Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
DAMIEN
THIRTY MINUTES EARLIER
I was on autopilot. No thoughts. No feelings. Just action, authority, and indifference. That was how I’d survived in the Kletka, and that was how I would survive this.
They couldn’t break something that didn’t exist.
I focused on the task at hand, spoke as little as possible, and instructed my men to load and prepare the artillery. When we got the signal, it was my platoon that fired first.
Striking the Howth Harbour lighthouse dead fucking center.
The relic exploded like a firework, spewing fire and shooting three-hundred-year-old granite in all directions.
It was the first strike against Ireland, a declaration of war, and I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.
But I felt nothing.
As the crew cheered, I watched my childhood crumble and fall into the sea through a cold, impenetrable shield. Detached. Devoid. And completely fucking alone.
That lighthouse broke the seal. Within seconds, every gun on the deck was pumping out missiles, rockets, or shells as fast as their crews could get them loaded and aimed. The deck of the ship filled with smoke and shuddered with every deafening blast, along with my heart, which felt like it might seize at any moment from the brutal concussions pounding through my chest.
And for possibly the first time in my life, I wished that it would. My obsession with finding my way back home had kept me alive, kept me going all those years in the Kletka. But now that Ireland was disappearing before my eyes, being consumed, bite by bite, by the same machine that had consumed me, what was left to live for?
These were the morbid thoughts going through my head as my gunners worked their way from the harbor to the cliffs. Building by building, house by house, it was like shooting cans off a fence post. But at least they were empty cans.
Or so I’d thought.
The smoke and flames climbing up the cliffs from the harbor had become so thick that I needed binoculars to make sure my gunners were hitting their targets. I swept over the coastline, confirming each hit, but when I looked farther ahead at what hadn’t been struck yet, what I saw broke through my mask of indifference like a hammer through a sheet of ice.
The next house in the line of fire was a tiny white thing—as old as the cliffs themselves—with a bright yellow door. The color was what stopped me. It seemed so familiar, just like the woman who stepped out of it, dripping with luggage and holding a baby boy.
I couldn’t make out her features, but she was thin with dark hair and fair skin.
Just like my ma.
My reaction was immediate and involuntary. With both hands, I shoved the crew member to my right away from the artillery, but I was too late. He’d already pulled the lanyard, and the blast felt like a sledgehammer against my skull. Fire tore through the smoke-filled sky. And all I could do was watch in horror as the white house with the yellow door—and the mother and child in front of it—were consumed by a billowing fireball of death.
“What are you doing?” I screamed, thrashing against the meaty hands holding me in place as a second Bratva soldier entered through the front door of our apartment.
He stomped toward my mother, who was standing on the other side of our tiny sitting room.
“Let him go!” she shouted, holding her ground as the goon approached. She was off work that day, so her long, dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and the purple bags under her eyes weren’t hidden beneath a centimeter of makeup. Neither was her terror. I could feel it in the air. “We had a deal,” she said, glancing from them to me.
The soldier made no attempt to argue with her. He simply placed his hands on either side of her face and jerked her head to the side so hard that her neck snapped. I’d never forget the sound. That sudden, unexpected crunch.
“Deal’s off.” He chuckled, tossing her lifeless body onto the couch.
She landed on her side, and the last thing I remembered before they hauled me away was the haunting emptiness in her pale blue eyes as they stared straight through me.
“What are you doing?” Five years later, I was screaming those words again, this time at the sailor whose shirt was in my fist. “There was a woman up there! With a fucking baby!”
Half of my platoon went still, and they stared at me, too, but their stares weren’t vacant—they were shocked and suspicious and ready to attack. They stared at me like I’d spoken to them in a foreign language.
Because I had.
Shite.
Releasing the sailor, I took a step back.
“What the fuck was that?” he shouted, allowing his comrades to help him stand. The rest of my platoon kept firing, too absorbed in their tasks and obscured by smoke to notice our standoff.
“He sounded like one of them .”
“Maybe he’s working for them.”
“That’s impossible. His father is—”
“I know what I heard.”
“I’m your fucking lieutenant,” I shouted—in Russian this time—“and you’ll address me as such.”
“You just attacked Antonov and screamed at him in English, sir ,” one of the men who’d helped the gunner stand up said, still clutching his arm.
“Spy!” Antonov shouted, shoving a finger in my direction. “He’s a fucking Irish spy!”
I didn’t know who drew first, but in the blink of an eye, my pistol was pressed against the gunner’s temple, and five more were aimed directly at me.
“Stand down!” I yelled, realizing a moment later that the words had come out in English again.
Whatever the fuck I’d been pretending to be had turned to water in my fists. I couldn’t hold on to it much longer, and honestly, I didn’t want to.
“Stand down!” I repeated in Russian. “That’s a direct order!”
The crewmen looked at one another, confused and conflicted.
“Any sailor who does not holster his weapon immediately will be charged with insubordination. This is your final warning.”
As the men hesitantly lowered their weapons, I glanced back up at the smoldering remains of the white house with the yellow door. No one could have survived that blast, so I wasn’t expecting to find any signs of life. But that was exactly what I saw. A silhouetted speck of a person, possibly a woman or a child, was running along the top of the cliff.
And directly into our line of fire.
Charging toward the other artillery gun under my command, I dived for that gunner just as he yanked on the lanyard, sending a shell screaming into the side of the cliff. As we crashed into the plexiglass deck railing, I kept my eyes on the silhouette, up until the moment it disappeared behind a geyser of rocks and earth.
The toxic rage that had been festering inside of me for five fucking years ignited and boiled over, flooding my veins with a hatred so thick and so hot that it burned away the last tattered remains of the lie I’d been living.
Pinning the gunner on the ground, I unleashed my fury, my agony, and my guilt through my fists, relishing the pain in my knuckles as they collided with bone and split open on teeth. All that time, I’d been putting on armor to protect myself—to keep me numb, to hide my humanity—but now that it was gone, I realized that it had also been protecting them.
From me .
Countless hands seized my arms, wrenching them behind my back as they hauled me away from the bloody pulp of a man on the deck. My chest heaved, and my body shook as they shoved me against the wall of a storage room and pummeled me with their fists, their knees, the soles of their boots, but I barely registered the blows. Because at that very moment, a spotlight beamed down on the ruins of the house with the yellow door.
Someone had survived.
Relief washed over me as I squinted into the darkness, moving my head to get a better view around the helmets of the men who were restraining me. I was desperate for proof that I’d finally done something right, that my actions had saved at least one innocent life, but as soon as I remembered what that spotlight meant, what it was attached to, that fleeting joy was replaced with a frantic, nauseating sense of dread.
The drones were programmed to find survivors, not rescue them. Whoever was still alive up there wouldn’t be for long. They’d either die in ten seconds by gunfire or in two weeks after being raped and tortured to death. But either way, that beam of light was a death sentence.
And I’d just blown my cover for nothing.
“What is the meaning of this?” Captain Orlov boomed.
A silence more deafening than artillery fire fell over the ship as every crew member turned toward the stage and saluted their leader.
I couldn’t see him through the crush of sailors surrounding me, but I knew that at any moment, Orlov would descend from his pedestal and push through the crowd, haul me off to a cell, let all the officers on the ship take turns beating and torturing me, and then send whatever was left of me back to my father, whose punishment would make the Kletka look like summer camp.
I should have been terrified, but I was too busy counting the seconds in my head to care.
Seven.
A black silhouette, small and quick, darted away from the pile of rubble, and I knew that it had to be the runner. They were still alive.
“He’s an Irish spy, Captain.”
“It’s true, sir.”
Six.
The beam of light followed the survivor effortlessly as they approached a vehicle parked next to the rubble.
Don’t do it. You’ll never get away in that. You’ll just become a bigger target.
“He assaulted two artillery gunners, sir.”
“He put a gun to my head, Captain.”
Five.
The survivor stopped running and stood perfectly still, staring at the van.
No. No, no, no. Don’t surrender. It’ll be so much worse. Fuck.
“He screamed at us in English, sir.”
“He sounded just like one of them .”
Four.
Run! Hide somewhere that’ll mask your body heat. Go!
My heart slammed against the bars of its permanent prison as I scanned the coastline in vain. There was nowhere to hide from a heatseeking drone. Nowhere except …
My gaze dropped to the moonlit waves crashing against the rocks below.
Three.
My entire awareness shrank to the size of that spotlight on top of the cliff. The ship, the sea, the smoke-filled sky—it all faded away, darkening and flickering until I felt as though I were looking up at that light from the bottom of a deep, murky lake. I swam toward it in my mind—watched it expand as I grew closer —and when I finally broke through the surface, I was no longer in Howth.
I was standing in a lake, in a forest, staring up at an oak tree …
And into the eyes of a girl perched on its lowest branch.
The sight of her took my breath away. She was clutching a rope swing and wearing nothing but her bra and knickers. Soft copper waves cascaded around her body like a veil, and when her big, terrified eyes landed on me, something inside of me cracked open, allowing a need that I had long ago buried to claw its way out of my rotten, putrid soul.
I didn’t just need her. I needed to protect her. I needed to get her down from there. I needed her in the water, in my arms, immediately and forever.
Standing to my full height, I lifted my hands, but a tightness in my throat prevented me from speaking. I couldn’t force more than a single word through the blockage. A single word to convey my inexplicable longing, my fear, my desperation … my love.
“Jump!”
But another word slipped through the crack in my consciousness right after it. A word that reeled me back into my body like the snap of a rubber band.
Two.
The light was once again just a slash of white on the other side of the sea, but standing in it was my salvation. If this stranger lived, then it would’ve all been worth it. If I could trade my hopeless, miserable life for theirs, then my treason wouldn’t have been in vain.
“Jump,” I whispered.
Please.
“Show me this traitor,” Captain Orlov demanded. “Move. Now!”
As the crowd of sailors parted before me, making a path for their leader to come administer his wrath, I felt a frantic, overwhelming need to go back into the light. To find the girl who’d been waiting for me on the other side of it and never let her go. I’d thought that the home I was longing for was Ireland, but I’d been wrong. It was a girl with copper hair, whom I’d never met.
But she was so close that I could taste the blackberries bursting on my tongue.
One.
Streaks of orange fired from the drone as the figure turned and sprinted toward the cliff. And without thinking, without a plan, without hope of survival or fear of death, I did the same.
“Seize him!” Orlov shouted.
A sick, electrifying thrill coursed through my veins like the end of a lit fuse, burning away those marionette strings and setting that last forgotten, charred ember of life inside of me ablaze.
The path in front of me opened wider as men got out of the way to allow those behind me to open fire. I hardly noticed the bullets whizzing past my head—my entire focus was on the runner on the cliff.
Make it. Please. You have to make it.
A bolt of pain tore through my side as I leaped over the railing, but when I saw that the runner had made the leap too—as we plummeted, together, into uncertain waters—all I could feel was the exhilaration of freedom and the weightlessness of relief.
I didn’t know if I would survive the jump, and honestly, I didn’t care.
Dead or alive, I was finally coming home.