Claimed by the Irish Enforce (Stone Syndicate Mafia Romance #2)

CHAPTER 1 NORA

I had believed him because I wanted to believe in small things.

Rent paid on time. Coffee made before work.

My own key turning in my own door. A life where my sister could be married to Gabriel Stone and I could still come home to a hallway that smelled like boiled cabbage, floor cleaner, and Mrs. Alvarez's incense instead of gun oil and rich men's secrets.

My grocery bags cut into my fingers as I climbed the last flight. One bag held oranges, discount pasta, laundry soap, and a carton of eggs I had checked twice because the corner store liked to hide broken ones in the middle. The other held coffee and bread.

The black car was outside again. I had seen it when I turned the corner from the subway, engine off this time, windows dark under the streetlights.

It sat across from my building, patient and dark.

For five nights, I had told myself it belonged to someone with a better coat than mine and worse parking manners.

Tonight, the driver's side window had lowered two inches before I reached the front door downstairs.

The Stone men thought they were subtle. They were not. A huge man in a black sedan at midnight did not become invisible because he wore a knit cap. He became a warning with heated seats.

Gabriel had promised Isabella that I was only being watched until the Hale mess finished settling. I had told Isabella I was fine. Both statements left out the parts that mattered.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket before I reached the top step. Isabella's name lit the screen, and my heart made that small, annoying jump it had started doing whenever someone called after dark.

If I answered, she would hear the hallway echo and ask about the car. Gabriel would know within a minute. Then another man with another silent car would appear, and everyone would call it care.

I declined the call and sent a text instead.

Me: Upstairs now. Stop worrying.

Bella: Impossible.

I smiled despite myself. Then I reached my door and stopped smiling. The third lock hung crooked from the frame.

At first, my brain refused the shape. The brass plate sat wrong, tilted away from the wood, one screw gone and another bent outward like someone had worried it loose with a tool.

Thin curls of fresh wood dust clung near the latch.

The old paint around the strike plate had split in a pale jagged line.

My key stayed pinched between my fingers.

The hallway noise dropped away. Mrs. Alvarez's television murmured behind her door. A pipe ticked somewhere inside the wall. My own breath sounded too close to my face.

I looked down the hallway. Empty. I set the grocery bags down carefully because eggs were still eggs even when your door had been opened by a stranger.

I should have called Isabella. Instead, I reached into my purse and closed my hand around the small can of pepper spray clipped to the lining.

My father had bought it for me when I started taking late shifts at the clinic desk.

He had stood in our kitchen and shown me how to aim with a seriousness that made Isabella laugh until he turned the can toward her and told her she was next.

Aim for the face, Nora. Then run. Pride is slower than feet.

I pushed the door with two fingers. It opened.

My apartment waited in the yellow light I had left on above the stove. The place was small enough that I could see the kitchen table, the sagging couch, the narrow hall to the bedroom, and the edge of my bathroom mirror from the doorway. Nothing moved. Nothing looked broken beyond the lock.

That made my skin crawl harder. The apartment looked almost exactly the way I had left it.

My laptop waited on the table. The cheap television stayed where it was. The coffee tin with my emergency cash still sat high on the kitchen shelf, ugly and blue and untouched.

Whoever had come in did not want what thieves wanted. My mouth dried.

I stepped inside and kept my back close to the wall. The pepper spray felt stupidly small in my hand. My eyes went to the bedroom door, the closet, the bathroom, the curtain over the fire escape window.

The curtain moved. A draft. Only a draft, but my chest still hurt.

I grabbed the aluminum bat behind the umbrella stand. It was dented from a charity softball game my father had coached badly and enjoyed loudly. Isabella had told me to throw it away three different times.

I had kept it because Thomas Brooks had not been a man who left many weapons behind. The bedroom came next.

My comforter was rumpled from the morning. One drawer stood open by two inches. My sweaters inside had been moved, not tossed. The difference made me sick. Tossed meant hurry. Moved meant time.

The closet door was closed. I stood in front of it with the bat raised and felt ridiculous for one second, then furious for feeling ridiculous. A strange man had opened my door and touched my things.

I yanked the closet door open.

Shoes. Laundry basket. The box fan with one missing blade. My old black dress in a dry-cleaning bag. A stack of storage boxes on the shelf.

Thomas's box sat where I had left it, brown cardboard soft at the corners, my father's name written across the lid in Isabella's neat handwriting.

THOMAS brOOKS.

My grip tightened on the bat. The top box beneath it had shifted.

I knew my apartment. I knew the tilt of every ugly thing in it. I knew which floorboard squeaked, which cabinet stuck, which neighbor smoked weed on Thursdays, which corner of the window gathered dust faster because the radiator breathed it there.

That box had moved. My phone buzzed again in my coat pocket. I nearly swung at my own hip.

Unknown number. Cold slid over my shoulders. I let it buzz until it stopped. Then a message appeared.

Tell your sister the dead man kept better records than she knows.

For a second, I was back in the hospital hallway with Isabella's hand crushing mine while a doctor used careful words around the fact that our father was dying. The dead man. He was my father. He was Thomas.

The dead man. My hand moved before my thoughts caught up. I hit call on Isabella's name, then stopped before the line connected.

If I called her, Gabriel would hear. If Gabriel heard, the Stone house would close around me before I could breathe.

Men would come. Doors would open for them and close for me.

Everyone would speak in that calm voice people used when they had already decided what should happen to a woman and only needed her to stop making it noisy.

I canceled the call. I opened Thomas's box.

Inside were the pieces of a life that did not fit anywhere else. His old watch with the cracked leather strap. A folded Mets cap. Two notebooks. Pharmacy receipts. A dark wooden watch box, scratched at the corners, empty except for the extra links he never used.

I touched the watch first.

The leather had gone soft from years of his wrist. Isabella had worn it through the worst days after his death until Gabriel gave her his ring and the watch became too painful for her skin.

She had handed it to me with both hands and said, Keep this for me.

Only until I can look at it without breaking.

I had kept it. Something knocked in the hallway. My head snapped up.

The sound came from farther away. Maybe the elevator. Maybe Mrs. Alvarez's grandson coming home. Maybe nothing.

Then the knock came again. This time, it landed on my door.

Three hard taps. Controlled. Patient.

“Nora.”

Declan Reeve's voice came through the door, low and rough, with that scraped edge that made everything he said sound like it had survived a fight before reaching his mouth. Anger rushed in so fast it almost felt like relief.

“Go away.”

“Open the door.”

“I am holding a bat.”

“I know.”

Of course he knew. The man probably knew the brand of cereal in my cabinet and how many steps I took from the subway when I was trying not to look scared. I crossed the living room and kept the chain on when I opened the door two inches.

Declan filled the space beyond it. He wore a dark coat over a dark shirt, no tie, hair damp from the weather, jaw rough with stubble that looked accidental and still unfair.

The hallway light caught the scar across one knuckle where his hand rested near the doorframe.

His eyes went to my face first, then the bat, then the broken lock, then past my shoulder into the apartment.

“Move back,” he said.

I kept my shoulder against the door. “You move back.”

“There may still be someone inside.”

“I checked.”

“With that stance?” His gaze dropped to the bat. “You'd hit the wall before you hit a man.”

“Come in uninvited and we can test your theory.”

A tiny pause moved through him. His mouth did not curve, but something changed near his eyes. Respect, maybe. That made me angrier because I did not want anything from him, especially approval.

“Good,” he said.

“Good?”

“Fear's allowed. Freezing isn't. You didn't freeze.”

I hated how much I needed that sentence to land somewhere in me.

“I did not ask for a performance review from the mafia hall monitor.”

“Open the door, Nora.”

“No.”

His eyes lifted from the damaged lock to my face. “Someone opened it already.” The words hit where he aimed them.

My fingers tightened around the bat. “That is not permission for you to do it too.”

A muscle jumped once in his jaw. The hallway behind him looked empty, but Stone protection never arrived alone. It multiplied like mold in rich houses.

Declan looked down the hall once, then lowered his voice.

“I can stand out here and argue while whoever came through that door gets farther away, or you can let me check the apartment properly.”

“I already told you I checked it.”

“You checked it scared.”

The worst part was that he was right. I wanted to slam the door in his face. I wanted to call Isabella and hand the fear to someone who loved me. I wanted my father alive, my sister safe without guards, and my apartment back from the invisible hands that had touched it.

I unhooked the chain. Declan did not push in. He waited until I stepped back.