CHAPTER 5 NORA
The alarm came through Declan's phone before it reached me as a sound I could name.
At first it was only a thin, metallic scream under his breathing.
Then a man's shout cracked through the line, followed by the ugly scrape of something hitting brick, and I pressed the phone harder to my ear as I stood so fast the chair behind me knocked against the wall.
Isabella turned from the guest-suite window. Her face changed before she spoke. She knew, because sisters could hear fear before words had time to catch up.
"Nora?"
I lifted one hand because I could not answer her and listen to Declan at the same time.
"Down," Declan said, his voice low and cold through the phone. He was not speaking to me. "Hands where I can see them. Aidan, kitchen. Finn, box the van in. I want him breathing. Gabriel will want his mouth working."
My stomach tightened until I had to put my free hand against it.
My apartment alarm kept shrieking in the background.
My little third-floor kitchen, the cracked tile by the sink, the window I used to prop open with a spoon when the summer heat got bad.
Someone had been on the fire escape with his hand at that window while I sat in Gabriel Stone's house wearing borrowed socks and pretending the door between my old life and this one had not already been kicked open.
"Declan," I said.
At first, he gave no answer. There was movement, a grunt, then Declan's voice again, closer this time and sharp as a blade. "I said stay down."
A man cursed. Metal hit metal. Isabella crossed the room and touched my wrist, her fingers cold against skin that felt colder.
"What's happening?" she asked.
"They're at the apartment."
The words came out too flat. My body had already gone somewhere else, back through the hallway of our building, past Mrs. Alvarez's blue door, past the patch of paint near the stairs where my father had once scraped his shoulder carrying up a secondhand bookshelf because I insisted I needed real shelves for my books.
A stranger had climbed toward that window.
A stranger had put hands on the place where Dad used to drink coffee when his pain let him sleep past dawn.
"Give me the phone," Isabella said.
I shook my head before she finished. The answer did not need a word.
She looked at me the way she used to when we were younger and I pretended I was not crying. Too much understanding. Too much worry. I stepped away from it as Declan came back on the line, his breathing changed but his voice steady.
"Nora."
"Are they inside?"
"One tried the fire escape. One used the service hall. Neither got far."
"My father's papers."
"I know."
Two words. Plain. Undressed. I gripped the phone until the edge bit my palm.
"You have to check the drawer under the stove," I said. "The mail I didn't sort yet is there, in a grocery bag. And the shoebox in the bedroom closet. Bottom shelf, left side. The small one with the green lid, beside the big box."
"Slow down."
"Listen faster." My voice shook, and I hated that, so I made it louder.
"Laptop on the desk. Charger in the wall.
Dad's hospital folder is in the cabinet over the sink because I ran out of places.
There's a brown envelope behind the microwave.
I don't know what's in it. I forgot it was there until now. "
Silence held for one breath. Behind him, the alarm kept screaming.
"Brown envelope behind the microwave," he repeated. "Cabinet over the sink. Small green lid. Grocery bag under the stove. Laptop and charger."
My throat hurt. "Yes."
"I have it."
"You don't. You're outside."
"Aidan is inside. I am sending him the list now."
The careful answer should have calmed me. Instead, it made me see the truth cleanly. Declan had men inside my home, and for the first time since this began, I was grateful and furious in the same breath.
"Do not let them throw things around," I said. "Do you hear me? They can look, but they don't get to treat his things like trash."
Declan was quiet for a second. When he answered, his voice had changed at the edges. "They won't."
The door to the guest suite opened without a knock.
Gabriel Stone entered first, dark suit jacket unbuttoned, phone in one hand, pale gaze moving once over Isabella and then to me.
Two guards stopped outside the door. They did not crowd the room.
Somehow that made the whole thing feel worse, because the space around Gabriel only existed when he allowed it.
"Declan has the building," he said.
"Declan has my building," I snapped.
Gabriel did not flinch. Men like him probably treated fear as weather, something to walk through with the right coat. Isabella's fingers brushed my elbow, warning and comfort at once.
"Your building is compromised," Gabriel said. "There is a difference."
"Easy to say from your house."
"Yes." His answer landed so simply that my anger stumbled. "It is. That is why you are here and not there."
I hated him a little for being right. I hated him more because he did not sound pleased about it. Declan spoke through the phone, asking to be put on speaker, and I did it while keeping the phone in my hand. Gabriel noticed. Isabella did too. Neither of them reached for it.
"Boss," Declan said. "One alive from the fire escape. One from the service hall. Finn has the driver pinned at Forty-Ninth and Dyer. False delivery bag, blank building badge, lock tools, and printed photos of Nora's kitchen and front hall."
My knees forgot they belonged to me. Isabella caught my arm.
Printed photos.
Someone had taken photos inside my building. Maybe from the hall. Maybe from that hidden camera Declan found watching my door. Maybe from a man I had passed on the stairs while carrying groceries, a stranger polite and smiling while he learned where I lived.
"What did they take?" I asked.
Declan did not soften his answer. "Nothing yet. Aidan reached the apartment before the service-hall man made it through the back."
"Yet," I said.
"Yes. Yet."
Gabriel's gaze sharpened on the phone, but he let Declan handle me. It was the first smart thing he did all night.
"I need to go there," I said.
"Absolutely not," Isabella said at the same time Gabriel said, "After the building is cleared."
Declan did not answer right away.
I stared at the phone. "You promised real explanations. You promised my phone stayed mine. You promised terms. I am adding one. I need to see what they touched. I need to take the rest of my father's things myself."
"Nora," Isabella whispered.
I looked at her then, and the fear in her eyes almost broke me. She understood why I had to stand there and say it.
"Dad's things have been moved by strangers too many times," I said. "Hospitals, offices, storage rooms, people with clipboards. That ends now."
Gabriel looked at Isabella. Something passed between them without words, marriage or war or both. Then he looked back at me.
"Declan decides if the ground is clean enough for movement," he said. "If he says no, you do not leave this house. If he says yes, you go in armor, with two cars, and you touch nothing he has not cleared."
"I am not wearing armor to enter my own apartment."
"Then you are not entering your apartment."
I opened my mouth, but Declan cut in before I could waste breath.
"Wear it. Hate it. Keep moving."
The room went still around his voice. My pulse hit hard once, not from fear this time. Anger, maybe. Or the strange, terrible relief of having someone speak to me like I was stubborn in a way that might keep me alive instead of delicate enough to pack away.
"You don't get to order me around in front of everyone," I said.
"I get to keep bullets out of you in front of everyone. The terms can survive that."
Isabella pressed her lips together. It might have been fear. It might have been the beginning of a smile she knew better than to show.
I looked down at the borrowed socks on my feet. They were too soft, cream-colored, expensive in a way socks had no right to be. My own boots were still by my apartment door, unless one of Mercer's men had kicked them aside.
"Fine," I said. "But if I go, Isabella stays here. I don't want both of us in the same car."
Isabella made a sound. "Nora."
I faced her fully. "You have the baby. I know you hate when people say that like you're suddenly not you, but I am saying it because I love you. One Brooks girl walking into that building is enough."
Her face tightened. For a second she looked like my sister from before all of this, standing in our kitchen with hospital bills spread between us, trying to be older than grief.
Gabriel moved closer to her, not touching until she leaned the smallest bit toward him. Then his hand settled at her back.
"I will keep her here," he said.
I believed him. That scared me in a way the intruders had not.
Declan said, "Ten minutes. Front drive. Eamon will bring shoes and a coat. Phone stays with you."
"And you tell me what you found before I get there."
"I will tell you what I know."
It was not everything I wanted. It was not nothing. In this house, I was learning the difference had teeth.
The coat Eamon brought me smelled faintly of cedar and cold air. The vest under it was heavier than pride. It pressed against my ribs and made every breath a reminder that my life now required equipment. I tied my hair back with shaking fingers and refused to let Isabella do it for me.
At the front door, she hugged me hard, almost hurting me.
"Do exactly what Declan says," she whispered.
I pulled back and gave her a look. "You know that makes me want to do the opposite."
"Yes. Do it anyway."
The laugh got out of me broken, barely there. Gabriel stood behind her, his face unreadable, but his eyes were fixed on the guards beyond the door.
"Mrs. Stone," one of them said to Isabella, quiet but urgent.
Mrs. Stone. The name still struck me strangely. My sister had become a title men obeyed. I wondered if she heard it the same way I did, like a door locking and opening at once.