CHAPTER 3 NORA
Morning came in gray strips through the blinds, thin and ugly over the chair I had shoved under my bedroom doorknob.
The chair was mostly theater. Declan Reeve stood in the hallway with a gun and a face that made locks seem decorative. Aidan was somewhere by the stairs. Finn was outside in the black car I had spent two weeks hating before I found out a worse car had been watching me too.
Sleep had not come. I had spent most of the night sitting against my headboard with Dad's box on my lap and my baseball bat across my knees, jumping every time the old pipes knocked in the walls.
Mrs. Alvarez's television went quiet around two.
Rain kept tapping the glass. My phone stayed plugged into the charger beside me, screen down, because every time it lit up my stomach tried to climb out of my throat.
At seven twenty-three, someone knocked.
Three controlled hits. Knuckles, not a fist. Declan did not pound. Of course he didn't. He had already proven he could wait outside a door and still take up the whole apartment.
"Nora," he said.
My fingers tightened around the bat. "I am alive. Congratulations on your hallway career."
A pause sat on the other side of the door. Then his voice came lower. "Open up. Isabella is on her way here."
That got me moving.
The chair scraped so hard the downstairs neighbor thumped the ceiling. I dragged it aside, unhooked the chain, and opened the door with the bat still in my hand.
Declan stood there in a black coat with rain darkening one shoulder, coffee in one hand, phone in the other.
His hair looked damp, his jaw rough with the night, and his eyes moved over my face so fast I felt each stop.
Hair. Mouth. Hands. Bat. Door frame. His gaze returned to my eyes, and the coffee rose between us like a peace offering from a man who probably did not believe in peace.
"You brought coffee," I said.
"You yelled at me last night before I could ask if you wanted any."
"That sounds like your fault."
"Usually is." He held it out. "Milk. Two sugars."
My hand stopped short of the cup. "How do you know that?"
"You ordered it that way from the deli under your building three times this week."
The heat in my face arrived fast. "So the surveillance came with beverage notes. How thoughtful."
Declan's mouth tightened. "Finn watches who follows you. He hears what he hears."
"And reports my sugar intake to the mafia?"
"He told me because I asked."
That should not have been better. It was not better. My pulse still kicked against the inside of my wrist when I took the cup from him, and our fingers brushed around the lid. His hand was warm. Mine was cold from gripping a bat all night.
He noticed. His eyes dropped to my fingers.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't speak."
"Your face did."
"My face says you need gloves."
"Your face needs boundaries."
A sound came from the hallway stairs. Isabella's voice, sharp with worry before I saw her. "Nora?"
My sister rounded the landing with Gabriel Stone behind her and Cormac Doyle beside him.
Two guards followed, then stopped lower on the stairs without being told.
Isabella's hand went to the banister as she climbed.
She looked beautiful in a soft cream coat that would have cost more than my rent, her dark hair pinned back, her face pale with fear she tried to make tidy because she was pregnant and married to a man whose entire house obeyed silence.
"Bella," I said.
Her eyes went straight to the bat in my hand. Then to my face. Then to the broken plate around my lock. "Oh God."
"Careful," I said. "Your husband may charge you for taking His name in the hallway."
Gabriel's gaze flicked to me, calm and gray and far too awake for a man still recovering from surgery. "He doesn't mind."
"Good. I have a list."
Isabella reached me first. Her arms came around me, careful around the coffee and the bat, and for one stupid second I was seven again and she was hiding the last cookie from Dad because I had cried over a scraped knee.
Her coat smelled like rain and the faint clean soap of the Stone townhouse.
My eyes burned, and I hated everyone present for making witnesses of it.
"I am going to kill you," she whispered into my hair.
"Get in line. Men keep trying."
Her arms tightened. "Don't joke."
"Then don't put guards on me and forget to send a pamphlet."
Isabella went still against me.
There it was. The thing that had been sitting in my chest all night, hot and mean, waiting for her face. She pulled back slowly. Her eyes shone, but she did not look away.
"I knew Gabriel had someone check the street," she said. "Light coverage. That was what he called it. I didn't know about the camera. I didn't know someone had entered your apartment."
"But you knew about the car."
"Yes."
The word hit harder because she gave it to me plain.
My throat worked. I stepped back into the apartment because the hallway had too many men and too many eyes. "Come in, then. Since everyone else already has."
Declan's face changed by one small degree. Gabriel's did not. Cormac's eyes went toward the lock, then the hinges, then the opposite wall where the camera had watched my door from across the air shaft.
"Five minutes here," Gabriel said. "Then we go to my house."
"We go nowhere until someone explains why I am expected to obey a family I did not marry into."
"You are Isabella's sister."
"I was her sister before she married you. Nobody pointed cameras at me then."
Gabriel took the hit without blinking. Isabella did. Her hand slid over the curve of her stomach before she caught herself, and guilt punched straight through my anger.
I turned away first, because pregnancy had made her easier to hurt and harder to stay mad at.
My apartment looked smaller with all of them inside.
The chipped kitchen counter. The old couch with the blanket thrown over one arm.
The grocery bag from last night still on the floor, one orange bruised near the baseboard.
Dad's box sat on my bed where I had left it, lid shut, watch wrapped inside an old handkerchief.
Cormac stepped only as far as the threshold. "Miss Brooks, I would like your permission to inspect the damage after we leave."
"Permission," I repeated.
"Yes."
"That word is popular with me today."
Declan's gaze touched mine. Brief. Rough. There and gone.
Gabriel said, "We have more to discuss than a hallway can hold."
"Your study?" I asked. "Is that where Stone decisions happen before women are informed?"
Isabella flinched this time. Gabriel's eyes narrowed, not with anger. With attention.
"Often," he said.
The answer was so clean I almost laughed.
"Fine," I said. "I want my father's box. My phone stays with me. I sit near the door. Declan does not put me in a car like furniture. And if one more man tells me what will happen without telling me why, I will make this morning unpleasant for everyone."
Declan's mouth moved like he wanted to say something and chose survival instead.
"Accepted," Gabriel said.
Isabella looked at her husband. "Gabriel."
"She is right."
The room went quiet in a way that made my skin prickle.
Gabriel Stone had not raised his voice. He had not softened either. He stood in my cheap living room in a tailored coat, recovering body held too straight, and somehow made agreement feel like an order everyone else had to respect.
"Nora rides with you," he told Isabella. "Declan follows."
My head came up. Declan's did too.
"I thought he was my assigned shadow," I said.
"He is," Gabriel said. "You asked not to be handled like furniture. My wife came for you. You ride with her."
Useful, finally.
I picked up Dad's box before I could thank him by accident.
The ride to the Stone townhouse happened under a sky the color of wet concrete.
Isabella sat beside me in the back of Gabriel's car, one hand around mine and the other over her stomach.
Gabriel sat in front with the driver, giving us the back seat like privacy was something he could grant by facing forward.
Declan followed behind us in a black SUV.
Every time we stopped at a light, I saw his car in the mirror, near enough that running felt impossible while still giving proof Gabriel had listened.
"Talk to me," Isabella said.
I watched rain streak the window. "You first."
"I should have told you about the car."
"Yes."
"I was afraid you would refuse and then Gabriel would do it anyway."
"So you picked the version where only one of you betrayed me."
Her fingers tightened around mine. "I picked the version where I could sleep knowing someone was outside if Hale's people came back."
Hale's name still had teeth, even dead or broken or whatever men like Gabriel called destroyed. Dad had died because of that world of policies and signatures. Isabella had walked into Gabriel's world to burn it down, and somehow the smoke had reached my apartment.
"This isn't Hale," I said. "Declan said Mercer."
Gabriel's shoulders shifted in the front seat. He did not turn around.
Isabella looked at him, then back at me. "Elias Mercer funded patient programs connected to some of the shell boards Hale used. Cormac thinks Mercer stayed cleaner on paper."
"Cleaner on paper," I said. "That phrase makes me want to break something."
"Me too."
The honesty eased one small, ugly knot under my ribs. I hated that. Anger had kept me upright since last night. Without it, the fear underneath started breathing.
Isabella saw too much. She always had. Her eyes softened, and I looked away before she could turn sisterhood into comfort in front of her husband.
"He used Dad's name," I said.
"I know."
"He said Dad kept better records than you know."
Her breath caught. Gabriel turned his head then, only enough for me to see the hard line of his cheek.
"Cormac is tracing every old record your father touched," he said. "Anything Mercer wants will be found before he reaches you again."
"And if it is mine?"
"Then you will know first."