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“Again?”
Hope stirred in my chest as those exhausted gray eyes struggled to focus on mine. Gray eyes that Father Sullivan had said looked just like Kellen’s. He was remembering. I knew he was.
“When you were captured,” Damien clarified, tilting his head back and sucking in a labored breath. “I thought I’d lost you when you were captured … in Howth.”
Rage simmered beneath my skin. He was hiding something. I could feel it.
“Please, Clo,” Damien begged, closing his eyes. “We have to leave.”
“Not until I find out what happened. Saoirse didn’t show me. None of Darby’s journals give any clues. Something terrible happened here, Damien, and I think it’s our destiny to right those wrongs. I’m sorry if you can’t see that, but—”
“All I see”—Damien’s eyelids lifted, revealing a colorless well of worry as he clasped my hands with weak fingers—“is a girl that I can’t live without. I’m sorry if keeping you safe interferes with your little murder mystery, but it’s my top priority, now and always.”
“Interferes with my what?” I stepped out of his grasp with a jerk, feeling my face heat and my pulse begin to climb.
“You know what I mean.” Damien rubbed his temples as his heavy eyelids lost their battle against gravity again.
“No, I don’t.”
Damien sighed with his whole body. “All of this stuff with Kellen and Darby is just a fantasy, angel. A … distraction from everything that’s happened, everything you lost.”
His body slumped against the wall while I just stood there, vibrating with anger.
After everything I’d shown him the night before—the bench, the rope swing, the way I knew my way around the house—he was going to ignore all my proof and jump straight to the conclusion that I was some hysterical woman, suffering from some grief-induced mental breakdown.
That I was Crazy Clover, living in her imaginary world again.
“I’m not crazy,” I hissed, feeling my hands ball into fists at my sides.
Damien sighed. “I didn’t say ya were, love. You’re just—”
“And I’m not leaving.” I folded my arms across my chest.
“This mystery you’re trying to solve, it won’t change anything, ya know. It won’t bring them back.”
“Us!” I shouted. “Stop saying them. It’s us, and you know it!”
“No. Them. Your family.”
Damien’s words extinguished my rage like a bucket of ice water as I considered what he was saying. Was I just trying to distract myself from my grief? Was I putting us in danger by staying?
Before I got the chance to answer those questions, Damien’s knees buckled, and I had to dive under his arm to keep him from falling. His body was shutting down. The man hadn’t slept more than two hours in the last two days, and he was still recovering from two gunshot wounds. He needed to lie down more than he needed me to challenge which one of us was in denial.
“Come on, handsome,” I said, steering him out of the kitchen and toward the bedroom. “Time for bed.”
Bobbing his head and slurring his speech, Damien protested, but he was too weak and shaky to push me away.
The only words I could make out as I laid him down and unlaced his boots were, “Please, Clo … stop. He’s gonna kill you … he’s gonna kill you too.”
Dear Damien,
I’ll probably be back before you wake up, but if not, I went to the church to see if Father Sullivan knows anything. Be home soon.
Love,
Clover
After leaving a note on the kitchen table, I slipped out through the broken back door and into the breezy cloud-covered morning. The sun had risen, but was nowhere to be seen as I gazed across the overgrown meadow at the forest and the purple mountain beyond. The top of it punctured the clouds, mirroring the wound I felt in my chest after my argument with Damien.
