Page 2 of Hunted

“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.

“My 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.

There was no point in getting up.

“This is White. It has to be White,” Darren said.

“Does it?” Stryker’s tone carried a hundred suggestions, none of them flattering.

Romano glanced at the slick, 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’m not the explosives expert in the room.”

Romano leaned out of the bed, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and drove his knuckles into his face twice before three orderlies were pulling him off, and 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? Huh? 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.

Chapter Two

When Lexi Stoltz came home from her final day at the clinic, her genius father was in their driveway, wearing a trench coat and loading suitcases into a U-Haul van with one hand, while holding an umbrella over his head with the other.

The sun was shining and the sky was blue. It was pushing eighty degrees.

She pulled into the driveway, sighing. It was heartbreaking to watch his decline. A genius researcher whose team had created a vaccine that had nearly wiped a deadly form of malaria, he’d won a Nobel Prize for Medicine. And she was proud of him, but it was unrequited pride.

The dementia had come on suddenly, only a few weeks ago. She’d decided to quit her job at the inner-city free clinic to stay home and take care of him. They wouldn’t hold her position for her, but she was a doctor, and she figured she could find another one without too much trouble when the time came.

Two weeks ago, her father had failed to come home from his job at the university for 3 days in a row. She’d gone to get him, of course, pounded on the door, begged him to just talk to her, but he’d called her an idiot and sent her packing.

That pretty much summed up their relationship. She was an unworthy admirer and he was a medical god.

Everything in her hoped this setback was something simple. She’d had elderly patients who developed symptoms like this due to a simple UTI, but so far he was adamantly refusing any doctor’s appointments or medical care. So she’d brought home two weeks’ worth of broad-spectrum antibiotics and a urinalysis kit. She was going to get to the bottom of this, and she would care for him herself, whether he liked it or not, the stubborn old bastard.

She drove past him into the open garage, then got out of the car, reaching back in for her purse and medical bag. But her father beat her to it, yanked her passenger door open, grabbed both bags, and hustled out to his rented van, moving as fast as a twenty-something, even if he did wobble side to side like a penguin. “Dad, what?—”

He slung the bags into the back of the van, followed by the umbrella, then turned to glare at her from behind thick lenses rimmed in gold. His wild hair fit the mad-genius cliché a little too well, but she couldn’t get him to sit still long enough to let her cut it.

“Get in, Lexia,” he told her. “Hurry, get in. We have to go.” He slammed the van doors closed and thumbed a button to close the garage door. Then he headed to the driver’s side.

She hurried to keep pace. “Where are we going?” she asked.

He opened the door, but Lexi moved in front of him and blocked him from getting in. “Dad, slow down. Just tell me what’s going on.”

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