Page 28 of The Specialist

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.”

“How did you get into Hidden Justice?”

“Along with bombs, computers fascinated me. They were the only classes I took that I enjoyed. I kept teaching myself, and I learned how to write programs, hack, do all sorts of things. I could build a computer and dismantle one the way I could a bomb. I had heard of Hidden Justice. Whispers and rumors—the way they extracted vengeance. I dug deep but found little.” He smiled, a real one this time. “But Damien spotted me. He dug into my trail, and one day Marcus appeared on my doorstep. He knew enough about me to be dangerous, yet he didn’t threaten me. We met other times. I told him the complete truth, filling in a lot of blanks for him, but he was unfazed. Told me about the manifesto at Hidden Justice. Gave me a chance to come on board and make a difference—this time, legally. Or at least as legal as HJ is. I could be a good guy again. Help people.”

“And you have.”

“I have killed a lot of people, Sofia. Done things I’m not proud of, but those days are behind me. I know right from wrong. I won’t cross that line again.”

“But you’re worried that now I know your past, I’ll leave you?”

He sighed. “My past, plus there might be someone else who knows it. Who might threaten me, and I know how you worry. That the idea of something happening to me might push you away.”

I was quiet as I mulled over what he had told me. His past hadn’t shocked me. Damien had hinted once that it was dark. Egan was a different man now; of that, I was certain. He showed it in the way he lived, the way he acted. The loyalty to his friends. The tenderness he showed me. The thought of someone threatening him did frighten me, but it angered me more than anything.

“Egan, I—”

I was interrupted by my phone, and I glanced at it with a frown. “I’m sorry, I have to take this.”

I answered the call from the ER. Hearing about the mass casualty coming in, I agreed to head in right away. Egan was already on his feet by the time I hung up, grabbing the car keys. “Come, Sofia. I will take you.”

In the car, I called the ER back, getting more details. Egan drove fast, skillfully going around other cars and getting me to the hospital in record time. “We’ll talk more,” I assured him as I climbed out of the car.

He indicated the doors of the ER. “Go. They need you.”

I hurried away, stopping as a thought occurred to me. I turned, but Egan had already driven away. I wanted to tell him everything was okay. That when I said we would talk, it would be only to set aside his fears. But he was gone.

I planned to settle it in the morning.

CHAPTER EIGHT