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Grasping her chin, I tilted her face up until I could see the shame all over her sweet, tormented face. She avoided looking at me at first, but when I made no move to release her, those dark brown lashes eventually lifted, revealing two endless emerald pools.
A riot of images exploded in the space between us. Blackberry bushes next to a lake, water in a teapot, biscuits in a sugar bowl. Trees and mushrooms and crumbling stone cottages. Missing teeth and freckled cheeks. Big green eyes …
Like the ones that were looking at me now.
I knew in that moment that I’d been right—this was an illusion. And the illusion was that we were strangers. I knew those eyes. They might have been set in a different face, surrounded by a mane of different hair, but every fleck of gold and facet of green was exactly the way I remembered—like the sun shining through a canopy of trees.
But I remembered them smiling. These eyes weren’t smiling. They were glistening with tears that spilled over the moment she tore them away.
“Sorry,” she apologized again, ducking her face and shielding it from me with her hand. “I can’t look at you. You remind me of someone, but he doesn’t exist, so—”
“I feel the same way,” I interrupted. The words came so easily that it was as if I had channeled them from somewhere else.
Clover froze at the sound of my voice, pursing her lips and tilting her head. “Can you say that again?”
I hesitated, unsure if I could speak while I was consciously thinking about it.
“It’s fine if ya can’t. It’s just … the way you said that sounded … Irish.”
One hopeful green eye peeked through two splayed fingers, and when I answered her unspoken question with a nod, the grin that followed enslaved me on sight.
“No. You’re Irish?” Clover’s squeal echoed through the cave as her eyes darted from my face to my wounds to my empty gun holster to my heart, which was beating its way out of my goddamn chest.
“Oh my God!” She beamed. “This makes perfect sense. When I found you, the Russians hadn’t made landfall yet, so I didn’t understand why you’d already been beaten and shot, but it’s because the Russians did that to you … on the ship!”
I could see the gears spinning in her head as she fabricated a story almost as far from the truth as the one she’d just read to me.
“Maybe you were wearing their uniform to sneak on board, or maybe you were deep undercover, like a spy—I don’t know, but they must have found out who you were and attacked. Maybe they even threw you overboard or—”
Her mouth fell open as her wide, round eyes shot back up to mine.
“It was you … that night, during the bombing. I was on the cliff”—her gaze fell away as the joy drained from her face—“and a drone found me.”
It was her. The girl I’d seen on the cliff. The one I’d risked everything to save. My injuries were for her, not some heroic spy mission. And they’d been fucking worth it.
“I was gonna let it kill me.” She swallowed. “Everything was destroyed—my home, my … family.” Her voice broke. “I just wanted to die along with them.”
Her eyes stared a hole through my chest as the memory hijacked her vision, but it felt as if she were staring directly at my heart, watching it splinter with every word she spoke.
“But then I saw you. In my mind. You were standing in a lake, and you looked so handsome.” Color rushed to her cheeks as she smiled. “You held up your arms, and you told me to—”
“Jump.” The word spilled from my lips as I pictured her the way I had that night. Lighter hair, perched in a tree, too far for me to hold … or save. That single word encompassed everything I was feeling—the hope and the hopelessness, the regret and need for redemption, the desire and the fear.
And when she lifted her eyes, smiling through the tears, she echoed my plea with a whispered, “Jump.”
Past and present, life and death, heaven and hell—it all blurred into meaningless nothingness as I stood, suspended in her grateful, awestruck gaze.
I used to want to come back to Ireland. Now, all I wanted was to make that girl look at me that way as often as possible for the rest of my life. Or eternity, if I was, in fact, already dead.
The world around us burned away as I dived headfirst into the flames.
Clover and I collided in a space that felt untouched by the past. When she wrapped her arms around the back of my neck, I didn’t want to push her away; I wanted to pull her closer. When she pressed her lips to mine, I didn’t taste the salt of her tears; I tasted the sweetness of who she had been before all that pain. But when she parted those lips and slid a shy tongue along the seam of my mouth, something inside of me cracked open, allowing the past to come rushing back in.
Gripping her hair in my fist, I kissed her back with an urgency that bordered on panic. I knew at any moment, the Devil was going to snap his fingers and send her running back behind the boulders. Remind her of what I was, what I’d done. I knew I’d spend another night listening to her cry as she cowered from the monster who’d ruined her life. And she should.
I wasn’t some heroic Irish spy, like she was telling herself. I was the sole heir of the Russian Bratva. I was a lieutenant on the ship that had bombed her town. I’d given the order. I’d led the charge. I was a fucking monster, and by allowing her to think otherwise, I was proving it.
But I was powerless to stop myself. Clover was my first taste of heaven after five long years of hell, and no amount of guilt could have pulled me away.
