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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!”
