CHAPTER 4 DECLAN #2
"And if I need to breathe without a Stone man listening?"
"Then you whisper insults. I'll pretend not to hear."
This time the twitch nearly became a smile.
I left before it could ruin me.
The Black Harp had been closed to the public by the time I arrived. Rain slicked the pavement outside, turning the old sign above the door into a smear of green and gold. Finn stood under the awning with his collar up and a cigarette unlit between his fingers.
"Boss is upstairs," he said. "Cormac has the filings. Maeve looks ready to skin someone with a butter knife."
"Any movement at Nora's building?"
"Mrs. Alvarez called twice to ask if the handsome rude one was coming back. I assume she meant you."
"She said handsome?"
"I was surprised too."
I grunted and went inside.
The public bar smelled like old beer, polished wood, rain, and the ghost of a hundred arguments that had ended better than they should have.
Chairs were turned upside down on tables.
A single lamp burned near the back stairs.
The place looked asleep until you noticed the two men near the kitchen door and the one by the front with his hand inside his coat.
Upstairs, Gabriel's back room had become what it always became when the family was bleeding information: files on the table, Cormac with a laptop and two phones, Maeve with donor names spread in front of her, Gabriel standing at the head like the room had grown around him.
He looked pale under the lamplight. Recovery had taken weight from him, but it had not taken command. His eyes found mine as I entered.
"Nora?"
"Inside the guest suite. Isabella with her. Four men on exits. She has their names."
Maeve's pen paused. "She demanded names?"
"She gets names."
"That will make future evasions harder."
"Good."
Maeve looked at me then. Too sharp. Too quick. "Careful, Declan."
"With what?"
"With confusing cooperation for loyalty."
I leaned both hands on the table and looked down at a printed photo of Elias Mercer smiling beside a hospital wing ribbon. His face had the clean shine of men who never had to smell what their money bought.
"I'm not confused."
Gabriel's voice cut through before Maeve could answer. "Work."
Cormac turned the laptop toward me. "Harrow Lane Risk received three payments in the last month through Saint Brigid. Officially for event security. Unofficially, the timing follows Hale's first deposition leak and the day Nora's building camera first picked up the black sedan."
"Owner?"
"Patrick Vale. Former NYPD. Retired early after an internal affairs investigation that vanished when a hospital donor hired him for private consulting."
Maeve slid another page across. "Vale does security for Mercer events. Hospital fundraisers, clinic openings, donor dinners. He is careful, expensive, and deeply loyal to whoever keeps his name out of court."
"And the Queens storage vendor?"
Cormac's fingers moved over the keys. "Registered as East River Records and Fulfillment.
It stores archived files for small clinics and charity funds.
Saint Brigid rented a unit there six weeks before Hale was arrested.
The account was accessed two days after Isabella released her evidence. Then again yesterday."
Yesterday. The day before Nora found her lock broken.
My hand closed around the back of a chair. Wood creaked under my fingers. In my head, Nora stood in that narrow apartment hallway with a bat in her hand and terror under her anger. Someone had walked into her home because a dead man's proof still had teeth.
"Send me the address," I said.
Gabriel's eyes sharpened. "You are not going to Queens yet."
"Then Nora's building. If they accessed storage yesterday, the apartment wasn't a scare. They were checking what she kept, what Isabella missed, whether Thomas's box had moved."
Cormac nodded once. "Likely."
"Her apartment still has her laptop, work papers, old mail, the closet shelf, anything they didn't touch because they planned to come back." My jaw tightened. "They know she's at your house. If they think she carried the box out, they'll look for what stayed behind."
Gabriel looked at Finn near the door. "Building feed."
Finn brought up his phone and swore under his breath. "Mrs. Alvarez says there are lights on in the service hallway. Building staff should be gone tonight."
The room changed at once.
Gabriel gave one order. "Go."
I was already moving.
Rain slapped my face when I stepped outside. The car Finn had left at the curb was running, black and quiet. Aidan came through on comms before I reached it.
"Reeve, I have movement near the back entrance. Two men, maybe three. Gray van in the alley. Plates covered."
"Nora's apartment door?"
"Hallway clear from my angle. Camera on four is looped. Someone froze it."
My hand tightened on the wheel as I cut into traffic. Horns screamed. Wet streets threw light across the windshield. The city moved too slowly around me, taxis and delivery bikes and people with umbrellas who had no idea a woman's apartment was becoming a battlefield over a dead man's file.
"Hold until I see them," I said.
Aidan breathed hard. "One is going up the fire escape."
The image of Nora's windows rose in my head.
Cheap lock. Thin glass. Little kitchen with the baseball bat behind the umbrella stand.
Her father's box gone from the shelf, thank God, but her life still inside.
Photos. Bills. Her work bag. A drawer of things she thought were private because normal people got to think that.
"Drop him if he reaches the window."
"Copy."
Finn's voice came next. "I'm two blocks behind you."
"Stay on the van. If it moves, you move with it."
"And you?"
I took the turn too fast. Tires hissed on wet pavement. "I'm taking the stairs."
My phone buzzed once against the console.
Nora.
I hit speaker. "Stay in the room."
"Mrs. Alvarez just called Isabella," she said. Her voice was sharp with panic she was trying to turn into orders. "She says someone is at my building. Declan, my laptop is there. My dad's old mail is there. There are things from the hospital that I never sorted because Bella said she had copies."
"I know."
"Don't just say you know. Tell me what's happening."
The old answer rose first. Nothing you need to handle. Stay put. Let me work.
I swallowed it until it cut.
"Two or three men at the back entrance," I said. "One on the fire escape. Aidan is inside. Finn is behind me. I'm five minutes out."
A hard breath rushed through the line. "Are they in my apartment?"
"One is trying."
"Stop him."
There it was. A command, not a plea, from a woman who had spent all morning fighting the idea that she needed men like me.
Heat moved through my chest, mean and clean.
"I will."
"Declan."
"Yes."
Her voice dropped. "Don't let them touch my father's things."
The light changed ahead. I drove through it.
"They won't."
Sirens wailed somewhere west, not ours. My car hit the curb outside her building hard enough to jar my teeth. I was out before it settled, gun low against my thigh, coat open to the rain.
Aidan's voice cracked through comms. "Fire escape man is at her window. Back door just opened."
The alley smelled like wet trash, rust, and exhaust. A gray van idled with its lights off near the service entrance. Finn's car screamed around the corner behind it. A shape moved above me on the fire escape, dark against the brick, one gloved hand reaching toward Nora's kitchen window.
I lifted the gun.
"Move your hand again," I said, loud enough for the alley to hear, "and you lose it."
The man froze.
From inside the building, Nora's apartment alarm began to shriek.