Page 20 of Forbidden Access

“How’d you meet?” she asked quietly.

A faraway look came into his eyes. “It was after I developed the gambling site that I met Rebecca. I thought it was a coincidence when we bumped into each other, but now I know her father sent her to seduce me. It had been his plan to recruit me all along.”

“Markov used his daughter to get to you?” Thorn’s chest tightened at the thought. What kind of man did that?

“Yeah,” Damian said, the word heavy with resentment. “We dated for a couple of months, and I fell for her hard. Then she invited me to her father’s place. That’s when I met Alek and he offered me a job. I was so in love I couldn’t see I was being played.”

“What kind of job?”

“To help him hide his illegal transactions.”

“You mean money laundering.” Her tone was sharp, but she couldn’t keep the edge out of it.

He nodded, his voice tired. “I was an encryption expert. I knew how to hide things so no one would ever find the trail. That’s when I came up with the idea for Lydian.”

“Your super-anonymous cryptocurrency.”

“That’s it. Alek backed me, and a few months later, we had the foundations in place. I released the open-source code and started building it from there.”

Thorn listened, captivated despite herself. His story wasn’t what she’d expected. It wasn’t black and white.

“But after Rebecca… I couldn’t do it anymore.” The tension in his jaw betrayed his emotions. “I left everything behind.”

Thorn wanted to believe it was because he’d had a change of heart, but she wasn’t so sure. Yet something in his expression made her think twice. Maybe he wasn’t the man she’d pegged him to be.

“I’m surprised Alek let you go,” she said cautiously, “considering what you knew.”

“He knew I’d be incriminating myself if I talked. Lydian was mine, and nothing could be traced back to him. My silence was my own protection.”

“That, I get.”

“So where did you go?” she asked, curiosity piqued despite herself.

Damian arched an eyebrow, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. “So not everything is in my file.”

She tilted her head, a small smile tugging at her lips. “Not that.”

He took a deep breath. “I went to the Middle East.”

“The map in your study.”

“Yeah. I wanted to get as far away from here as possible. Ironically, I went from one conflict straight into another.”

“You went to a war zone?” Her disbelief was evident.

“I fought on the front line against ISIS for almost a year.”

Thorn stared at him, shocked. “You? On the front line?”

“It wasn’t intentional. I went over there to work on a tech project for the Kurds in northern Syria. I ended up fighting because I had no choice.”

Her heart pounded in her chest. This was not the story she’d expected to hear. “What happened?”

Damian leaned back against the wall, staring at the ceiling. “I was met by a man in army fatigues. During the drive into town, he handed me a Kalashnikov and said, ‘If you’re not dead in two weeks, you’ll know everything there is about fighting a war.’”

“But you had no military training.”

He shook his head, a wry smile on his lips. “Zero. The closest I’d come to war was playing Call of Duty.”

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