by the ringing in his ears, almost blinded from the dust cloud and debris and the blood in his eyes. He ran unevenly toward his house, only one goal in mind—getting to his family.
But the house was gone. It was just… gone.
He ran toward where it should’ve been, and then something fell out of the sky and flattened him to the blacktop.
*****
The next time Connor Romano opened his eyes, his boss and best friend, Assistant Director Darren Wade standing over him. He was on his back, unsure why. He looked around and saw fellow agent and nemesis Monroe Stryker standing on his other side. The memory of the blast shot through him like adrenalin and he sat up in what turned out to be a hospital bed, would’ve jumped right out of it, if they hadn’t both grabbed him by the shoulders and held him still.
“Nurse!” Darren shouted. “A little help in here!”
Stryker thumbed the call button on his bed repeatedly. Romano met Darren’s eyes and saw the grief there, the message, the unspoken words. Wendy was gone. He knew that. But he had to ask all the same. “The boys?”
Darren shook his head slowly.
An infusion of darkness filled his veins, pushing everything else out. It replaced his blood with thick, black despair. He sank back onto the bed, no longer struggling to get up.
There was no point in getting up.
“This was White. It had to be White,” Darren said.
“Does it?” Stryker’s tone carried a hundred suggestions, none of them flattering.
Romano glanced at the well-dressed asshole. “Yeah. Unless it was you, you bastard. Everybody knows you wanted Wendy for yourself. Did you finally get frustrated enough to do something about it?”
“I loved her, you bastard!”
“And I married her. Four years ago. You’re still obsessed, though. Obsessed men do violent things.”
“I might be obsessed, but I’m not the explosives expert in the room.”
Romano leaned out of the bed, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and punched him in the face twice before three orderlies were pulling him off. A nurse jabbed him with a tranquilizer. It made his brain go fuzzy before he even hit the pillows.
“I loved her,” Stryker said again. “If you killed her because of that–”
“Shut the fuck up, Stryker,” Darren warned. “You’re out of line. Keep it up and you’ll be out of a job, too. This was White. There’s no question.”
“Yeah? Then how the hell did White know where they lived? How did he find them with all the precautions we take to protect agents’ families?”
Romano reached out with an all-but-limp hand, closed it around the I.V. pole beside him, and tried his damnedest to swing it at Stryker’s head. He was unconscious before he knew whether it had connected.