Black at Heart

Prologue

Supervisory Special Agent Wyatt Blackstone had never had to attend the memorial service of one of his own team members before. After today, he hoped to God he never attended another one.

Especially since it was his fault Lily Fletcher was dead.

Against his better judgment, he had allowed a woman he knew shouldn't be in the field to participate in a sting operation with another FBI Cyber Action Team. She'd had no business being there. Lily had been an IT specialist, a computer nerd, young, untried, sweetly enthusiastic. But also haunted by her demons. Those demons had driven her to work a case she should never have been involved in. They had pushed her to be in on the takedown of a suspect with twisted cyber fantasies of abusing children had haunted her dreams.

And there, everything had gone straight to hell. One › agent dead on the ground. Lily wounded and trapped before bleeding to death in a vehicle driven by a desperate madman.

He was tormented by the thought of those awful, desperate hours she had endured.

The memorial service had been small and private. The FBI had not made it a media event, as they could have. Wyatt hadn't wanted it that way; none of the group had. Because of the screwups that had led to her death, and his team's recent successful capture of a serial killer known as the Professor, the bureau acceded to his demands.

Lily had had no surviving family and very few friends outside the bureau. Though many agents and FBI supervisors had attended the service in the nondenominational chapel, few had continued on to the cemetery. Not Arlington, though she had been entitled to that. Instead, Lily's thirty-year existence in this world was marked with a simple headstone in a small, private churchyard in Annapolis. Others nearby bore the names of her sister, her nephew, and her parents. He hadn't known her mother and father had died on the same day during I Lily's childhood until he read the dates.

An entire family gone. Plucked off one tragedy at a time.

After the chaplain's final graveside prayer, only Wyatt and the other members of his team, who had formed a family of their own, had remained. Ignoring the bitterness of the January day, they'd talked quietly, said their good-byes. Then they'd all drifted away, lost in their own sadness, wondering how things might have turned out, differently.

Wyatt didn't think he would ever stop wondering.

Even now, hours later, as he sat in the dark in his house, nursing a tumbler full of whiskey, he found it hard to believe. Sweet, quiet Lily, so eager to please despite being so visibly wounded by the horrors that had befallen her, was gone. Senselessly killed by someone who hadn't been fit to touch a single strand of her golden hair.

"I'm sorry," he murmured, lifting his glass to his mouth. "I should have protected you."

He sipped once. Then again. He needed the fire to spread through his body, burning out the anger, the helpless frustration. The grief.

Wyatt never allowed himself to grieve. He'd learned as a child how futile it was to wish someone back from the dead, to ask why horrible things happened, to give in to sorrow.

But Lily? He could grieve for Lily.

Realizing it was almost midnight, he finally rose, needing to go to bed. The past several nights had been sleepless ones. Tomorrow was another workday, another chance to keep moving forward, stopping whatever ugliness he possibly could.

Before he even reached the stairs, though, his cell phone rang. Wyatt pulled it from his pocket, slid it open, and lifted it to his ear.

"Blackstone."

No response at first, but a hollowness told him the line wasn't dead.

"Hello?"

Another long pause. Then a soft voice emerged from the silence like a specter appearing out of his own memories.

"Wyatt?"

He froze, haunted by the pain in that one whispered word. "Who is this?"

"Help me, Wyatt. Please help me."