My wife walked past me and took another man’s hand in our driveway, his black Audi parked halfway across the lawn

I stood in the entryway for three long minutes, listening to the muffled sounds of Colette’s weeping turn into frantic curses, then the scraping sound of her rolling suitcases down the gravel driveway, disappearing into the dark toward the highway.

The house fell quiet again.

I checked the locks on the back kitchen door, verified that the side entrance to the garage was bolted, and walked back into the living room. I looked up the stairwell; Kaden hadn't stirred. The boy was sleeping the deep, untroubled sleep of someone who finally felt safe in his own skin.

I poured myself a glass of water from the kitchen tap, turned off the hallway lamp, and sat back down in the recliner. The wind howled against the eaves, rattling the storm windows, but the old house held its ground. The framing was solid. The foundation was stone. We were going to make it.

Then, at exactly 1:42 AM, the perimeter alarm in the workshop out back chirped twice.

Not a false trigger from the wind. It was the infrared beam that crossed the driveway gate—the one I had installed four years ago when copper thieves hit the industrial park.

I set the water glass down instantly.

I picked up the heavy Maglite flashlight from the shelf by the back door, slipping a thirty-inch iron wrecking bar into my right hand. I didn't turn on the floodlights. I didn't make a sound. I stepped out onto the back deck, keeping low beneath the shadow of the cedar fence.

The sleet had stopped, replaced by a thick, swirling ground mist that made the yard look like an open grave.

At the far end of the driveway, parked halfway across my soaked lawn just like he had on the day this nightmare began, sat the black Audi S8. Its headlights were off, but the faint, ghostly glow of the dashboard screen illuminated the interior.

The driver’s door was wide open, swinging gently in the wind.

Spencer hadn't sent his security guards. He hadn't sent Dale Whitmore. He had come himself.

Through the mist, near the heavy wooden doors of my detached workshop where sixty thousand dollars in tools and flammable lacquer were stored, I saw a dark figure moving with erratic, jerky steps. The smell hit me before I saw the flame—the sharp, sweet, suffocating stench of five gallons of high-octane gasoline poured across the cedar siding.

In the dark, a hand struck a road flare.

The crimson, blinding phosphorus hissed to life, casting demonic, blood-red shadows across Spencer Campbell’s sweat-soaked, wild-eyed face. He was drenched in gasoline, holding the sputtering flare six inches from the saturated wall of my shop.

"Conrad!" he screamed into the foggy night, his voice cracked with total, irreversible madness. "Come out and watch your kingdom burn!"