CHAPTER 17 NORA #2
"You walk behind my left shoulder until the door speaks," he said. "When it speaks, you answer from inside my reach. You do not step past me. You do not touch anything unless Siobhan clears it or I put my hand over yours."
"And if the door only opens for me?"
His thumb stilled. "Then I hate every second and stay close."
"That sounds almost reasonable."
"Don't get attached to it."
I wanted to smile. My mouth trembled instead. Declan saw it and dropped his hand before tenderness could become another wound in front of his men.
Movement snapped back into the corridor.
Cormac sent coordinates. Gabriel ordered two teams to converge on Saint Brigid from north and south, with another holding back to cover Isabella, Siobhan, and Maeve.
Maeve gave a code phrase for the chapel trust entrance, her voice flat with anger that sounded aimed at herself.
Siobhan stayed on the line to guide us through what an old maternity cold room might contain and what not to touch if we wanted proof to survive.
The Black Harp's back exit opened into rain. Night slapped cold across my face, almost welcome after the frozen basement. Declan put me in the middle seat of the SUV, then climbed in beside me and pulled my seat belt across my body himself. His knuckles brushed the cracked photo under my shirt.
"Photo," he said.
I pulled it free. The glass had split across Isabella's smile and through my younger cheek. We looked happy in it, all elbows and cheap cake from a birthday Thomas had stretched beyond what he could afford.
Declan's gaze held on the picture for one breath. "Keep it where you can reach it."
"Why?"
"Doors can learn names. They don't get to decide family."
The words went into me and stayed there.
I slid the photo into my coat pocket with the torn bracelet and Rina's access card. The dead ringer sat in Declan's evidence sleeve between us. During the drive, it stayed quiet. The lack of sound grew loud in my head.
Rain striped the windows. Aidan drove too fast and spoke too little.
Finn stayed behind at The Black Harp with a medic because Declan had ordered it and Finn had bled through his coat.
The city outside went from late-night bars to shuttered clinics, then to older streets where churches sat squeezed between brick buildings that had outlived their purposes.
Saint Brigid had been beautiful once.
Even boarded and blackened by years of neglect, the chapel wing rose above the medical annex with a narrow bell tower and stained glass gone dark behind wire.
The main hospital building beside it looked dead in the way abandoned hospitals always did, too many windows, too much empty watching from behind them.
Mercy Women's Foundation had left a discreet brass plaque near a side gate, polished enough to lie.
A Stone team waited under the awning across the street.
Gabriel's men had the stillness of loaded weapons.
They looked at Declan first, then at me.
The new attention made my stomach twist. Two hours ago I had been Isabella's sister, a problem to shield.
Now the men watched me the way they watched keypads, doors, and things that might explode.
Declan noticed. Of course he did.
"Eyes out," he said.
Every stare moved away from me.
Aidan came around the SUV with a black medical kit and a tablet. "Cormac patched the building schematics. Public entrance is useless. Maeve's code opens the trust office on the east side. Siobhan says the chapel lift isn't on any approved floor plan."
"Gray nurse?" Declan asked.
"Camera caught a woman in a pale coat entering forty minutes ago through the old laundry dock. Face mask, hair covered. She had someone with her." Aidan's eyes flicked to me. "Female. Walking on her own. Could be Rina."
My lungs seized around her name. "Show me."
Declan started to refuse. I felt the refusal gather in his body before it reached his mouth.
"Show her," he said instead.
Aidan turned the tablet.
The footage was grainy and green-gray, but Rina's face still found me through it. She walked beside the gray nurse with her arms loose, her head high, and a bruise dark along one cheek. A thin strip of white cloth was tied around her wrist. She glanced toward the camera for less than a breath.
Then her fingers lifted.
Two taps against her own chest. One point down.
"She knew we'd see it," I said.
Aidan frowned. "Meaning?"
"She went below. She wanted me to know she went below."
Declan's voice dropped. "Or she was told to make us follow."
"Both can be true."
He looked at me, and something hot moved under my fear. He hated that answer because it sounded like his world. He respected it for the same reason.
The east trust office smelled of old dust, damp carpet, and lemon cleaner sprayed over rot.
Maeve's code opened the first door. The second door accepted Rina's bent access card after Aidan held a portable reader against the panel and Cormac muttered through three lines of angry instruction over comms.
Inside, the corridor sloped toward the chapel.
Saints watched from cracked plaster niches. Their painted eyes had peeled away in patches, leaving blank spots where mercy should have been. My feet slowed near a statue of Saint Brigid holding a lamp. Someone had tied fresh white thread around the statue's wrist.
My bandaged arm began to pulse.
"Nora," Declan said.
"I feel it."
Aidan lifted his light. "Feel what?"
The wall behind the statue hummed. It was faint, almost shy, like a refrigerator heard from another room. Under it came another sound. A woman's voice, too low for words, singing through metal.
Men hear bells, girls hear doors.
Harkin's voice crawled through memory, and my skin went cold for reasons the weather had nothing to do with.
"There," I said.
Declan moved in front of me. "Aidan. Panel."
Aidan found the seam behind the statue's base and pried open a strip of wood that looked older than the wiring beneath it. The access panel blinked once, red. He swiped Rina's card.
Denied.
He tried Maeve's trust code.
Denied.
Cormac swore through the comm. Siobhan told him to stop swearing near a live medical lock. Gabriel ordered silence, and the silence came.
The hum behind the wall changed.
My name appeared on the small black screen.
NORA MARIAN brOOKS
SECONDARY ROUTE PENDING
The hallway tilted. Declan's arm came around my waist before I hit the wall.
"Breathe," he said at my ear.
"It wants the bracelet."
"Tell me how you know."
I looked at the panel, at the red light pulsing like a tiny heart. "Because my arm hurts where the band was split."
Nobody spoke.
Declan's hand stayed at my waist. "Give me the bracelet. I put it on the panel."
"It won't answer you."
"Try me anyway."
I took the torn patient bracelet from my pocket. The letters brO looked cheap and harmless in my palm. Declan placed his hand under mine, steadying me without taking the choice away. Together, we lifted it to the reader.
The panel blinked amber.
MATERNAL MATCH REQUIRED
"Marian's band," Aidan said. "The gray nurse has it."
The singing under the wall stopped.
A speaker clicked above the statue. The same young woman's voice from Harkin's room filled the chapel corridor, soft enough to make every gun rise.
"Secondary bird arrived without mother band," she said. "Accepting blood memory. Open lower Mercy."
The bracelet cut into my fingers.
Declan shoved me behind him as the floor answered with a long mechanical groan. Stone shifted beneath the statue. A narrow section of wall opened inward, breathing out air so cold it turned every exhale white.
Beyond the opening, stairs dropped into blue emergency light. Steel drawers lined the first visible wall below, each one marked with a number and a woman's name.
At the bottom, drawer 3B glowed.
MARIAN brOOKS.
A handprint smeared fresh blood across the handle.
Then Rina's voice came from somewhere beneath us, thin and shaking through the cold.
"Nora, don't let her open all the mothers."