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If he wasn’t …
“You have surrendered to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Follow this drone to the nearest encampment, where you will be detained as a prisoner of war. Failure to cooperate will result in your immediate termination.”
If he wasn’t, then we were both fucked.
CHAPTER 16
CLOVER
As I followed the drone through the ashes of Howth, down shattered streets half-buried under rubble, the two men followed me. I hadn’t saved myself from them at all; I’d only delayed the inevitable and pissed them off in the process. They shoved me, spat on me, squeezed my arse, and grabbed at my breasts. With every bloody step, my legs shook harder, both from fear and from hunger, but somehow, they kept pulling me forward, delivering me to my doom. I ignored the taunts from the men behind me, ignored the leveled homes on either side of me, and stared straight ahead at Ireland’s Eye.
Searching for a selkie that didn’t exist.
Once we reached the harbor, I was shocked to find that most of the boats and several of the buildings there were still intact. The pier, the restaurants lining it, and the warehouse-like fish market where Da had sold his daily catch were all still standing. Probably because the Russians were using those buildings as some kind of headquarters. Tanks that looked like armored boats lined the main street. Tents crushed every blade of grass in the park next to the pier. But everything else had been destroyed.
Except for the boats in the harbor.
I stared at the faded red trawler at the end of the pier, and for the first time that I could remember, I wanted my da.
The drone led us past the loading dock behind the fish market and around to the main entrance facing the harbor. Men in camouflage watched me pass, their eyes lingering on my bare legs before flicking to the faces of the arseholes behind me with an appreciative sneer. My feet began to drag, my body recoiling from the hell that awaited me inside that building, but two viselike hands around my upper arms propelled me forward.
Just before we reached the door, it slammed open and stayed that way as a sailor or soldier struggled to pull something heavy out from inside. Releasing me to hold the door, the blue-eyed man with the buzz cut exchanged words with the stranger as the object he was dragging came into view.
First a foot, then the leg it was attached to, and then the rest of the naked young woman came sliding out the door, as unwieldy and unwanted as a bag of garbage. And almost as badly soiled. Multiple streams of blood ran down the length of her inner thigh, some dried and smeared, some shimmering red. Her torso and bare breasts were covered in burns, lashes, bites, and bruises. And when her pale gray face finally came into view, it was beaten beyond recognition and half-covered with a bloodstained matting of icy-blonde hair.
Sophie.
My empty stomach lurched violently as I turned away, dry-heaving on a startled sob. It was the single most horrifying thing I’d ever seen, and it had happened to someone I knew. A regular girl, like me.
And I was going to be next.
The drone began beeping in what I assumed was a warning that we needed to keep moving, so with a huff of impatience, the bearded man released my other arm and helped his comrade fling my classmate’s lifeless body into the harbor.
I’d made a mistake.
I’d made a horrible fucking mistake.
I should have let that drone kill me the very first night. Now, I was going to be tortured and raped to death, and for what? So that the man I’d saved could die of thirst or infection or starvation while he waited for me to return?
The speed of the beeping increased, like a bomb that was about to explode, and for the first time in a week, that didn’t scare me.
But what was waiting for me inside that building did.
I was frozen to the spot. I couldn’t run, even though I was temporarily unrestrained, and when the bearded man’s fist closed around my bicep again, I couldn’t make myself walk either. Jerking on my arm, the arsehole shouted at me in Russian before he finally leaned over, planted his shoulder in my stomach, and lifted me off the ground.
“No!” I screamed, kicking and thrashing as the other two men joined him in wrestling me into the building, but my efforts were in vain.
The men were simply too strong. And as soon as the door closed behind us, I knew that I would never be coming back out.
Alive.
Between my flailing limbs and the bodies of the three men carrying me, I couldn’t see much, but I could tell that the warehouse was dimly lit and smelled like a combination of fish, cigarettes, and every imaginable body fluid. Setting me down on an old wooden stool, one of the men held me still while the other two lashed my ankles to the legs with cable ties.
They shoved my torso forward so that my wrists would reach the front legs, which meant that I couldn’t sit all the way up, but also that if I got tired and leaned too far forward, I’d fall face-first onto the concrete floor. In fact, if I thrashed at all, I’d fall face-first onto the concrete floor. My only option was to try to maintain a semi-upright position, which wasn’t easy with my bruised thighs, abs, back, and ribs all screaming in pain.
When I finally lifted my head, I saw that we were gathered next to the long counter where Da used to sell his fish, which was now covered with laptops instead of mackerel and lined with Russian militants instead of fishmongers. Some of the screens had maps, or spreadsheets, or pages full of Russian text on them, but most were broadcasting arial footage of various places in Howth and Dublin. The screen in front of me, however, whose operator was shouting back and forth with the men who’d carried me in, had a very different image on it—the back of a hunched-over girl in a mud-soaked jumper, lashed to a stool.
Looking over my shoulder, I watched as the drone that had led me there slowly glided past us and landed on a charging dock next to the laptop. My bewildered face, framed by two curtains of unwashed hair, stared back at me just before the screen went black.
