Chapter 44
CHAPTER 44
DAMIEN
L ift … flip … slide … aaaaand …
Click.
The repetitive sounds of a leather cuff being unbuckled and re-buckled was the only thing keeping me sane. With nothing to do and no other source of entertainment, I’d spent my hours in isolation plotting my escape. I’d come up with at least four different options, but all of them began with me being able to free myself from my restraints, which I could now do with my eyes closed, thanks to a lot of free time and a metal rod I’d discreetly removed from the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom.
Not that I had any plans to escape. I just needed to know that I could. It made me feel less like a prisoner and more like an undercover assassin biding my time.
Which was exactly what I needed to be.
Press … latch … slide … and …
Done.
That paper towel dispenser had actually been my first clue as to where I was. When the guards finally let me use the toilet in my new gray cell the day before, I noticed that everything in the bathroom had been bolted down as well. The hand soap, shampoo, and paper towels were all in unmarked metal dispensers attached to the white tiled walls. There were no decorations. No shower curtain or bath mat. But when I dried my hands, I noticed that the paper towel dispenser had a sticker on the side with instructions on how to open it.
And those instructions were written in English.
Alarm bells had immediately gone off in my head, but it wasn’t until I’d walked back to the bed—at gunpoint—and caught a glimpse of the world outside my window that the reality of the situation really grabbed me by the fucking throat. A horrifying, nauseating sense of failure washed over me as I stared down at Steeven’s Lane—gutted, bombed-out buildings on one side, a massive stone wall on the other, and inside that wall, scattered across the grass below my window, debris from a recent rocket strike.
I hadn’t made it to Russia.
I hadn’t even made it out of Dublin.
I was right back at St. Patrick’s Psychiatric Hospital.
And this time, I was the one trapped inside.
Lift … flip … slide … click.
My surrender had been for fucking nothing. The soldiers at Heuston Station had beaten me unconscious, carried me half a kilometer down the street, and locked me in an empty room in the psych ward until they could get my father on the phone to decide what to do with me.
And his decision had only verified the fact that I didn’t fucking know him at all.
I’d expected him to whisk me back to Moscow so that he could see to my imprisonment and torture personally. I’d expected his wrath, his rage, but what I hadn’t expected was his thinly veiled pride. My murderous rampage had proven to him that I was every bit as fearless, violent, determined as my old man, and now, he was more eager than ever to continue doing what he enjoyed most.
Trying to break me.
Alexi had thought that a year in the Kletka would do it, but not even five had been enough to make me bend the knee and kiss the ring on his iron fist.
He’d thought that making me lead the charge against my homeland would do it—force me to submit to his power and accept my fate as his heir and successor to the Bratva throne.
But it had quite the opposite effect.
Because I wasn’t motivated by fear or power, and my treasonous killing spree had revealed that to him.
He knew now that my sole motivation was protecting Clover Doyle, that I would do anything for that woman.
Which meant that if he had her …
I would do anything for him .
I would accept the role of vice president, be his puppet in Ireland so that he never had to leave the safety of the Kremlin. I would strip my fellow countrymen of their identities, their names, their heritage, and their lives if they didn’t fall in line. And in exchange, he’d let Clover live when they captured her in Shannon.
But they weren’t going to capture her in Shannon.
I might not have known my father, but I knew Clo. There was only one place that girl wanted to be, and it wasn’t fucking America. I would bet my life that Clover had gone back to Glenshire. I prayed that she had because right now, that was the safest place for her to be. The Russians would never bother invading a village that small, and Nora would take care of her until she could get a job and save enough money to buy our old house back.
But I was going to play my part anyway, pretend like I believed them when they told me they’d found her, let Alexi think he’d finally broken my will.
Because the sooner he believed that he had me by the bollocks …
The sooner he’d let me get close enough to kill him.
Press … latch … slide … done.
So, I sat in my bed like a good boy, fastening and unfastening my restraints, as I stared at the designer suit hanging from the corner of the TV. I had no idea how Alexi had gotten it to me so fast, but he must have given the soldiers guarding me strict orders not to let it get wrinkled. As soon as the press conference was over, they’d made me change into the institutional-blue T-shirt and trousers that all the other residents of St. Patrick’s hospital wore, but I knew that in a few hours, they’d make me put it back on. And that was when my real punishment would begin. When I’d have to enforce the new treason laws that Alexi had just decreed. When I’d have to stand there in my designer clothes and do nothing while my fellow citizens were dragged from their homes and shot in the streets for not cooperating. When I’d have to absorb the hatred in their heartbroken eyes as they used their final breath to spit on my Italian leather loafers.
That would be my real punishment. This was just a security precaution—restraints, solitary confinement, and three Russian soldiers stationed at the hospital to guard me at all times. One was positioned outside my door, one at the front entrance, and one patrolled the perimeter of the building, but there were half a dozen more at Heuston Station that could be there in five minutes if they needed to subdue me.
Not that I was going to fight back. I was going to be such a model VP that Alexi would have no choice but to invite me to the Kremlin for a father-son photo op once my job here was done.
And then I would do what I should have over twenty years ago—I would avenge Darby’s death and rid the planet of Alexi Abramov once and for all. I knew I’d never make it out of the Kremlin alive, knew I’d never see Clover’s angelic face again, but I would see the next one she wore, and the one after that, and the one after that. It was a blessing I didn’t deserve, but I was prepared to walk through hell to change that.
The sound of a digital keypad, followed by a mechanical whirring, gave me just enough warning to re-buckle my cuff and shove the rod down next to the mattress.
“Vice President Abramov,” a soldier barked in Russian as he entered my room and stood at attention. “The girl has been located and taken into custody. I have been instructed to tell you that she will not be harmed as long as you—”
The whistle of a bullet being fired through a silencer was the only warning I had before the soldier’s forehead exploded and brains splattered across my bed and hospital uniform.
Curling my fingers around the metal rod, I watched as his body fell to the floor, revealing another man, dressed in Irish camouflage and a ski mask, who was now pointing that silencer at me.
“Come on, prince. Let’s get ya outta here.”
Based on the sound of his voice and the lines around his eyes and mouth, I would have guessed him to be middle-aged or older, but the calmness of his tone and the way he handled his weapon suggested that this was a skilled, experienced soldier. Possibly Special Ops.
“Who are you?” I asked as he holstered his gun and began unbuckling my cuffs.
“A friend of a friend,” was all he said before a series of gunshots and Russian shouting echoed through the hallway.
Shite.
If this had been an official Irish military operation, he would have introduced himself with his name and rank, but he hadn’t.
This was a rebel attack, and from the sounds coming from the hallway, there were plenty of them.
Just then an alarm began blaring, and a red light started flashing in the corner of the room.
“Stay behind me,” he shouted over the siren as he removed the final cuff from my leg.
“Wait! I can’t leave!” Panic flooded my veins as my eyes darted around the room, sizing up all of the objects I’d identified as possible weapons during my hours of escape planning.
Alexi was going to think I was behind this. That I’d betrayed him again. Whoever these rebels were, they were fucking everything up. He was never going to trust me after this.
The man’s weathered eyes widened. “Why the fuck not?”
Hopping over the railing on the far side of the bed, I ducked underneath and unplugged the power cord.
“Hey! We gotta go!”
Just as the rebel dipped his face below the mattress to see what I was doing, I swept my leg out, taking him out at the knees. He fell backward, landing next to the dead soldier. His head hit the tiles with a sickening crack, but he was still conscious when I scrambled over and wrapped the power cord around his neck. Pinning his right hand down with my knee so that he couldn’t grab his weapon, I tightened the cable as he punched me repeatedly with his left hand.
“Damien!” a female voice shouted from the doorway, but I refused to look up until the rebel’s body went limp. “What the fuck are you doing?”
As soon as his balled fist fell to his side, I loosened the cord and glanced up as a short, stocky woman in matching camo marched over and swatted me on the head.
“That’s my best fuckin’ guy!”
“Jack?”
“Yeah, it’s fuckin’ Jack. Jesus Christ.” She knelt beside me and slapped the masked face of the man on the floor. “Paul. Hey, Pauly. Wake up. We gotta go.”
“What are you doing here?” I left her to tend to the rebel on the floor as I slid over to the dead soldier and relieved him of his handgun and boot knife.
“Saving your arse,” she hissed, helping her friend into a sitting position.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, probably not loud enough to hear over the alarm, as I walked along the wall to the door that Paul had propped open with a cigarette lighter in the doorjamb. Glancing into the hallway, I saw another dead body at one end, but couldn’t tell if it was a Russian or a rebel. When the coast was clear, I shouted over my shoulder, “I don’t need to be rescued. I know what I’m doing.”
“Like fuck ya do,” she spat back. “By the time you get close enough to Alexi to kill him, the entire fuckin’ country will be speakin’ Russian!”
“Wait. What?” I spun around. “How do you know about that?”
“A little birdie told me. How do ya think?”
“Clover?” Darting back into the room, I slid on my knees, through the pool of blood surrounding the dead Russian, over to Jack. Clutching her arms, I locked eyes with her, forcing her to give me her full attention. “You’ve seen her?” I asked. “She’s okay?”
“She’s worried fuckin’ sick about ya, is what she is. Her and your ma.”
“My what?”
“I’ll explain in the tunnel. C’mon.” Jack stood and helped Paul to his feet. The flashing red light made him wince and dry-heave.
“I can’t leave,” I shouted.
“Listen to me.” Jack draped Paul’s big arm over her shoulders and lifted her ski mask to reveal her very annoyed, very tired face. “I wanna kill that son of a bitch just as bad as you. We all do. Right?” She raised Paul’s limp hand, and he grimaced. “But I’d like to do it before I have to burn all my shite and start goin’ by the name Jacqueline Cuntapova the Great.”
“Stop!” a male voice shouted in Russian.
Raising my hands over my head, I turned and found a Russian soldier pointing a gun at us, but staring at the face of his fallen comrade on the floor.
His expression turned murderous as he lifted a bulky military phone to his head and barked, “I’ve got them, sir. They’re with the VP—”
A red hole appeared between the man’s eyes before I even registered the whisper of the silencer.
“Hold him, will ya?” Jack huffed, lowering her weapon as I scrambled to catch her friend.
Walking across the room, she plucked the phone out of the second dead soldier’s hand and held it up to her ear.
“Hello?” she shouted, clamping her free hand over her other ear to block out the sound of the alarm. “Shite. You speak English? English. ” She cupped her hand over the microphone and glanced at us. “Paul, I need ya to translate.”
Paul’s head swayed, and his cheeks puffed out as if he was gonna be sick.
“I think he’s got a concussion,” I said, guiding him over to the bed so he could sit.
Jack’s attention fell back to the phone in her hand. “Do … you … speak … English? Ah, grand. Here’s the situation. A group of concerned patriots have killed yer men at St. Patrick’s Hospital, and—let me finish, fucker! And they’ve kidnapped your VP.”
She pulled the phone away from her ear as angry Russian shouting came pouring out of it.
“Hey! I don’t speak Russian, arsehole. Listen. Listen!”
Letting go of Paul with an apologetic glance, I stepped over both dead soldiers and stood at the open door. I tried to listen for footsteps or voices in the hallway, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing over the blaring alarm and Jack shouting into the phone.
“If President Alexi wants his son back, he can pick him up tomorrow at noon, in person, in the middle of the Ha’penny Bridge, but only after he announces that the new treason laws have been canceled. That’s right. We want to keep our flags, and our language, and our bleedin’ names, ya fuckin’ cunts.”
Taking a deep breath, I peered out into the hallway and jerked my face back just before a bullet whizzed past it and shattered the doorframe behind my head.
The soldiers from Heuston Station had arrived.
Tapping Jack on the shoulder to get her attention, I held up six fingers and jerked my head in the direction of the hallway.
“Shite,” she hissed. “Hey, I gotta go. Remember, Ha’penny Bridge, tomorrow, noon, Alexi can come get his boy in person, or yous all can pick him up in a body bag. Yer choice.”
Pocketing the phone, Jack and I helped Paul to his feet. His pupils were blown, but he was lucid enough to stand and hold a gun, so we propped him against the wall out of the line of fire and hidden around the corner from the entryway.
Then, I got an idea.
Holding the metal rod with a white pillowcase tied around the end of it out the door, I shouted over the alarm, “Don’t shoot! This is Vice President Lenin Abramov! Do not shoot!”
My father had given me that name the moment I’d stepped foot on Russian soil. Said the name Damien Hughes was “too fucking Irish.”
“They’re all dead! Don’t shoot!”
I walked into the hallway with my arms raised, and half a dozen familiar faces marched toward me, led by the motherfucker who’d knocked me out the day before. I swallowed when I remembered what he’d hit me with and glanced down to see a matte-black machine gun poised in both fists.
Fuck me.
Red lights splashed across their serious faces as I prayed that Jack would know to take the leader out first. I’d already been shot twice. I could probably take a third or a fourth, but not a fucking spray. That machine gun was a game changer.
I could see her in my periphery, preparing to jump out and open fire, and Paul was right behind her, poor cunt. He stood with his shoulder against the entryway wall, still obviously bell rung, but we needed all the help we could get.
Then, with a nod of Jack’s head, everything shifted into slow motion.
I dropped to my knees, pulling the Russian’s handgun out of my waistband as a hail of gunfire tore through the air just above my head. Aiming for the fucker front and center, I squeezed the trigger, but Jack beat me to it. My bullet sailed over his falling body and clipped the lad standing behind him. I winced as I braced for the wrath of the other four, but their guns had already clattered to the floor, bodies jerking and convulsing as exit wounds burst through camouflage and flesh.
Within seconds, all six Russians were in a bloody heap on the floor, and four grinning, ski mask–wearing vigilantes were hugging and thrusting their guns into the air behind them.
Turning to Jack, who was propped up on her elbows beside me, I let out a laugh and helped her up. “Nice friends ya got there,” I shouted over the alarm. “Where’d you find ’em?”
“Special Ops Force.” She beamed with pride. “Not bad for a bunch of retirees, huh?”