Chapter 20
CHAPTER 20
CLOVER
D amien Hughes.
The deep purr of his Irish accent was still vibrating through my chest when his body slumped over sideways onto the floor.
Shite.
I released the wheel, making sure it was tracking straight before I turned to assess the massive body lying unconscious behind me.
At least, I hoped he was just unconscious.
I hated him for what he and his men had done to Howth, what they’d done to my family, to me. I hated him for letting me believe a lie. He’d taken full advantage of my desperation and stupidity the night before, knowing damn well that I never would have touched him if I’d known the truth. I hated that he’d seen me naked and touched me without my permission at the fish market. Just like the rest of them. I hated the way he’d scared me back there, like my father, with his explosive rage and lack of remorse. But mostly, I hated how hard it was to hold on to that hate.
When I looked at him, I saw a friend.
When I heard his voice, I heard the green hills and rocky cliffs of home.
When I felt his touch, I knew I was safer behind enemy lines than I had been under my own roof.
And when I saw him unconscious and bleeding on the floor, all the hurt I’d been trying to hold on to dispersed into the air like a fine mist of seawater, exposing the tender, terrifying truth underneath.
“Damien.” I dropped to my knees, patting his scruffy cheek as I searched his body for new injuries.
I unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off his shoulder far enough to expose his new bullet wound. It had only grazed his arm, but the gash was deep, and he’d lost more blood. Blood that he probably couldn’t replace with his current level of dehydration.
I knew from experience that his dead weight was too much for me to move, so I slipped the knife out of his boot pocket—which was now lashed to my ankle—and cut as much of his shirt off as I could. Visions of a white room full of naked bodies chained to sinks immediately hijacked my mind. I could suddenly smell human waste, feel the scratch of a blade down my chest, and hear the tearing of fabric as my clothes tumbled to the ground. My heart began to pound as I sliced through the blue-and-white material, tearing it into bandage-sized strips, but I pushed the images away almost as quickly as they’d appeared.
I’m the one with the knife this time , I told myself. And I’m using it to cut up something of theirs.
I needed whiskey and water, so I stayed the course, traveling south at full speed along Ireland’s coast as I scoured every inch of my father’s filthy boat. It was agony, going through his things. I hadn’t been on his boat in years, but I’d spent so much time on it as a child that I still remembered every nook and cranny.
He couldn’t afford childcare after Ma died, so I’d spent every summer and school holiday out on the boat with him. I wished I could say that it had given us time to bond, but instead, it just gave him more time to yell at me. I was always getting in the way or touching something I shouldn’t, so by the time I turned nine, he’d decided that I was old enough to stay home alone—with a list of chores, of course—but for a year and a half, the Pride of Howth had been my sad, salty home away from home.
I saw my father’s face in every wet, reflective surface, saw his callous knuckles in every knot. As I tore through his belongings, I braced myself for his wrath, knowing that at any moment, he was going to come barreling out of the cabin, cursing and snatching things out of my hands and shoving me to the ground—or worse—but he didn’t. My heart raced, and my fingers shook as I rummaged through his storage bins, but no one came to hurt me, and the relief I felt made me sick to my stomach.
I found at least five nearly empty bottles of Jameson, dozens of crushed cans of stout, food wrappers with no food, and exactly zero bottles of water, but when I dropped to my knees in the middle of the deck—exhausted and defeated and dying of thirst—I stared at the buckets on the bow and realized that it wasn’t seawater sloshing around inside of them, like it would have been after a catch. Those buckets were full of rainwater . In fact, they were brimming with it.
Rushing to Damien’s side with my arms full of bottles, I soaked the fabric strips in what little whiskey was left and tied one around his heavy arm. The muscle immediately tensed in my hands as Damien’s face contorted in pain.
“Damien … Damien, wake up.”
A whisper of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth before I tightened the knot, causing those lips to part with a baring of teeth.
“Havin’ a good dream, were ya?” I asked, placing another whiskey-soaked strip of fabric, this one folded into a square, against the exit wound on his side.
A hiss followed.
“Ya said my name.” That small smirk returned, melting some of the ice that had formed around my heart before Damien’s features went slack and his face rolled to the side.
“Oh no. Stay with me. Come on.” I slid my hands between his head and the ground—careful to avoid the scabbed-over gash on one side—and lifted. “Ya need to sit up. I found water.”
Without opening his eyes, Damien pushed himself to a sitting position, and I guided him back to his original spot against the opening of the hatch. The buckets were too heavy to carry, so I’d filled two empty whiskey bottles with water.
Holding one dripping wet bottle to his lips, I held my breath as Damien took it from me and tipped it back. A stray drop of water slid from the corner of his mouth, down over his chiseled jaw, along the straining tendons in his neck, and through the planes and valleys of his chest and abs before disappearing into the waistband of his trousers.
The sight caused my mouth to water violently. Lifting my own bottle to my lips, I glanced back up at his face, where two haunting gray eyes took my breath away. Damien’s throat bobbed as he drank. His stare traveled to my mouth, where twin streams cascaded down my own neck and into the woolen fabric of his jacket. My nipples hardened as those streams converged between my breasts and slid down the length of my nearly naked body. After what had just happened to me at the fish market, I didn’t think anything could make me want to be touched again, but something about the way Damien was looking at me, the way my body tingled and hummed as I fed it something it desperately needed, made me realize that Damien’s touch had made me feel the exact same way.
It was a need—but I could live without things that I needed. I’d been doing it since I had been seven years old.
Setting his bottle down, Damien licked his lips and tipped his head back against the hatch, watching me with hooded eyes.
A prickly heat crept up the column of my neck as I set my own bottle down and wiped my mouth with the back of his sleeve.
“Feelin’ better?” I asked, keeping my eyes cast down as I pulled the deep V of his jacket closed with both hands.
I heard him lean forward, felt the swipe of his thumb, featherlight, as it collected a drop of water from the side of my lip, and my body froze on contact. My lungs were still as rocks in my chest, but my heart pounded wildly next to them as Damien’s knuckle lingered under my chin. Then, in a gesture so gentle that it brought tears to my eyes, he lifted my face, encouraging me to look at him. I blinked and widened my eyes out of habit, letting the sea breeze dry my tears before the first one could fall, but when I glanced up and found soothing silver staring back at me rather than bloodshot blue, I realized that I didn’t have to do that anymore. Damien might have been every bit as terrifying as Oliver and far more violent, but he’d never once lashed out at me for crying. He’d taken care of me instead. Given me the clothes off his back, drawn me pictures … held me.
The memory of waking up that morning, safe and warm in his arms, only made me want to cry more.
“Thank you,” he said, his hushed voice as sincere as his beautiful face.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, pulling away and wiping my eyes before he saw more than I was willing to show. “You’re obviously Irish—your accent, your name. How could you …” My words fell away as the sound of distant bombs rumbled over the roar of the engine.
Glancing to the right, I notice that the cliffs were gone, replaced with the wide expanse of Dublin Bay. Heavy smoke hung over the city, blocking out the summer sun as unseen fires burned and unseen missiles exploded. My eyes went wide, and my mouth fell open as I scrambled to my feet and stared out the shattered cabin window. The city was too far away to tell how much damage had been done, but the flashes and bangs were unmistakable, even from several kilometers away.
Ireland was under siege, and Damien had helped lead the charge.
I bristled as he pulled himself up and stood at my side, but the sadness radiating off of him kept me rooted to the spot. He stared at the destruction the same way I did, like someone had just reached inside of him and crushed his heart.
His gray eyes darkened. His jaw flexed beneath his stubbled skin. Then, the side of his fist shot forward, smashing out what was left of the broken window. I turned with a shriek, covering my face as he punched the glass again and again, until the entire pane was empty and our view of the nightmare happening in Dublin was unobstructed.
“Damien, what happened?” I shouted over the wind that was now whipping through the cabin, my hands shaking from his sudden outburst. “Why were you with the Russians? Talk to me, goddamn it!”
Barreling out of the cabin, like my father would have done if he were upset, Damien began to pace back and forth across the deck. I stood in the hatch and watched as he shoved a hand in the direction of our burning capital.
“I grew up there,” he growled, pointing at some indistinguishable place on the horizon. “He knew that. He knew I wanted to come home, so he sent me here to watch it burn.”
“Who did?” I kept most of my body inside the hatch, using it as a shield, but the precaution was unnecessary.
Damien’s face paled, and he began to sway on his bare feet.
Darting across the deck, I wrapped my arm around his back and guided him to sit on the wooden storage bench in the center of the boat. His body was on fire. Leaning forward, he braced his elbows on his knees and stared across the bay, his mouth set in a hard line. It was as if he could see through the crumbling buildings, all the way into his own childhood home.
“I never knew who my father was,” he said, his voice as distant as his mind appeared to be. “My ma raised me alone, did the best she could. But the older she got, the harder it was to make a living”—he hesitated—“in her line of work.”
I placed a hand on his upper back in understanding.
“When she couldn’t make enough to pay the rent and support her own various addictions anymore, she finally got desperate enough to contact my father. It turned out that he’s an extremely powerful member of the Bratva—the Russian Mafia. My ma never wanted to see him again after … what he’d done to her, but she was willing to risk it to get him to pay her child support. To keep us from being out on the street.”
I could feel the broken heart pounding beneath his fiery, hot flesh and realized that mine was keeping time with his. “What happened?”
“He sent his men to kill her and kidnap me. He has no other sons, so molding me into his successor became his number one priority. I spent the next five years in a Bratva training camp in Siberia before being shipped off to the Navy a few months ago.”
My hand flew to my gasping mouth, but Damien’s steely gaze stayed focused on the smoking city in the distance.
“How old were you?”
His hard gaze cut to me over his shoulder. “Fifteen.”
He might have looked cold on the outside—a chiseled killing machine, honed by hate and numbed by the ice in his veins—but on the inside, he was burning alive.
Damien tore his eyes away as another series of booms echoed through the bay. I sat next to him and gripped the bench with both hands as my pulse began to climb, but there were no missiles in the sky. No screaming projectiles arching toward us. I was safe … with him. Only with him.
“Why the Navy?” I asked, my voice trembling with the fear I was trying so hard to rationalize away.
Damien’s hands formed two fists where they rested between his knees. “My father hates nothing more than the fact that his only son was raised Irish, so when Russia decided to invade Ireland, he pulled some strings and got me assigned to that particular ship as a fuck you . Even made me a lieutenant so I’d have to lead the attack against my own country.”
His gaze turned to me again, and I could almost see the iciness of his exterior cracking from the simmering rage within.
I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him on that ship—surrounded by enemies who’d come to destroy his homeland, forced to keep his mouth shut and kill his own people. Kill his own dream.
“Damien, I … God, I’m so sorry.” I shook my head, at a loss for words.
Sorry wasn’t enough for everything this man had been through. He’d bared his soul to me, shown me his pain. The least I could do was reciprocate.
“My ma died too.” Between the wind and the waves, I could barely hear my own voice, but Damien’s crestfallen face told me he’d heard me loud and clear. “She got in a car accident when I was young, after a … really bad fight with my da. He didn’t kill her, but … he did. Ya know?” My gaze drifted over to a green fishing net, hanging out of a partially closed storage bin. “I hated him so much, and I loved him so much, and now … now, he’s gone too. They all are.”
Despite his anger, his tensed muscles and clenched jaw, Damien stood and pulled me against his hard, heaving chest. The action wasn’t gentle, and the landing wasn’t soft, but his arms encircling my body felt like two bandages closing a wound I hadn’t realized was bleeding. I melted into his rigid embrace, accepted what little comfort he had to give, but as the two of us stood in silence, watching our childhood homes crumble into the past, I couldn’t help but widen my eyes so that the breeze would dry my tears.