And we’re back to Darby’s interesting choice to stay in the same country as the mob bosses she is responsible for locking away.  Darby’s all happy because she’s pregnant and just finished her fourth scary kids’ book and it’s maybe their anniversary?  Kate, Kellan’s mom, owns a bakery and drops treats off every week but Darby’s the only one who hugs her because Darby’s a hugger.  Trees, moms, sheep, lampposts…

 

Darby goes up to the barn they converted into a wood working space for Kellan and is surprised to see Kellan pointing a gun at her.  He apologizes for the gun, but not for his short assassin hair and crazy eyes.  He’s all freaked out, rightfully so, that he found the Butcher murdered – the Butcher was the one who kept their location safe.  Bam, noise, and they’re invaded by thugs, Alexi has a gun pointed at Darby’s head because he’s a pretty mad Russian mobster, Mafia romance! 

 

Kellan drops the gun and then they shoot Darby in the leg so she and the baby will bleed out in 5 minutes.  Oh, you didn’t know she was pregnant, Kellan?  Wtf, this is awful.  Kellan didn’t, so Darby says knife and Kellan stands up and knifes himself in the heart, again leaving Darby with the thugs by herself and wtf.  But that’s the end of the chapter so hopefully Darby wasn’t tortured more, but really wtf.  Of course this is how they die.  Just brutal to the readers and completely unnecessary, it’s just wrong.  You can kill them off, I get it, but this was mean.  A few minutes into the wood scene I bumped it up to 2.85x because it was just awful.

 

We then jump ahead 20 years-ish to Clover, who’s mom died and her dad is an a**hole.  He’s physically abusive and expects her to just deal with it since she’s 20 and he doesn’t have to let her live with them.  Clover’s supposed to go to college soon, but also stays around because her dad has a young wife and a baby that Clover wants to try to help shield from the abuse.  Because of course she’s being abused.  A news story says if you live where Clover lives, run for it, Russia is invading, and her dad just laughs and tells her to go check the traps.

 

Meanwhile, Damien is an Irish guy fighting for the Russians because he was sold to a fight club when he was fifteen.  Sure, okay.  But he’s not happy about it!  He loves Ireland, but he’ll do what he as to because I guess a deal’s a deal when the Irish sell a kid to Russia?  His group of people are going to short shell the port, and the Russians are all excited to pillage something.  He’ll do it, but he doesn’t like it!

 

Clover goes to check the traps and we get to hear how sh*tty her life has been with her only comfort is the fairy boy Darby Donovan wrote about.  He was her imaginary friend and she believes in selkies, so the town calls her Crazy Clover.  But she’s pretty, so she lets the boys touch her so she has some kind of connection.  Zeus’s teeth, of course this is our heroine, no joy here.  Her dad is physically abusive, the town kids are cruel and touch her, of course, of course! 

 

Clover goes to her traps in a cave, smokes a cigar, and looks at her greatest possession, Darby’s books.  She has to head back, and when she does, she finds her house has been destroyed and nice stepmom Sheila and baby Odin were killed.  Because of course a baby would blow up.  &*(*^&**&%$#$&*@

 

She takes keys from Sheila’s amputated arm and goes to leave, but a drone robotically tells her if she leaves we’ll kill you, so she runs and jumps off a cliff.

 

Meanwhile, Damien is having trouble blowing up his home.  It’s hard on him when his group blows up Sheila AND HER BABY.  He stops a guy from shooting Clover as she runs for the cliff and says it in English so now they know he’s a spy!  Wtf.  This is the first time he hasn’t blended in culturally?  Sure, so there’s fighting and he sees Clover disappear from view.

 

The Russian ship is blown up by Irish planes and Clover’s all, there’s a pilot in the water!  I’ll save him!  So she saves him and brings him back to her trap cave only to see that he’s not Irish.  He blew up her family, but he’s just so cute!  But that’s bad!  She pushes on his unconscious body to get out then starts crying on him.  I guess future wars with fight club guys are weird.

 

Damien is kind of waking up and has memories of Kellan’s life of having his head shaved and then chasing Darby after he told her to leave.  He wakes up to find Clover snoring on top of him, and he’s all this is heaven!  When she takes his gun and points it at him he gives a frowny face, boo, this is hell!  For some reason he can’t talk, like is that from injury or he’s now morphing physical attributes with Kellan.  Who knows.

 

Clover is freaked out by seeing Damien’s gray eyes, the same eyes of her imaginary fairy friend, a friendship that got intense after her mom died.  So now that the rest of her family, including a BABY, was blown up she worries this is another hallucination like the fairy boy.

 

She’s like f this, I’m out of this safe enclosure with this wounded guy who probably can’t hurt me.  She walks up the hill and is spotted by a drone.  So everything has blown up everywhere except for this drone that wants her to march to the closest internment camp.  Ummm, so what?  She jumps off another cliff and swims back to the cave.

 

Now they’re stuck together!  But she wants him dead!  But look at those grey eyes, I love him, he’s my friend, I must save him!  She kind of patches him up, gives him some water, then sees a red, blue, and white tattoo and runs behind a boulder yelling stay away!

 

Clover’s then sad because she thought if she could just be better her dad would love her, but now he’s all blown up so what’s the point to life?  But then Damien drapes his coat over her and it’s all fine now, she’s not alone!

 

Damien has a flashback of killing Lawyer when he’s trying to hurt Darby, who’s wearing his jacket.  Now Clover is wearing his jacket.  Sigh.  He heard her being cold all night and couldn’t take it any more so he dragged himself over and put his coat on her hoping that she’d shoot him.  Me, too, buddy.

 

He finally gets to look at her and she’s not the same girl, her hair is darker, she smells like salt.  This isn’t his girl!  But she’s pretty and is now going back to her hiding spot because she thinks he murdered her family, which he kind of did, which included BLOWING UP A BABY.  For whatever reason that is beyond me, he can’t speak, so he fingerpaints a picture of her or Darby, I don’t know, with his own blood and throws it at her.  Ah, romance.

 

Clover catches some lobster and tries to feed Damien, but he’s like, nah, I just want to die.  She convinces him there’s plenty and he finally eats then she reads out loud from Darby’s books, which makes him think he’s really in hell.  I find no reason to disagree.  Darby was murdered at 22 and Clover wants more than anything to go to the village where Darby was murdered…of course you do.

 

Damien goes kind of nutso crazy when he hears the stories because it’s his story and he didn’t get the girl, and he’s trapped in a cave with a demon pretending to be his girl.  But wait, she’s a real girl and she’s scared – maybe Damien is the arsehole, no, his dad is, no wait, the need for physical touch is the real arsehole.  Sigh.  Clover’s crying and now he’ll hold her forever, and I don’t know, I think he needs some sleep.

 

Damien finally tilts her face up to see her eyes – she’s followed a strict rule of not looking at the Russian, and now everything makes sense, okay, buddy.  This is his girl, just a little different from last time. 

 

He speaks and Clover freaks out with joy that he’s Irish and then concocts a really annoying Darby-esque story that he was a hostage and the Russians shot him.  That’s it, so now she’s all happy and he’s like, okay, we’ll just go with that, I was a spy hostage!  Like Kellan worked for special ops and she never questioned it.  Sigh, I wish Darby had gotten smarter.  Nope.  We’re doing this again.  Damien’s the soul heir of the Russian fight club, a lieutenant who ordered her family, including A BABY, to be blown up, but that’s fine, let’s do this, you just do you Clover, he doesn’t need to fix your delusions.  Because that turned out great last time.  He then babbles on some more about the devil. 

 

They’re now out of supplies so Clover has to go get more.  Off she goes ending up on a farm she knows.  She hears laughing voices and she knows it’s all going to be okay.  She runs to the voices because this is Darby and she’s so Darby.  She knocks on the door and is attacked. Omg.  She runs but they catch her and prepare to assault her when she screams only go to get punched in the back of the head.  A drone comes and points a machine gun at all of them, stopping the attack, so they start kicking her.  She follows the drone as the two thugs grab at her and insult her as she walks.  Again, she ran toward voices knowing they the town had been overrun by Russians who just BLEW UP A BABY.  Omg.

 

The thugs take Clover to a building where the previous victim’s dead body is being carried out – another young girl who’d been sexually and physically abused in every way possible.  And Clover is next.  Good god.  2x

 

And there are more people there who’s been abused, including Mr. McCormick.  Being beaten, you have to be f’ing kidding me, does this end?  And they start to assault her before cutting off her hair.  Then they take her to a room filled with men to assault her.  Because of course they do.  Still 2x

 

And they continue to assault her, using a picture of Alexi at one point, and it’s just too much.  They’re about to taz her into submission but they suddenly stop.

 

Damien shows up speaking Russian and now she feels stupid, she should have known, and this just goes on to further prove she’s unlovable.  Now he has to pretend to assault her, but doesn’t really and tells her to scream, so she does and it feels good to scream.  I just can’t with this.  He’s saved her from being gang raped, but he’s the worst of all of them!  He keeps pretending to assault her, and this is never going to end.

 

He finally nods for the first perv to come over and then shoots him in the face.  So his plan was to fake abusing Clover just to get the guy close?  What?  He now has to kill the other 11 or 9 assaulters, which he does, then throws Clover in the water and they meet at her abusive dad’s boat.  He’s been shot again and she’s not so thrilled with him, but thank f that scene is over.

 

They sail off and she’s like how could you do this to your people?  His mom was a dancer who turned tricks on the side to survive and he’s the head of the Russian mob’s only son – when she couldn’t take care of him anymore she went to his dad for support and I think his dad killed his mom and took Damien to the Siberian fight club, then made him a lieutenant so he had to watch Ireland burn.  Clover’s all, that’s a bummer.

 

They go onshore to a bakery to hide out until morning, and there’s attempted Tiddlywinks, but Clover freaks out as she remembers what just happened a few hours ago.  Which makes sense since IT WAS A FEW HOURS AGO.  Someone get her some clothes, please.

 

Damien’s upset because she’s hurt and he thought he’d reached her before the bad stuff, ummmm, okay?  She was naked with a gun and guy’s tiddlywink near her face as blood pooled on the floor from her cut wrists.  Sooooooo, what now, Damien?

 

They hear someone coming so Damien throws the intruder into the wall only to find it’s a lady named Jaqueline who’s the partner to Kate, the bakery owner.  They all go upstairs for them to clean up and Damien wants to leave but he can’t, so he doesn’t, and she doesn’t want him to, they’re still alive because they’re together so let the mob come for them, ugh.  And Tiddlywinks.  They declare their love for each other, and I guess that’s nice?  This book is exhausting.

 

They both have three freckles which Clover says means they’re soulmates, she read it in Darby’s book.  He’s like that’s good, since the fight club’s after us we’re probably going to die young.  Clover wakes up and feels like she’s been run over by a bus, but in a good way.  Ummmmm…..

 

She then freaks out that he left her because of course anyone would leave Crazy Clover, then goes downstairs and sees he hasn’t left her, but there’s some news and then some thugs break in.  Damien and Jack kill them but Damien and Clover need to go, so they put the bodies in a different room, because no one will take the second it takes to look to the right, so that’ll help.  Clover and Damien take off so the drones follow them and leave Kate and Jack alone.  Umm, okay.

 

They get on a train and end up in Glenshire where a priest yells Damien is the devil, that he killed a priest and blah blah, so they run off into the woods where the witch is like hey dumbasses.  They’re confused, so she changes into a giant thing with blue eyes and throws them in the lache, where Clover sees things that Darby lived through. 

 

The lady of the lake is pissed at Damien/Kellan for being such a dumbass, so she tosses him around and makes him relive Darby dying and him killing himself as he looks at his now father!  Omg!

 

And Tiddlywinks.

 

If they’re together forever, then what happens when they have a life without trauma, they just stare at each other?

 

And now Clover gets it, she’s Darby!  And she reminisces about when they played Harry Potter.  She calls him Kellan and he’s like ooookay, so let’s go to the train.

 

And she’s like lets go play in the cottage, Kellan, it was your favorite thing!  And he’s all, okay so you are hallucinating, let’s maybe get you some sleep.  He disagrees with this soulmate stuff.  He thinks the place is f-ing with their minds.  She’s like what is wrong with you, a**hole?  How did you not see it (the previous life)?  He thinks it was oxygen deprivation.  So you did see something!  I don’t know what I saw!  He answers.  He’s not Kellan, and she now thinks she’s Crazy Clover again.  He disagrees, let’s talk about it on the train.  She stops letting him dress her.

 

Here’s your rope swing!  See?  No, let’s get you some food.  They had tiddly’d on the bench Kellan made.  Here’s the cottage!  See?  No, it’s too dark!

 

They go into the cottage and Clover knows where the matches and candles are, but he’s like all houses have matches and candles.  She started looking around and he’s very uncomfortable.  She doesn’t remember how Darby and Kellan died but wants to figure it out because she thinks they’re there to right a wrong.  Since they obviously have time to solve a mystery as they run from the Russian mob/army.  He’s all this is f’d, we need to leave our we’ll be murdered, too. She hugs the flight jacket and cries.

 

It eventually comes back to him, I don’t remember how, and Tiddlywinks.  He’s like, we are going out of this country, and she’s all, we have to solve the murder!  He’s like argh! And she’s like, this is what I do, make really bad decisions!

 

He pretty much passes out from no sleep and bullet wounds and she bebops off to learn more of the Darby/Kellan murder for her podcast.  Norah the neighbor says yo, Darby’s uncle is in a hospital in Dublin, he can probably tell you!

 

And off to Dublin Clover goes, leaving a note and some kind of food for Damien.  Off to Dublin, home by night, kisses!  He’s all wtf!!!  And que more tortured soulness as dumbass is like, I knew how they died, I could have told her, I am so so so dumb. You really are.  I will get her! 

 

At the hospital, uncle is like Darby’s come to take me to heaven or hell!  Which is it?  Oh right, well first tell me how I was killed.  And he tells her it was Russian dude because she and Kellan got them locked away for a few life sentences, well, he did, too, so when there was more trouble (their murders) he couldn’t do anything about it since he’d taken on the fight club once, he couldn’t do it again!  Then boom blam, explosion.

 

Damien’s apparently better at directions than Clover and heads right for the hospital in time to see the boom blam and soon finds his angel under some plaster.  He apologizes when she wakes up, this is all his fault, and it’s like, yeah, it is, this was really stupid. 

 

He turns himself in to the Russian fight club so he can kill his father, he’s all down with it now instead of running (his dad’s all I can’t wait to assault your new girlfriend, and I’m like, does the assaulting literally ever end?) and Clover goes back to Kate and Jack for help, since they are only kind of war torn?  Then Damien appears on tv as the VP of Russia, since that’s a thing, and tells them all to obey mother Russia and burn their t-shirts or die.  Really.

 

He’s a traitor!  Jack yells.  Oh and this is after Clover’s like, he’s Kellan, I’m Darby, you’re caught up.  Kate’s like of course he’s Kellan!  We must save him!  But we don’t know where he is!  Darby’s all, I do.

 

Meanwhile, Damien’s in a cell playing with his restraints.  When Paul and Jack come to save him, so he strangles Paul, but I guess not really because Paul’s banged up but we never hear about what an as&hole Damien was to nearly kill him.  They go back to the church somewhere, and Clover’s all ta da!  We have a plan!

 

This little resistance group announces they’ve kidnapped the Russian VP and they’ll exchange him on a bridge tomorrow for some beer.  Alexi will have to show up!  And then Damien can kill him!

 

Damien, Jack, and Paul head to the exchange point and Clover realizes that life only works when she and Damien are together!  And then she sings a song about togetherness before running off to help Damien.

 

Meanwhile, Damien sees a redhead being carried off so he chases the redhead and her captor only to be captured because ha ha ha, it’s not Clover!  It’s a different lady and now he has to do infomercials for his dad forever! 

 

Clover goes back to the psych ward where Darby’s uncle was before, and where she almost blew up.  She’s looking for the bodies of the soldiers and I can’t even remember what all happens.  Next thing you know Damien’s giving some speech about how Russia is good for your skin when he sees that they have captured Clover!  Omg!  His dad’s all happy because he gets a new girl to torture, and Damien’s all nooooooo!!!!!!   Then Clover starts screaming which attracts the drones.  Damien grabs her and they make it into the armored helicopter as the drones kill his dad. 

 

And Tiddlywinks.  Errr, okay.

 

After tiddlying, Clover explains this was all her plan – she went to the psych ward to get a finger and Paul speaks Russian so he could hack the drones!  He’s all, I suck, I was supposed to kill my father and you had to do it!  She gives him jazz hands as she sings her togetherness song.  Then he gets on tv and announces with the president now dead he’s the president!  I’m not kidding.

 

Six months later Shamus, Kellan’s boss who was apparently running Ireland, has fled to Venezuela and Damien gives an interview to the BBC about how Ireland is now a part of NATO and he’s stepping down as the Russian president and Russia will have a real election.  All thanks to his wife who he hasn’t married yet, Clover!  He then goes down to the basement to all the Russian thugs that he doesn’t want to leave to hurt Clover and Ireland and gives them a present.  I thought he might kill them all to protect Clover and Ireland, but no, he just wanted to hand them Shamus.  And ta da, world peace!  I’m not kidding.

 

Six months later Damien and Clover get married and they Tiddlywink in the cave and it’s all amazing, she’s going to write and he’s going to run for office!  Umm, what?

 

End Note:

 

I was so tired after finishing the book that I wrote the above summary then left it for about two months - I don’t even know what to note.  Not my bag, that’s about it.  It’s like a trauma sandwich with extra trauma on the side served with a trauamtini.  I’m just tired revisiting it for about 15 minutes.  I might go make some coffee.