CHAPTER 13 NORA #2
"Bella," I said softly, because I heard her pain before I turned. "Do you remember? He made us unplug the apartment chime when he came home the second time. You were mad because we kept missing deliveries."
Her face changed. "I thought the sound bothered his headaches."
"So did I."
Bell's mouth stretched. "Tom had two daughters. One watched forms. One watched doors."
Gabriel's pale eyes went flat. "Cormac. Maeve. Now."
Cormac made the call. It took three rings before Maeve answered, voice tight and awake.
"Tell me Gabriel is alive."
"He is," Cormac said. "And Bell is in the house."
A pause. Then Maeve said, "Show me."
Cormac turned the phone. Maeve appeared on screen in a dark robe, hair pinned back too cleanly for the hour. Fear flashed across her face and vanished under discipline. When she saw Bell, her mouth lost color.
"Eamon Bell," she said.
Bell dipped his chin. "Miss Stone."
Declan's hand closed around the back of Bell's chair until the wood creaked. "You knew him?"
Maeve's eyes did not leave Bell. "I knew a contractor attached to Mercer Shield. Years ago. Continuity upgrades for donor clinics, after-hours medical access, emergency backup if Gabriel needed treatment off record."
Gabriel turned slowly toward the phone. "My house was in that packet."
Her control slipped for one breath. "Your recovery suite was. You were coughing blood in church stairs and refusing to step inside a hospital where cameras could follow you. I tried to build an option. I did not give Mercer permission to copy your home."
Gabriel's stillness frightened me. Isabella went rigid beside him.
The words recovery suite passed through the room like a match dropped near spilled liquor. Gabriel's illness had been a shadow at the edges of too many conversations. It had brushed his face in moments he thought no one saw. Hearing Maeve say it aloud made my skin tighten.
Isabella stared at Gabriel. "Recovery suite?"
Gabriel did not answer fast enough.
Siobhan stepped in with the kind of tired courage I had begun to trust. "Tonight is not the room for that fight, Mrs. Stone. But yes. There are medical plans you were not shown."
Isabella's hand went to the side of her stomach. Gabriel saw it and reached for her, then stopped before his fingers landed. Pain moved across his face so quickly I might have missed it if the room had not been full of people watching secrets bleed.
"Maeve," he said, his voice so quiet everyone listened harder. "You will send Cormac every file, every invoice, every name tied to that packet. If you omit one page, I will treat it as betrayal."
Maeve lifted her chin. "You know better than that."
"I know what entered my house."
Her eyes flashed. "And I know what I was trying to keep alive. Do not confuse my fear with disloyalty because it is easier than admitting you made us plan around your death."
The phone speaker made the words smaller than they were. They still hit like a slap.
Bell laughed under his breath.
Declan moved. One hand sank into Bell's hair and tipped his head back against the chair. "Find humor somewhere else."
The room held its breath. My pulse jumped hard, not from fear this time.
Declan's violence had a focus that should have repelled me.
Instead it pulled my attention straight to his hands.
Those hands had carried Harkin through smoke.
Those hands had stopped outside my body when he wanted to touch me.
Those hands could hurt, and somehow that restraint made them worse to want.
I looked away first.
Bell swallowed. "The girl still opens."
"Explain," Gabriel said.
"Tom hid a dead switch," Bell said. "Mercer never found it. Vale thinks the girl can."
"Where?" Declan asked.
Bell's eyes slid to me. "Where she stopped answering."
Cormac's phone buzzed before anyone answered him. Finn's name lit the screen. Cormac put him on speaker, and the sound that came through carried engine noise, rain, and a man's rough breathing.
"We're at Black Harp," Finn said. "Harkin is inside. Stone medic has him. He wants Nora Brooks on the line before they sedate him."
Declan's eyes cut to Gabriel. Gabriel gave one short nod.
Cormac brought the phone closer. "Mr. Harkin, Nora is here."
A wet cough scraped through the speaker. Then Daniel Harkin's voice came thin and raw. "Tom's girl?"
My hand found Isabella's without thinking. "I'm here."
"Bell in the house?"
"Yes."
"Then they found the edge of it." Harkin dragged in a breath that sounded painful enough to bend him in half. "Tom called it the dead ringer. Said the little one knew which bell never to answer. Said if Vale ever woke the house, the counterkey sat where the sound died."
The pantry pressed in around me. Declan's shoulder stayed close to mine, heat and smoke and violence in the clean lemon smell of the room.
"Counterkey to what?" Cormac asked.
"Mercer's bridge," Harkin rasped. "Names. Old route. Proof Tom stole before Hale's men learned he was more than a dying claim. Get it before Vale does. Bell never rings alone."
The line crackled. Finn cursed away from the phone, then came back. "Medic is putting him under. He gave us that much."
Gabriel's gaze settled on Bell with a coldness that made the pantry seem smaller. "Enough for now."
The apartment chime.
The thought struck so hard my knees almost loosened.
Our old apartment had a beige plastic doorbell box mounted above the hall closet.
Dad had taken the cover off one night with a butter knife while Isabella was at work.
He had asked me to hold the screws. I remembered the dust inside it, the tiny wires, the dead moth curled like burnt paper.
He had not unplugged it because of headaches.
He had hidden something inside.
"Nora," Isabella said. "What is it?"
The pantry blurred for a second. I grabbed the edge of the folding table with my good hand. Declan's hand came to my waist, firm, immediate, there before I could fall and gone before anyone could decide what it meant. The place where he touched me kept burning after he took his hand away.
"The doorbell box," I said. "At the apartment. Dad opened it after he came home. He told me not to answer after midnight. I thought he meant the sound. He meant the chime. He put something inside the chime."
Cormac's head lifted. "Nora's apartment still has remote security from the last pressure attempt."
"Check it," Declan said.
Cormac's thumbs moved over his phone. The room waited through two terrible seconds. The townhouse lights hummed above us, newly restored and too bright.
"Camera at Nora's hall is offline," Cormac said.
Declan's face hardened. "Since when?"
"Nine minutes ago."
Gabriel looked at Bell. "Who is there?"
Bell's smile returned, smaller and meaner. "Midnight came early."
Declan's gun was in his hand before I saw him draw.
Gabriel issued orders that snapped guards into motion.
Aidan was already at the pantry door, calling for a car.
Isabella said my name, but I could not move toward her.
My eyes stayed on Bell because the old warning had finally become clear, and the door I had been told not to open was waiting in the apartment where my father's voice still lived in the walls.
Declan stepped in front of me again. "You stay here."
Fear went through me hot, then anger followed fast and kept me standing. "That is my home."
"It is a target."
"Because of me. Because of my father. Because I can tell you exactly which box he opened and where the screw sticks." My bandaged arm throbbed. I raised my chin anyway. "You need me."
His eyes burned into mine. For a breath, all the shouting around us faded behind the pulse hammering in my ears.
He wanted to refuse. I saw it in the set of his mouth, the way his hand flexed around the gun.
He wanted to put me behind stone walls and guards and rules until the world stopped knowing my name.
Then he looked at the photograph in Cormac's evidence sleeve.
When his gaze came back to me, the refusal had turned into something harder.
"You ride between me and Aidan," he said. "You do exactly what I say when I say it. If I tell you to get down, you hit the floor. If I tell you to run, you run toward my voice."
My throat ached. "And if I tell you where my father hid the answer?"
Declan stepped close enough for the smoke on his coat to wrap around me. With his free hand, he reached for my injured wrist, gentle where everything else about him looked built for damage. His thumb brushed the edge of my bandage, barely there, and my whole body answered.
"Then I listen," he said.
Bell laughed once from the chair.
Declan did not turn. Neither did I.
The old chime box waited in the dark across town, and for the first time since my father died, I was going to answer the bell on purpose.