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He rested his head against the back of Izzy’s couch and closed his eyes. The sensory memories from that night were so strong he could easily take himself right back to his kitchen. “The night before my graduation, I came home after dark. As soon as I walked into the house, I knew something was wrong. There was an abnormal silence. The power had been cut.
“I remember that silence. It’s burned into my mind. It was so quiet I could hear my own heart racing. I remember the fear, too, the certainty something was seriously wrong but, honestly, I never expected what I found.”
He stared off into space as he was transported back in time. Then Izzy stroked his cheek again, pulling him from the dark water that threatened to drown him. “I walked into the kitchen to find Callie bleeding out on the floor, but before I could even register what I was looking at, I was grabbed from behind. There were two guys. When I say I had no skills back then, I mean it. As much as I struggled, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to save her, my daughter, or myself.
“And it was all a fucking mistake. The wrong fucking house. They wanted my neighbor. All a sick, twisted, fucking mistake.” He continued to gaze at nothing, speaking on autopilot just to get the words out. Now that he’d started, they felt like a poison, eating him from the inside out, and he needed to purge. “They knocked me down, carved the fuck out of my face, and threatened me over something that had nothing to do with me. I couldn’t get away. All I could do was take it and pray they’d leave before they realized there was a sleeping child upstairs. They beat the fuck out of me until I passed out on the floor next to my dead wife, having no clue where my baby was.”
“Jesus, Jig,” she said, her voice heavy with sorrow. “But…” Her voice cracked. “But they found her?”
He nodded, tears burning his eyes. “I never saw my daughter alive again, Izzy. I was late getting home so I didn’t get to kiss her goodnight.” God, how he missed the soft weight of his daughter in his arms. The way she’d light up and quiver with excitement as she stood by the door waiting for him to come home from work each evening. “She was a fucking baby.” Wetness tracked down his cheeks, and his chest tightened until he could barely breathe.
“Shhh,” Izzy said, wiping his tears away even as she ignored the ones trailing down her own face. “You can stop. You don’t have to tell me more.” There was so much genuine caring in her voice and in her touch. He wanted to soak it all up because it was the only thing warming his heart enough to prevent it from turning to a block of ice.
Jig shook his head and clutched her hand like a lifeline. “No. I want to say it. You need to hear it. Hear who I am. After their deaths, I fell into a deep depression. I stopped going to work, cut ties with both our families, I couldn’t even get out of bed. Cops had nothing, though I’m pretty sure they were in the pocket of the asshole who killed my family. Then, one day, I was watching the news, and I saw a mugshot of one of the guys who’d been in my house. Who murdered my—” He swallowed, unable to repeat it. “He’d killed someone else in a carjacking gone bad and was on the loose. That story snapped me out of my fog. I was done being a pussy. Done being unable to protect myself or anyone else. Done letting life happen to me. In that moment, I decided I’d be the one controlling what happened in my life from then on out, so I went to the gym and learned how to fight, training ten to twelve hours a day for months. I also went to the range and learned to shoot. Basically, I turned myself into an entirely different man.”
“Jigsaw,” she whispered.
He nodded. “Yeah. About eight months after their deaths, I went off in search of the two men who’d broken in, their boss, and anyone else in their gang’s chain of command.” He looked her straight in the eye. “Their boss was a powerful crime lord, and it took me months to track him and formulate a plan to kill him. In that time, I became obsessed with uncovering every aspect of his life. The combination of grief and anger nearly destroyed me. I killed two men one night after following them from a bar. The men who killed my family. I was nothing more than a rabid animal bent on revenge.”
