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“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.
CHAPTER 7
CLOVER
The waves pummeled me as I swam along the edge of the cliff over to the cave, spilling over my head in merciless torrents and shoving my body into the rocks. The sea was always freezing, even in June, and the shock of being repeatedly doused by that frigid water made it nearly impossible to think about anything other than getting the fuck out of it.
By the time I found the entrance and hauled my soaking wet, half-drowned arse onto the narrow ledge outside of it, all I could do was lie there and gasp and stare up at the sky. For a few moments, it was just me, my burning lungs, and my shivering body. Nothing else. No thoughts. No feelings. Just the sound of the sea, the smell of my burning town, and the hollow echo of my soul. I was simply too depleted to think or feel.
I hoped it would last forever.
But soon, another sound joined the rhythmic lapping of the waves, one that was alarming enough to break through my exhausted, traumatized fog—the deep roar of rapidly approaching jets.
Finally, I thought. The Air Corps were coming.
I continued to stare at the sky above me as three smoke-spewing missiles sliced across the starless night, followed by the planes that had fired them. I rolled my foggy head toward the cruise ship just in time to see it return fire. The Russian missiles crossed paths with ours in the air, their contrails nearly kissing, and then … night turned into day.
I threw my arm over my face as an inferno of heat and light enveloped me. The explosions were so loud that they rattled the bones in my chest, the sounds more terrifying than anything I could have ever imagined. Grinding metal and groaning steel. Squealing engines and screaming men. A plane plunged into the water a hundred meters in front of me, and I had to scramble up on top of the cave entrance to avoid being washed out to sea by the massive wave it’d created.
From there, I could see that the entire deck of the ship was on fire, and there was a gaping hole right in the center. But even as the ship burned and slowly split in half, even as its engulfed crew threw their flaming bodies into the sea, it somehow kept pumping missiles into the air.
Another jet went down out past the Eye, but I couldn’t see where it landed through the black smoke billowing out of the belly of the ship. I turned my gaze skyward, looking for the third plane, when the right side of the ship suddenly erupted in an explosion so powerful that it knocked me on my arse. The fire must have reached the ship’s cache of ammunition because the detonations kept happening, one after the other in that exact same spot, producing a fireball the size of a hot-air balloon that kept being refilled. It was so bright that it illuminated everything from the island to the cliff.
Including the lifeless body of a man drifting toward the rocks.
