Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
CLOVER
T he waves pummeled me as I swam along the edge of the cliff over to the cave, spilling over my head in merciless torrents and shoving my body into the rocks. The sea was always freezing, even in June, and the shock of being repeatedly doused by that frigid water made it nearly impossible to think about anything other than getting the fuck out of it.
By the time I found the entrance and hauled my soaking wet, half-drowned arse onto the narrow ledge outside of it, all I could do was lie there and gasp and stare up at the sky. For a few moments, it was just me, my burning lungs, and my shivering body. Nothing else. No thoughts. No feelings. Just the sound of the sea, the smell of my burning town, and the hollow echo of my soul. I was simply too depleted to think or feel.
I hoped it would last forever.
But soon, another sound joined the rhythmic lapping of the waves, one that was alarming enough to break through my exhausted, traumatized fog—the deep roar of rapidly approaching jets.
Finally , I thought. The Air Corps were coming.
I continued to stare at the sky above me as three smoke-spewing missiles sliced across the starless night, followed by the planes that had fired them. I rolled my foggy head toward the cruise ship just in time to see it return fire. The Russian missiles crossed paths with ours in the air, their contrails nearly kissing, and then … night turned into day.
I threw my arm over my face as an inferno of heat and light enveloped me. The explosions were so loud that they rattled the bones in my chest, the sounds more terrifying than anything I could have ever imagined. Grinding metal and groaning steel. Squealing engines and screaming men. A plane plunged into the water a hundred meters in front of me, and I had to scramble up on top of the cave entrance to avoid being washed out to sea by the massive wave it’d created.
From there, I could see that the entire deck of the ship was on fire, and there was a gaping hole right in the center. But even as the ship burned and slowly split in half, even as its engulfed crew threw their flaming bodies into the sea, it somehow kept pumping missiles into the air.
Another jet went down out past the Eye, but I couldn’t see where it landed through the black smoke billowing out of the belly of the ship. I turned my gaze skyward, looking for the third plane, when the right side of the ship suddenly erupted in an explosion so powerful that it knocked me on my arse. The fire must have reached the ship’s cache of ammunition because the detonations kept happening, one after the other in that exact same spot, producing a fireball the size of a hot-air balloon that kept being refilled. It was so bright that it illuminated everything from the island to the cliff.
Including the lifeless body of a man drifting toward the rocks.
The pilot.
Nothing about him suggested that he might be alive. He was floating face up, arms motionless, legs submerged, and I’d seen that crash. No one could have survived that. But the second I saw him, my exhaustion, my emptiness, my complete and utter depletion were forgotten, replenished with fresh energy and pulsing with purpose.
I felt that same pull—that urgent, desperate, unexplainable need—that I’d felt on the cliff.
Jump , it commanded again.
And just like before, my body responded without question.
Compared to the thirty-meter plunge I’d just made, the leap off the cave’s entrance felt like nothing. I was already freezing, so my muscles and lungs didn’t even seize from the cold. And I wasn’t running for my life this time.
I was swimming toward his.
The waves were relentless, but so was I, diving under the surface between breaths where the water was easier to cut through. Even though it felt like I was swimming in place, for every meter of progress I fought to make, the current carried him three meters closer to me.
The need to wrap my arms around him propelled me. I pictured myself embracing him as I hauled him to safety. Anticipated the moment when my chest would be pressed against his, when his body would be draped over mine. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t know this person. I didn’t even know if he was still alive.
In fact, I was so focused on reaching him that when I came up for my next breath, I didn’t notice the massive swell of water surging toward me until it was almost too late. Diving beneath the surface just before it crashed over my head, I felt the weight of the churning water shove me violently into the deep. It tossed my body like a rag doll, rolling and spinning me toward the rocky sea floor, but when it finally passed, I somehow found my way back to the surface.
The pilot did not. I knew it before my head even breached the water.
The ship was now completely engulfed in flames, illuminating the choppy black sea and airplane wreckage floating around me, so it only took a split second for my eyes to verify what my gut already knew. Then, with a deep breath and a renewed sense of determination, I dived back under.
He was down there somewhere, and I was going to find him. His presence was a warm breeze on my skin—I could tell which direction it was coming from even though I couldn’t see it. Chasing that sensation, I drove myself deeper, muscles pumping, lungs burning. And with every passing second, I felt less and less in control of my actions.
After everything I’d survived that day, everything I’d already lost, I was going to drown in the sea, trying to rescue a stranger who was probably already dead. And there was nothing I could do to stop myself.
I’d barely had a single conscious thought since I’d jumped off that cliff. My heart and mind were a pair of traumatized voids, vacant hostages inside a body that was propelling them straight toward the ocean floor.
My lungs begged for air, and my nerves twitched with frantic commands that my muscles ignored, but a spark of blue light behind my closed eyelids distracted me from the fear. Again and again, it flashed, like lightning during a storm, and in those split-second illuminations, it was as if it was showing me a parallel universe.
Flash.
Blue light spilled over the sea floor, revealing a treasure trove of trinkets and jewelry rather than seashells and starfish.
Flash.
I was standing on the bottom instead of swimming toward it, weighed down by some invisible force.
Flash.
The blue glow surrounded me in this alternate reality, pulsing and surging, taunting and teasing. It was the force holding me captive, and it was enjoying itself immensely.
Flash.
I was going to inhale. I could feel it. At any second, I was going to lose the battle between my need to breathe and my will to live.
Flash.
With my jaw clenched shut, my muscles jerking violently from the cold, and every cell in my body screaming in panic, I pulled a ring off my finger and held it out to the greedy blue glow. An offering, a plea, in exchange for my life.
Flash.
With a swirl of bubbles, the ring disappeared. The light disappeared. The invisible weights around my feet disappeared. And when I reached into the void it’d left behind …
He was there.
Even with my eyes closed and the sea blacker than midnight, my arms slipped around his waist as if I could see him in the dark. The size and shape of his body felt perfect and familiar against mine, and I pushed off the sea floor without realizing that I was even close to it. The pilot and I shot up effortlessly, as if propelled by another invisible force, but the moment our heads broke through the surface, only one of us gasped in relief.
Panic raced through my veins, pushing me to swim harder as I struggled to keep both of our heads above water. The current did most of the work, guiding us into the mouth of the cave as the nightmarish sounds of the ship breaking in half ricocheted off the stone walls.
Finding a foothold in the side of the inlet, I pushed our upper bodies out of the water and dropped the man onto his back on the pebbled beach. I didn’t know what I’d expected to find, but when I finally gazed down at the stranger’s face, mine contorted into a silent wail.
He was dead.
And he was the most beautiful corpse I’d ever seen.
Even with nothing more than the ambient firelight reflecting off the water, I could tell that the smooth skin covering his high cheekbones and square jaw was drained of all color.
That his full, unbreathing lips were as purple as a deep bruise.
That his closed eyelids, rimmed in thick black lashes, didn’t so much as flutter.
And that the water streaming down the side of his face was red instead of clear.
“No!” I shouted, giving his shoulder a shove. “No! Wake up!”
I slammed my fists down on his unbreathing chest. “Wake up! Please !”
Again and again, I pounded on the hard muscle above his cold, dead heart. A strike for every person I’d lost. For every person I’d been too late or too weak or too afraid to save.
Ma.
Odin.
Sheila.
Da.
Him.
“Why?” I screamed, my voice cracking along with my mind as I grabbed his jacket with both hands. “Why are you doing this to me?”
I didn’t know who I was yelling at, and I didn’t know what else to do, but I knew that accepting another loss simply wasn’t an option. So, in a sudden act of desperation, I threw myself forward, slammed my mouth over his, and blew.
The moment our lips touched, a warm, giddy golden glow seeped into the marrow of my bones. It spread through my body, lighting everything in its path. It turned me on, made me hum. I felt like a neon sign that had been plugged in for the very first time. My fragile, forgotten, hollow soul now sang with life, radiating heat and vibrant color.
I exhaled every bit of my wonder and confusion and pain and need through our sealed lips, and as soon as the pilot’s lungs expanded under my fisted hands, he jerked away from me, rolling onto his side and heaving a bellyful of seawater onto the pebbled ground.
I laughed in relief as he coughed and gasped, a tingly rush of joy dancing over my damp skin. His life felt like a gift from God, just for me—a consolation after so much death.
Until I noticed that the jacket of his uniform was hanging halfway off, and underneath, staining the crisp blue-and-white striped shirt below, was a massive puddle of blood.
Dread slithered up my spine and coiled around my heart.
Not because of the blood.
But because of the stripes.
I’d been watching the Irish military on the news for the last year while they battled England for control of Northern Ireland, and none of their uniforms had ever looked like that. Especially not their fighter pilots. They wore dark green jumpsuits. Always.
This man wasn’t my salvation. My glimmer of sunshine in the midst of a storm.
He was the goddamn lightning.
I recoiled from him so fast that I lost my foothold and slipped back into the inlet. Swimming backward to get away from him, I didn’t stop until my shoulder hit the opposite wall.
What had I done?
What the hell had I done?
That cave was the only reason I was still alive, the only hope I had of staying that way, and I’d just welcomed a potential killer inside with open arms.
Clinging to the rocks, I stared at the back of his foreign uniform, rising and falling with every raspy, ragged breath, as tears of hatred blurred my vision.
I pictured Odie’s sweet, round cheeks. Da’s big, blond beard. Sheila’s severed arm, lying in the smoldering, blood-smeared wreckage of my home. A drone telling me to surrender or die.
In my mind, this stranger morphed into the singular embodiment of the entire Russian military. He was the reason my family was dead. He was the man behind the machine. He was the missiles and the ship and the tanks and the drones.
And he deserved to die. Not them.
Shoving off from the wall, I crossed the inlet in two strokes and hauled myself out of the water. Squatting down in front of the sailor—or officer, based on the fanciness of his uniform—who was still lying unconscious on his side, I gave his shoulder a hard shove. He rolled onto his back without a fight, eyelids closed and lips parted.
I tore my gaze away from his hauntingly handsome face and focused instead on the patches and medallions decorating his chest—the ones that told me who he really was.
The ones that reminded me what he’d taken from me.
I knew I was freezing by the way my fingers shook as I wrapped them around his left bicep, but all I could feel was a blinding-hot lava flow of rage as I yanked on his arm, desperate to roll him into the inlet.
“Get … out!” I grunted, pulling and shoving, but he was too heavy, and I was too exhausted. I’d lost my wellies in the sea after my cliff jump, so every push and shove caused my knees and bare feet to grind harder against the pebbles on the beach until they eventually slid out from under me completely.
I landed with a shriek on the Russian’s chest, and when he didn’t move, I lay there, draped over his unconscious, bleeding body, and wept.