Chapter 3
CHAPTER 3
DAMIEN
“ S mer-nah!”
The deafening rabble of Russian voices, screaming drills, and clanging socket wrenches fell silent as a hundred crewmen darted out from behind the tanks they had been servicing and stood at perfect attention.
Facing me.
It was a show of respect that I hadn’t earned and damn sure didn’t deserve. And they all knew it.
“Topside. Now,” I barked in Russian, reigniting the noise and activity in the belly of Russia’s most prized warship.
The sound of tools crashing into bins and boots marching across the floor echoed off the metal bulkheads until the last man disappeared into the stairwell and the hatch slammed shut behind him.
And then the hold was silent again.
I was supposed to be in that stairwell with them, but I couldn’t make myself move. There were no windows in the hold. No sights or sounds that might remind me of where I was. Down there, I could pretend like we were anchored somewhere else.
Literally anywhere else.
It had been five years since I’d stepped foot on Irish soil, but it felt like five lifetimes. Every day that I’d spent sparring with Bratva soldiers in the Siberian snow instead of playing football in Phoenix Park, every day that I heard the guttural grunts of Russian instead of the songlike cadence of Irish, every day that I ate shchi and kasha instead of soda bread and shepherd’s pie, I felt another piece of the boy that I’d once been burn away. Now, all that remained was a single charred cinder—a brittle, unwanted reminder of who I used to be.
Of who I would never be again.
Remembering that they had cameras on every inch of that ship, I clasped my hands behind my back and began walking between the rows of tanks. My eyes swept over the machines as if I were inspecting them for fuck knew what, but all I could really see was a merciless onslaught of memories from my childhood in Dublin.
For five years, coming home to Ireland had been my only goal—my singular obsession, my sole reason for living—but now that I was finally back, I couldn’t even bring myself to look at it.
“Lieutenant,” a man shouted in Russian over the intercom, causing me to stand at attention and face the security camera on the bulkhead beside me.
“This is Senior Lieutenant Petrov.”
Petrov. My superior. I pictured the brass buttons on his overly decorated jacket straining to contain his swollen beer gut.
“What the fuck are you doing down there? The captain wants you topside for his speech. Now .”
I answered with nothing more than a salute. I knew he would see it—he was obviously watching me—but I also tried to limit all conversation as much as possible. I’d been taught to speak Russian without a detectable accent as part of my father’s rigorous training, but I didn’t want to press my luck. I’d been warned that no Russian—Bratva or military—would ever trust me if they found out where I was from.
And honestly, they probably shouldn’t.
I wasn’t one of them, and I never would be. I’d been taken against my will at the age of fifteen—the second my father found out he had a bastard son in Dublin—and thrown into an underground Bratva development program called the Kletka. It meant cage , and that was exactly what the fuck it was. A prison-like boot camp in the frozen tundra of Siberia, where the organization trained their potential new soldiers to fight, kill, and most importantly, obey. I was fed a steady diet of steroids and beatings until I was big enough to fight back. And then … the real training began.
Because my father had no other sons, he saw me as his only chance at immortality—an angry, hateful lump of clay that he could mold into his own disgusting image. Initially, he’d been training me to take over the Bratva and carry on the family’s gun running, drug muling, and human trafficking businesses, but when Russia began planning to invade Ireland, he enlisted me in the Navy and pulled enough strings to have me start as a lieutenant. He didn’t want me engaged in actual combat—I was far too valuable for that. He’d just wanted to solidify my identity as a Russian by making me participate in the destruction of my own homeland.
It was a ten-story climb from the hold of the ship to the deck, but I wished that it were ten thousand. I stared down at my boots as I ascended the stairs, focused on their rhythmic stomping, but all too soon, the dull black leather began to glow gray. The moment I lifted my head and saw that overcast Irish sky through the porthole, my heart began to pound against my ribs like a prisoner thrashing against the bars of its cell. The final glowing cinder of my boyhood longed to see home, but the betrayed, burned-out husk of a man that I’d become knew better.
Seeing it would only make what I’d been sent there to do that much harder.
With a deep breath and an even deeper sense of dread, I opened the topside hatch and stepped out onto the deck. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see that green coastline without wanting to scream, so I shut everything out, except for what was directly in front of me. I didn’t feel the summer breeze on my skin, I didn’t taste the salt of the Irish Sea in the air, and I refused to hear the cries of the gulls I’d once fed as a boy. Instead, I did what I’d been doing at the Kletka since the day I’d realized that there was no escape.
I accepted my situation, and I armored the fuck up.
By the time I reached the stage, my longing, my rage, my powerlessness and despair were all safely locked away behind the numb, bulletproof facade of a Bratva-trained killer.
Captain Orlov watched me take my place in line next to the other officers with an impatient scowl on his vodka-flushed face, but he didn’t reprimand me. Either my mask was terrifying enough to make him think twice or he was too excited about starting a war to waste his time on me.
Senior Lieutenant Petrov, who’d barked at me over the intercom, stood to my left, back stiff and belly out, leaving nothing to my right but the one fucking place I couldn’t afford to acknowledge.
So, I stared straight ahead at the two thousand troops gathered shoulder to shoulder on the deck. This was what they’d been waiting for, what they’d been promised when they were drafted. The pay was shite. The conditions were worse. But on that shore, they’d be given complete immunity to rape, steal, maim, or kill anything and everything that crossed their path. And judging by the gritted teeth and wild eyes of the men staring back at me, their patience was wearing thin.
“Comrades,” Captain Orlov’s voice boomed through the loudspeakers, and two thousand hands immediately shot up in salute.
Including mine.
Like a fucking puppet.
I could almost feel my father tugging on the invisible marionette strings above me, lifting my chin, squaring my shoulders.
“Today, we fight not for Russia, but for the honor of President Abramov himself!”
Every saluting hand sliced forward with a guttural, “Ura!”
I felt nothing.
“Over twenty years ago, the United Irish Brotherhood ordered the murder of President Abramov’s uncle, Dmitry. But when Alexi came here to avenge his uncle’s death, like a man of courage, of honor, the UIB behaved like cowards. They had him arrested— framed —for unspeakable, heinous crimes.”
The troops booed and spat on the ground, as if their precious president hadn’t done exactly what the fuck he was accused of. Human trafficking, murder, arms dealing—that was probably the least of it. Everyone knew that Alexi Abramov was a Bratva kingpin who’d hijacked last year’s election and taken the Kremlin by force. We just weren’t supposed to say it out loud.
“President Abramov spent two years locked in a prison cell because of these deceitful, lying bastards.” Captain Orlov thrust a hand in the direction of the shore, and without thinking, my gaze followed.
The sight of the Irish coast hit me like a sucker punch, forcing the air from my lungs in a sudden, nauseating rush. Gray stone cliffs sloped down to the sea, blanketed with green grass and dripping with wildflowers. Waves crashed against the rocks hypnotically, like the rhythmic curl of a beckoning finger, calling me home. And behind them, gray clouds gathered where the cliffs met the sky. It looked like smoke.
Like the cliffs were on fire.
An onslaught of childhood memories played over a soundtrack of my own silent, self-hating screams, and for one torturous second, I felt everything. Every useless, agonizing emotion I’d refused to feel for the last five years flooded my body like boiling toxic waste, scalding my skin from the inside out before I finally pulled my mental armor back on and clung to the numbness.
That’s exactly what he wants , I reminded myself. To hurt me. To break me. To control me once and for all.
“Since then, the UIB has branded itself a political party , and like a virus, it has infiltrated every level of the Irish government. They promised to reclaim Northern Ireland from the UK, but in delivering on that promise, they have made themselves weaker than ever. Their military is depleted. Their allies have vanished. They are isolated, defenseless, and ours for the taking!” Orlov roared as the troops shouted and thrust their fists in the air.
I hoped that if anyone noticed my distraction, they’d assume that I was scanning the coastline for threats because I was incapable of tearing my eyes away from that sight. I followed the cliffs as they sloped down to sea level, the rocky beach giving way to a pier that stretched out into the water, dotted with barnacle-crusted fishing boats and a lighthouse that hadn’t functioned in years.
Howth Harbour. I’d been there as a lad. We took a school trip to Ireland’s Eye to see the ruins of a monastery that the Vikings had raided. I’d never been on a boat before that day.
Now, I was back, on a very different boat, and this time, I was the one doing the raiding.
Bile seared the back of my throat, but I forced that down too.
“Like a Trojan horse, this converted cruise ship has already allowed us to breach their defenses. She is too big to take into Dublin Bay without drawing suspicion, so from here, we’ll take Howth peninsula and push through to Dublin by land.”
I scanned the boats, the docks, the paths, the beaches—searching for signs of life and praying that I wouldn’t find any.
The boats were all docked. The pavements were empty. The windows of every house, shop, and restaurant were dark. And a seed of desperate, masochistic hope took root in my chest.
Howth was a ghost town. We weren’t sneak-attacking them—the residents had already left.
“Crewmen, deploy the tanks and head straight to the harbor. Infantry and intelligence, follow in the rafts. Once the bombing has stopped, set up an encampment, establish roadblocks, and deploy the drones to look for survivors. Artillery troops, remain on deck and report to your assigned officer.
“Tonight, we show the UIB that a crime against President Abramov is a crime against Russia, and Russia … never … forgets!”
The cheering was deafening, but I didn’t feel a fucking thing.
“Lieutenant,” Petrov bellowed, clapping me on the shoulder as he steered me off the stage. “You are a lucky man. Your platoon has been assigned to short-range shelling.” He swept his sausage-like fingers over the Howth coastline. “It is much more fun when you can see the shit that you are blowing up, no?” He laughed, giving my shoulder a series of shakes. “My men on the rocket launchers will be jealous.”
I wanted to rip his hand off and stab him in the throat with the severed bone.
Instead, those marionette strings forced my own hand to lift in a salute and my legs to march over to the artillery guns, where my platoon was awaiting my instruction.
I couldn’t change what was about to happen. Despite the authority implied by my officer’s uniform and the patches on my chest, I had no power here. I was just as much a prisoner on this ship as I had been in the Kletka. The only thing I had control over was whether or not they broke me. And at that, I would never fail. I would bury my humanity so deep that even I couldn’t find it. I would carve out my heart, snuff out my soul, if that was what it took to deny them the satisfaction of my pain.
And that was exactly what I did. I took solace in the fact that the town had been evacuated, I accepted the situation, and I armored the fuck up.