Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 70370 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 281(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70370 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 281(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
“You think this man wants to hire you for some demolition?”
“Illegal demolition, yes.”
“Why would he think you would be willing to do something like that?”
He glanced past my shoulder to the window. His gaze was unfocused for a few moments, then he met my eyes.
“I was not always on the right side of the law, Sofia.”
“You mean Hidden Justice?”
He shook his head slowly. “Unlike Marcus or Damien, I wasn’t brought on board HJ through the normal channels. I didn’t go to the police academy or have military training.”
“What are you saying?”
He scrubbed his face. “My father was a specialist. He defused bombs. Built them. He worked for the government. He was brilliant. I was always fascinated by his work, and he let me sit with him a lot. I learned very early in life how a bomb was made. How to take one apart. We would make small devices and go into the country and blow things up—like a tree stump or whatever. I loved it. My mother hated my fascination with it, but she allowed it because she knew if I was with my father, I was safe. She said more than once if I was left on my own, she was afraid of what I would do.”
I smiled and nodded, wanting him to keep talking.
“We were just a middle-class family. Struggling. My mother’s parents were gone. My grandmother—my father’s mother—was alive and lived with us. She died when I was eight. Neither of my parents had siblings. No other family holding them there, and the country was volatile at times. Times were hard. My father lost his job due to cutbacks. An opportunity came up, and we left everything behind and came to Canada and started over.”
“Did you like it?”
He shrugged. “I was resentful of being taken from what I knew, but I liked it here. It was more modern, the city was bigger. My father had a job that gave him a steady income, and my mom worked in a coffee shop. We lived in a small house, but it was nice. He worked for a construction company, razing buildings. That fascinated me too, and he often let me go to work with him.” He smiled grimly. “When I was eighteen, he told me I knew more about bombs than he did. That the student had surpassed the master.”
“So you went into the same field? Demolishing buildings?”
“My parents wanted me to have an education. My father held three degrees, and he wanted me to explore my options. I had always been ahead at school. I skipped grades nine and eleven, I tested so high. But I tried to please them, so I went. But university bored me, so I quit and I went to work.”
He stood and began to pace, his voice and accent thick when he spoke. “I was twenty-two when my parents went on a trip. They had been saving for a long time to go back to Romania and see old friends. They had been gone two weeks when I got a notice that they had been killed in a train accident. It derailed, and the car they were in had no survivors.”
“Egan,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“I found out it was an attack. Planned and executed. The small group that did it were militants, wanting attention. They got mine. They killed innocent civilians to get their name out there. Using a bomb.”
He met my eyes. “I was furious. Consumed by grief. I went after them. Put myself deep undercover, with no one knowing. The few friends I had here thought I was on an extended trip. I knew no one back in Romania any longer. I wanted revenge—to make the men who did this pay for my loss. To give some justice to others who had lost so much that day as well. It took a long time. I plotted and planned. Got into the group. I killed them all.” He laughed without humor. “Locked them in a room and blew them up the way they did to my parents and all the other lives they took.”
I shuddered at the cold look in his eyes. The flatness of his voice. The doctor in me wept at the thought of the lives he’d taken. The daughter in me understood his need for vengeance.
“And?”
He kept pacing. Walking around the room, picking up a piece of sculpture or a small picture, holding it in his hands, then setting it down and continuing to move. He strode past me, and I reached out, taking his hand and pulling him down beside me.
“Tell me.”
“I took out the group, but there were others. I became a self-taught mercenary, tracking them down. Taking them out. I was known as the silent bomber. The deadly ghost. I could walk in and plant a bomb and never be seen. I had no identity. You never knew who I was until it was too late. If you were on my radar, that was it. I got you. I razed buildings. Defused bombs planted to hurt innocents. Even though I wanted to help people, and I did, I had a reputation. A scary one.” He shut his eyes. “I loaned my talents to some groups I probably should not have in the name of revenge. I did that for three years. Then one day, I couldn’t anymore. I didn’t want the violence. The blood. I couldn’t bring my parents back, and I was fast slipping down a slope. A dangerous one. Right and wrong were becoming blurred. I walked away and came back to Canada.”