Chapter 19
CHAPTER 19
DAMIEN
I pushed open the front door with Clover’s limp body draped over my shoulder and winced into the sunlight. Men in camo marched up and down the pier, entering and exiting every vacant shop and restaurant with their guards up and guns drawn. As soon as they saw me, they stopped and raised their hands in salute.
I opened my mouth to announce that I’d found the prisoner, but didn’t get more than the first syllable out before I realized that I was about to say it in English.
Fuck.
Clearing my throat, which made the hole in my side throb worse than the lifeless body I was carrying, I started over, stating the obvious in Russian. “Got her.”
Then, I walked straight to the edge of the harbor before anyone could get too close. I gave Clover’s thigh one reassuring squeeze before tossing her in like a sack of flour. She did as I’d said, staying limp the entire way down, and after the splash receded, she was gone.
I should have been relieved that the water was dark, shadowed by the harbor wall and the row of boats docked next to it, but panic tugged at the edges of my awareness the second she disappeared. It whispered that she was gone forever. That she’d be floating face down in a few minutes, just like the blonde a few meters away.
“That her?” a Russian voice asked to my right, out of breath from jogging over.
I turned and glared at the commander, trying my best to remember how to look intimidating. Technically, he was my superior, but I was Bratva royalty. I had to behave like I was untouchable, not some traitorous murderer who would be dragged back to Siberia and tortured to death if anyone found out what I’d done.
I nodded once.
He lowered his hand and straightened his back. “How did you find her? We looked everywhere.”
“Everywhere?” I snapped, simply repeating the last word he’d said to make sure my Russian didn’t fail me again.
A crowd was beginning to form behind him. At least two dozen men approached and stood at attention, waiting for me to give them orders.
Fuck.
“Sir, what do we do now? With the bodies? What do we tell their families?”
I stared them all down as I rehearsed what I was about to say in my head. I didn’t trust my Russian anymore, especially not while my mind was preoccupied with Clover’s safety and my body was preoccupied with the agony of thirst, hunger, adrenaline withdrawal, a head injury, and a fucking gunshot wound.
“You tell them what happened. One of Russia’s finest was tending to an injured prisoner when she took advantage of his kindness and stole his weapon. Our men hesitated to return fire because they didn’t want to harm a woman, and they paid for it with their lives.”
I must have spoken fluently enough because the men were nodding in agreement instead of giving each other questioning looks.
“Call the admiral’s office in Saint Petersburg and arrange transport for the bodies. The rest of you …”
I was about to tell them to move the bodies into the walk-in refrigerator, if there was one, but while I tried to remember the Russian word for refrigerator , the front door of the fish market began to open behind them. Something about the way it moved—in slow, jerky increments—made my heart race. The crowd noticed my distraction and followed my gaze to the cracked entrance, where a man in a camouflage shirt was dragging himself out. Blood poured down his face from what I knew was a bullet wound at the top of his forehead, but the round must have clipped his skull instead of going straight through.
Fuck.
Maybe he won’t remember what happened .
I couldn’t remember shite for days after my head injury, which I still wasn’t sure how I’d gotten. Probably hit a rock underwater after my jump.
“Where are the medics? Get this man some help,” I ordered, hoping to slip away during the commotion.
Every second that Clover was out of my sight, the odds of her running away went up tenfold. She’d already tried to run from me once. I needed time to explain myself before she did it again.
But slipping away wasn’t in the fucking cards.
At the sound of my voice, the man who’d dragged himself out of the fish market lifted his head and trained his one clear eye on me. “You.” His voice was a guttural growl, punctuated by a bloodstained finger, pointing in my direction. “It was you!”
Ice flooded my veins, chasing away the dread as I glared at the confused faces of the men before me.
My only response was to thrust my hand in his direction and raise my eyebrows, as if to say, What are you waiting for? Fucking help him.
The less I spoke, the better.
A few crewmen rushed over to help him up, but he swatted them away and continued to thrust his finger in my direction.
“It was him! He fucked the redhead and went fucking crazy when Borkov wanted a turn. He killed them all to keep from … from …” He collapsed on the ground. “… sharing her.”
“Redhead?” the commander asked, glancing from me to the blonde corpse in the water.
“Redhead,” I repeated with an eye roll. “Poor bastard’s been shot in the head. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying.”
“I saw them bring in a redhead a few hours ago,” one of the crewmen announced. He was speaking to the commander, not me. That wasn’t fucking good.
“I saw her too,” another said. “She was so fucking hot. I was hoping to get a taste later.”
My jaw clenched.
“Sailor”—the commander’s eyes were on me as he prepared to ask the crewman his next question—“was this redhead chained up with the others when you searched the building?”
I felt the blood drain out of my face and surge into my extremities. My right hand vibrated with the urge to unholster a weapon. I’d grabbed a knife and a pistol from one of the bodies behind the counter before we left, but there was no way I could take on this many men on my own. Especially not when they were all armed and on high alert.
“No, sir,” the crewman answered.
“Shit! Get him!”
A commotion broke out as I turned and sprinted down the pier. Every step was excruciating. Every bullet that whizzed past me, a miracle. And as I scanned the boats bobbing along the wall for the one Clover had described, every second felt like a lifetime.
Wexford Whaler.
Irish Hospitality.
Galway Girl.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Up ahead, all the way at the end of the pier, I finally spotted it—Clover’s father’s boat. The Pride of Howth was a rust-colored nightmare that looked like it had been raised from the bottom of the sea or possibly from the bowels of hell. Ropes and nets and fenders dripped from its hull like bandages from a mummy that had been brutally stabbed to death with a half-dozen poles and antennas.
My heart rate skyrocketed as I scanned the deck and the helm for any sign of her, but I knew she wouldn’t be there. I’d known the moment she disappeared beneath the surface of the water that I would never see her again. Now that she was free, she could go wherever she wanted, which, based on her reaction in the fish market, was as far away from me as fucking possible.
Pain sliced through my chest at the thought of losing her, almost as sharp and searing as the bullet that grazed my right arm seconds later.
As the shouting and gunshots grew louder, I quickly realized that stopping to use the ladder was out of the fucking question. So, with a running jump, I plummeted three meters down onto the deck of the boat. Pain exploded in my side, but I gritted my teeth and pushed through it. Pulling the knife out of my boot, I slashed through the ropes tethering the Pride of Howth to the pier, and then I dived into the helm as a window shattered overhead. Glancing up at the wires beneath the wheel, I cursed and punched the bulkhead.
A metal plate covered the control panel, held on with four simple screws.
“Fuck!”
“There’s a spare key under the seat cushion.”
Rolling onto my good side, I glanced up and found an auburn apparition leaning over me. A wall of shimmering wet hair separated me from the madness outside, and for a moment, for a fleeting fraction of a second, I felt like a kid in a blanket fort again.
Then, another window shattered, and she was gone, crouching behind the seat with her hands over her head.
“Drive!” I shouted, pulling the pistol from my holster and launching to my feet. I stood in the hatch, shielding her with my body as the first head came into view over the harbor wall.
“I don’t know how!”
“Turn the key!” I aimed and pulled the trigger as the engine roared to life.
That head and the body attached to it dropped to the ground, but was quickly replaced with another. And another.
“Do you see a lever?” I shouted between blasts.
“Em … yes! Over here!”
I fired three more rounds into the squad barreling toward the edge of the pier above us. It was enough to keep them back, but not enough to keep them from returning fire.
“Hold down the button on the handle and slide it forward.”
I widened my stance to keep my balance as the boat lurched forward. It might not have looked like much, but the Pride of Howth had a beast of an engine. Thank fuck.
Clover screamed as a bullet flew through one of the already-broken side windows and shattered the windscreen.
“They’re shooting from both piers!” she shouted.
“Stay low and steer!”
I swiveled and took out two lone infantrymen on the opposite pier before returning my attention to the squad to my left. With the choppiness of the water and the sudden acceleration, it was getting harder and harder to hit my marks, but it made us a harder target to hit as well. More bullets ripped through the helm, piercing the bulkheads and showering Clover with sparks from the radio.
By the time my clip was nearly empty, the men I hadn’t hit were lowering their guns and screaming obscenities as Howth Harbor disappeared behind us. None of the amphibious tanks were fast enough to catch up, and by the time they figured out how to hot-wire another fishing boat, we’d be long gone.
I turned to face Clover with a sigh of relief, but she wasn’t looking at me. She wasn’t looking forward either. Her entire body was sideways in the captain’s chair, and her gaze was locked on the rolling green hills of Ireland’s Eye as we sped past. Saltwater misted her face through the broken windows, but Clover didn’t so much as blink. Her eyes narrowed to slits as she scanned the empty island, almost as if she was searching for something.
But that small patch of land disappeared just as quickly as the harbor, and when it did, Clover turned away with a deep sigh. The afternoon sun cast her silhouette in a halo of golden light as she wrapped her arms around her naked body and shivered.
“Here.” I took off my blazer—wincing as the fabric dragged across my latest injury—and draped it over her shoulders. Then, I sat on the floor and pulled off my boots and socks, slipping them onto her tiny, ice-cold feet. I would have given her my shirt as well, but it was covered in fresh blood, most of which wasn’t mine.
Clover slipped her hands into the oversize sleeves of my jacket and buttoned it closed while I cinched the laces on my boots as tight as they would go. By the time I was done, her shivering had stopped.
Satisfied, I leaned back against the hatch and closed my eyes. I could feel the darkness creeping back in—the fog of unconsciousness that I’d been trying to fight off ever since my head injury. I knew Clover was watching me, but I didn’t have the strength to lift my eyelids and find out why.
“They shot you again,” she finally stated, her tone factual and cold.
I nodded slowly.
Silence stretched on between us as I struggled to stay awake. I knew there was more that she wanted to say, and when I finally forced my eyes open to let her know that I was still listening, she said it.
“You’re one of them.”
Clover was furious with me—I could see it in her stiff back and clenched jaw—but her tone gave nothing away. She was either too polite or too afraid to let it show.
I hoped it was the former, but I knew better. I’d seen the way she reacted to me back there. I was a monster to her now.
I was a monster, period. The things I’d just done, the ease with which I’d done them … I’d enjoyed killing those men. I’d needed it. And Clover had been a captive audience for all of it.
I’d become a lot of things that I wasn’t proud of over the last five years—a liar, a puppet, a deserter, now a killer—but there was one thing that I couldn’t be accused of, not anymore.
“I was one of them,” I corrected, holding her gaze even though my eyelids felt like anchors.
“And what are you now?” She was still using that neutral tone, but she clung to the back of the captain’s chair as if it were a shield.
Clover was definitely afraid of me, and that hurt worse than any of the festering injuries screaming for my attention.
Clover was the only person I’d met in five years who treated me like a human being. Who touched me out of kindness rather than violence. I would never hurt her. I was in awe of her. That night on the ship, when I’d watched her face off with a fucking drone all by herself, her defiance had awakened something in me. She’d reminded me of who I used to be, who I wanted to be again. It might have been wrong to let her believe that I was an Irish hero rather than a Russian invader, but it hadn’t felt wrong. In fact, nothing had ever felt more right .
My purpose, my identity, my reason for living—it was all wrapped up inside my boots, socks, and blazer.
She’d asked what I was now, and the answer was simple. Hers.
But I’d scared her enough for one day. So, instead, I told her the only other thing I knew for sure.
“I’m just Damien,” I said, my eyelids drifting closed on the weight of that statement. “Damien Hughes, at your service.”
Then, I gave her a two-fingered salute and let the darkness pull me under.