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“Disgusted?” Jack snapped.
“Little skirmish,” I whispered, picturing scorched hills covered in dead sheep and leveled houses.
“Fleein’ yer cities. Runnin’ off to the country—or worse, America. After everything we just went through to unite our island again, yer just gonna roll over and let another colonizer take it from ya without a feckin’ fight?”
Jack laughed maniacally and pinched the bridge of her nose.
Rooney continued, “Yeah, sure, Abramov likes to brag that he’s got a two-million-man army. Ours might not be that big—”
“Not that big?! We’re down to eight thousand, ya fuckin’ muppet!”
“But we’ve got five million men, women, and children on this island who can all join the fight.”
“Children?” Kate echoed, shaking her head as she stared at the screen with sad, unfocused eyes.
“So, get yer arses to Dublin and bring all the weapons ya got. Yer country needs ya, ya cowards!”
Pausing the broadcast, Kate looked at Jack. “What do we do?”
“You should get off the island,” Damien responded, his voice deep and commanding. “Right now, Abramov is focused on the capital, but as soon as there’s a Russian flag flyin’ over Dublin Castle, he’ll take the rest of the country.”
“How do ya know that?” Jack asked, coming to stand behind Kate.
Damien shrugged. “We have our sources.”
He was letting them believe he was in the Irish military, just like he’d done with me. I’d felt so betrayed by that omission, but now, I understood why’d he done it. Damien was one of us, no matter what the patches on his jacket said.
Shite.
I glanced down at the Russian flag on my arm and turned that side of my body farther away from our hosts.
“We’re not leavin’,” Jack stated bluntly, gripping the back of Kate’s chair. “This is my home, and I’m gonna defend it.”
“What are you gonna do?” Kate asked quietly.
She didn’t look at either of us, but I could tell that her question was directed at Damien. She behaved the same way around him that I had in the cave. Like it hurt her to look at him. Like it hurt her not to.
He opened his mouth to answer, but the next voice we heard wasn’t his.
And it wasn’t speaking English.
Damien and Jack locked eyes as the sound of two men laughing and speaking Russian echoed up the stairs from the bakery.
“Hide,” Damien whispered.
“No!” Jack hissed. “Nobody move. These floors squeak like rusty gates. They’ll hear ya.”
Kate’s eyes went wide with terror as they darted from Jack to Damien.
“Ya have a gun?” Damien asked.
“In the bedroom. Too far.”
Something shattered downstairs, like a plate or a pane of glass. The men laughed and broke something else.
“Motherfuckers,” Jack spat.
Kate’s hand began to shake in mine, but Damien was as calm and quiet as the harbor fog. Standing up in his chair, he pulled the gun from his waistband and stepped onto the table. It creaked a bit under his weight, but not enough to hear all the way downstairs. Crouching to keep from hitting his head on the ceiling, Damien stepped from the table to the counter, then over to the kitchen island. There, he dropped to his knees and silently lifted a barstool, placing it back down as far out as he could reach. With it, he bridged the gap between the kitchen and the sitting room, ending up on a blue velvet couch that sat across from the stairwell. Kneeling on the seat, Damien leaned over the back, staring down the barrel of his gun into the shadowy void below.
