Page 97 of Dirty Padraig: Dirty Dusters

I am him. He is me.

I finally feel the connection being reciprocated.

My mind then shifts to the immediate problem at hand. Sitting upright, I stare at the door. It’s closed. Getting off the sectional, I pass him and walk across the room to pull the handle down.

As I knew it would be, it’s locked.

“Shit,” I hiss.

Irish walks over to where I’m standing. “It should just….” He pulls the handle down repeatedly. Nothing. A frown mars his brow. “It’s meant to open automatically from the inside.”

“If it did, I wouldn’t be trapped in here.” Walking back, I sit down, then watch Irish try the door again. He eventually gives up. My eyes track him as he makes all the other recent discoveries I did.

The fact that there’s not much water. The fact that there’s no food. The reality that the pretty much non-existent rations will now have to be split between us both.

“This place was always stocked with enough supplies to last six people for a week at least.”

“I was sent here on a lost cause, Irish.” Surely, he must realize it’s me the bad guys are really after.

“What do you mean?” He turns to look at me, his frown deepening.

“What I mean is, whoever’s sent me here on this fool’s goddamn errand has deliberately removed everything in advance. They’ve also turned off the water supply.” I look at him as he sits beside me, so close I can feel the warmth of his thigh against mine.

“I was going through Molly’s phone. The last message she received suggested that she’d been left a gift under the sectional in here. I wanted to know what it was. If it was something that could help us track down this faceless faction we’re up against. So, I came straight away.”

“Without telling anyone where you were going?”

“Yup,” I admit reluctantly.

“And without your phone?”

“Yup.” I swing my head to look at him, hope, no doubt, written all over my face. He shakes his head.

“I caught a cab. In my haste to leave, I also left my phone at home.” A pause. “And was this gift something that could help us track them down?”

I shake my head as I pull the small wooden box out of my pocket before passing it to him. He studies it before lifting the lid, recognizing the music instantly, just as I did.

“The funeral march.” He closes it. “So, it was a setup.”

“It would appear that way.”

“And you have no idea who it might be?”

I shake my head. How can I tell him that I think his wife may be involved? I can’t. He loves her. He’s happy. I won’t destroy that for him, and definitely not without proof.

“So, what do we do now?”

“We conserve energy because we have no food and very little water, and we wait. There’s not much else we can do.” Leaning my back against the sectional, I pull my knees up to my chest, then rest my chin on top.

Minutes pass as we both consider our predicament.

“You want to play I Spy, Jaine?”

It’s a sentence that should make me smile. It does, and it doesn’t. It takes me straight back to when the three of us were being held by the Bratva.

And then there were two.

I blink back the resultant tears before positioning myself so I’m lying down with my head resting on the armrest. It doesn’t surprise me when Irish lies down beside me like we always did in our Yale days. We’d lay side by side on my student bed, planning what our future together would look like.

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