Chapter 38
CHAPTER 38
CLOVER
“ M rs., em … Donovan? You’re in luck. Your uncle is awake and somewhat lucid today. Please, follow me.”
St. Patrick’s Psychiatric Hospital was being run by a skeleton crew, thanks to the mass exodus from the city, and the few people who’d stayed to care for the patients seemed shell-shocked and vacant. I wasn’t sure if it was their desire to care for others or their basic need for normalcy that kept them coming back, but whatever the reason, it was obvious that by this point in the invasion, checking visitor IDs was pretty low on their list of priorities.
I’d given them Darby’s name just in case I needed to be a blood relative to visit. Eamonn O’Toole was the only person alive who might be able to tell me what I needed to know, and I wasn’t going to risk my chance to see him by letting them know that I was a perfect stranger.
I followed the hollow-eyed nurse down a clinical gray hallway to a door that had to be opened with a key card.
The first thing I noticed was a large window that looked out over Steeven’s Lane. Of course, I couldn’t see the road through the massive stone wall encircling the hospital, but I could see the taller buildings behind it. At least, the ones that were still standing.
I didn’t think anything could affect me as much as the destruction of Howth, but riding through the wasteland that Dublin had become ripped the newly formed scabs off of all of my still-fresh traumas.
I was so close to home, and yet I was homeless.
Images of blood-splattered plaster and a severed hand flashed behind my eyes before I shut them down, taking a deep breath and shaking my head as I stepped farther into the room.
It was small, but sunlit, and spacious enough for some basic institutional furniture and, of course, a TV, which a very old, very frail man was staring at from his elevated position in a hospital bed.
“Good afternoon, Mr. O’Toole,” the nurse boomed, getting his attention.
After a second or two, the man’s beady blue eyes shifted slowly to hers, and his wrinkled eyelids appeared to be dropping from more than just old age.
“He just had his afternoon meds,” the nurse explained quietly, “so he should be nice and calm for ya.”
Clearly.
“Mr. O’Toole, this is your niece, Darby Donovan. She came by to say hello. Isn’t that nice?”
Dropping her voice to a normal volume again, she added, “Don’t be scared, love. This one’s harmless. He just has trouble grasping reality sometimes, which, honestly, might be a blessing these days.”
I nodded in understanding and held her haunted stare, but it only lasted a second before she turned and headed for the door.
“There’s a red panic button on the wall by the bed,” she added from the narrow entryway. “Press it if ya need anything.”
The door closed with an ominous, automated click, and I suddenly found myself locked in a room with a drugged psychiatric patient in the middle of an active war zone.
I probably should have been concerned about my safety, but my thoughts were split between needing to find out what was in this man’s head and worrying about what was going through Damien’s.
My stomach soured as guilt ate away at it, but I pushed that aside as well. There would be plenty of time to feel my grief and my remorse on the train back to Glenshire. Right now, I needed to focus. Everything I’d come here for was on the other side of those cloudy, confused eyes.
“Hello, mister—I mean, Detective O’Toole. My name is—”
“Christ almighty, it took ya long enough.” His wiry white eyebrows furrowed as an angry spark of recognition flicked across his face.
“I’m sorry?”
“Ya should be. Leave an old man waiting like this, rottin’ in this godforsaken place. I was beginning to think you were never comin’.”
“I, em …”
“So where to?”
“Excuse me?”
“Heaven or hell? What’s it gonna be?”
My heart sank. The man wasn’t coherent enough to exchange basic pleasantries, let alone tell me what I needed to know. I’d come all this way, risked my life, betrayed Damien’s trust for absolutely nothing.
“You’re not gonna tell me where I’m goin’? Why the hell did they send you? They shoulda sent yer ma. She was less of a cunt.”
“My ma?”
“She woulda sold me Da’s house when he died, but, nooo, the old kook had to go and leave it to you.”
Darby.
Eamonn wasn’t incoherent. What he was saying made perfect sense, if I were his dead niece who’d come to escort him into the afterlife.
That was it. That was my ticket into the vault of his mind.
“With all due respect, Uncle ,” I said as loudly but sweetly as possible, “I would advise against calling me a cunt when the fate of your eternal soul has yet to be decided.”
“Wh-wh-what’s that?” he sputtered, sitting up straighter in his remote-controlled bed. “Yet to be decided?”
“That’s correct, dear Uncle. The angels selected me to conduct your judgment personally, due to our … unfinished business. They are not happy about the lack of justice that was served following my murder.”
“Lack of justice!” he sputtered, clutching his bedsheet with two knobby fists. “What’d they expect me to do? Take on the whole damn Bratva again?”
The Bratva?
Again?
“Thanks to your contract-killin’ boyfriend, I’d already risked me arse once to put Alexi behind bars. Got that piece of shite three consecutive life sentences, and he still bribed and blackmailed his way out. What was I s’posed to do? Huh? If I poked that beehive again, they were gonna come for me next. I had to cover it up. I had ta!”
“So, a man in the Bratva named Alexi killed Kellen and me? Because you’d helped us send him to prison?”
“A man named Alexi?” he mocked. “Alexi Abramov is no fuckin’ man. He’s a goddamn disease. A blight on the whole human race. Just look at what he done to me city!”
Eamonn shoved a shaky finger in the direction of the glowing TV on the wall as aerial footage of a decimated Dublin scrolled by on the screen.
Then, his eyes went wide, and his mouth dropped open in horror as he slowly returned his attention to me.
“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? If I’d been brave enough to go after him again, to put him back behind bars for good, none of this woulda happened.”
Eamonn’s milky eyes lost what little focus they’d held as he cupped a hand over his mouth and stared into the depths of his own mortality.
“Uncle Eamonn, I need you to stay with me,” I continued, using my most soothing voice.
“I’m damned,” he whispered, shaking his head.
“Not necessarily,” I added. “I just need to ask you a few more questions …”
That got his attention. “Please,” he said, his eyes snapping back to mine. “Tell ’em it wasn’t my fault. Tell ’em I couldn’t take on the whole Bratva again. Tell ’em there isn’t a prison on earth that could hold a man with that much money and power. He woulda gotten out again, and when he did, he woulda come for me!”
“I understand that, Uncle. I do. And I will take it into consideration. Now, can you please tell me why the president of Russia would want to kill a young couple in Glenshire, Ireland?”
“I didn’t know this was gonna happen! I swear!” His tone bordered on panic, and I was afraid that I’d lost him.
“Uncle, please answer the question. We’re almost done. You’re doing grand.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Now, please state for the record why President Abramov wanted us dead.”
Eamonn nodded and took a few deep breaths. “Alexi wasn’t president back then, ya know, but he was one of the top dogs in the Bratva. And Kellen, from what I could gather, was a hit man for the United Irish Brotherhood, back before they became a political party and that rat bastard Séamus Rooney took over. That’s another one that I could never keep behind bars. Slimey fuck.”
“Uncle, please. Why did Alexi Abramov—”
“I’m getting’ to it! Christ. It was never proven, but me hunch was that Kellen had taken out somebody near and dear to Alexi, and as retribution, he came for Kellen’s head. The UIB must have sold him out because the two a yous conspired to get both Séamus and Alexi arrested at the same time. Which made yours truly look like quite the big shot back at the station, thank you very much.”
Eamonn smiled slightly as his eyes began to drift out of focus.
“You’re telling me that my husband was a contract killer for the UIB?”
“Ya didn’t know?” The old man laughed until he had a coughing fit. “Kellen was the best hit man I’ve ever seen! Untraceable. Completely clean. Never found so much as a fingerprint, but me sources on the inside said he was the UIB’s number one enforcer. They called him the Devil of Dublin.”
The Devil of Dublin . That name sounded so familiar.
I flashed back to the images Saoirse had shown me of Kellen fighting, bleeding, running, killing, and then us happy together in Glenshire. It all made perfect sense now.
The two men currently battling over the fate of Ireland, men who now had entire armies at their disposal, were once a couple of rival Mafia bosses that Kellen and I had tried to stop.
My head was reeling.
“Thank you, Mr., em, Uncle Eamonn.” My voice shook as I tried to process this onslaught of information. “You have no idea how badly I … and the angels … needed to hear that. This concludes your judgment hearing. I hereby declare you—get down!”
The last thing I heard before I ducked beneath Eamonn’s hospital bed and covered my head was the high-pitched scream of a rocket barreling straight toward us. I didn’t look out the window for confirmation—I didn’t need to. That sound was carved into the very fiber of my soul like the grooves of a record, a trauma that I was destined to replay over and over and over again.
Just like my life with Kellen.