CHAPTER SIX
Liam
The house had settled into a rhythm, but the past few days had been anything but ordinary.
My days started before sunrise. I’d walk around the property, talking to the men at each security point.
They’d tell me the same thing every day: nobody had tried to get in, and no strange cars had been seen on the road.
The cameras hadn’t caught anything. The men searching for the two attackers who’d tried to take Nora hadn’t found any sign of them.
That should have made me feel better. It didn’t.
Those men who’d tried to take Nora were too organized to give up after one attempt.
They knew her name. They’d waited until she was alone.
They’d moved with confidence, like they thought nobody would stop them.
Men like that usually worked for someone, and people who planned kidnappings so carefully didn’t give up easily.
Not knowing what they wanted or when they’d strike again bothered me more than a direct fight. Enemies I could see could be dealt with. An enemy who hid and waited for the right moment required patience, and patience was not my strong suit.
After my rounds I’d spend an hour in the study talking to people who were still investigating Nora’s past. Every report was the same.
She’d moved to Boston a year ago. She worked hard at her two jobs.
She paid her rent on time. That was about it.
She seemed like an ordinary woman trying to make a living in the city.
That’s what worried me. People didn’t plan to kidnap a waitress.
Either someone knew something about Nora that I didn’t, or Nora had no idea why she was a target.
I wasn’t sure which one concerned me more.
The rest of the house kept going as usual.
The staff did their jobs. Meals were served on time. The phones rang. Business kept going.
Nora found a new routine. She tried to be invisible. She thanked everyone she met. She carried her dishes to the kitchen. She read a lot, like it was an escape from the world. She was so quiet that most people might not even know she was there.
She didn’t often talk to me. I didn’t blame her.
I’d rescued her, but I’d also taken control of her life.
It was necessary to keep her safe, but that didn’t change how she felt.
Every time we talked to her, I saw a guarded look in her eyes.
She answered politely, but she was distant, and I understood why she was upset.
But I wouldn’t let her go until I had answers. Keeping her safe was more important than keeping her happy. If she hated me when this was over, that would be better than standing over her grave and wishing I’d listened to my instincts.
With that decision firmly settled in my mind, I didn’t have much to think about.
My job was to keep Nora safe until we figured out who was after her.
My phone had been quiet all afternoon, which meant my team still hadn’t found out who the two attackers were.
Every lead they followed hit a dead end.
I trusted my team, but that didn’t make waiting any less frustrating. I couldn’t do much by staring at another report with no answers, so I left the study and wandered through the house without a plan. As I reached the end of the corridor, I slowed down outside the library.
I wasn’t looking for Nora, but I knew she’d probably be there. Over the last few days she’d spent more time in the library than anywhere else in the house. The shelves gave her a place to escape without leaving the property.
She was sitting where I’d expected, curled into the chair beside the window with another novel open on her lap.
Sunlight spilled over the pages and the arm of the chair.
She hadn’t turned a page since I’d arrived.
The story she was reading had lost her attention.
I stood there for a moment before knocking on the open door.
“Nora.”
She looked up and closed the book with one finger to keep her place. She nodded at me as I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. The library was an old part of the house. Over time it had become a place where people went when they wanted to be alone.
My grandfather had built this collection of books one by one. He’d thought every home needed a room where the outside world was quiet. I hadn’t understood what he meant when I was younger. Looking at Nora now, I finally did. The books helped her, though they didn’t make her forget everything.
“You’ve finished a lot of our books already,” I said, looking at the shelves.
“Yeah. It seems so. I didn’t want to leave them sitting unread. And I’ve had a lot of time.”
There was no bitterness in her voice. There didn’t need to be. The truth was, I’d taken away all the things she’d used to do. She’d had a routine, and now she was stuck in this house with nothing to do.
I started thinking about what it must be like for her.
This house was guarded. The doors were locked.
The cameras were always watching. There were men standing outside.
To me it was a safe place; to Nora it was not.
I had two choices: wait for more information, or keep making decisions without knowing what was going on.
I didn’t like waiting, but sometimes I had to.
“How are the books?” I asked her. She looked down at the book in her lap.
“They help,” she said. I knew what she meant. Sometimes I got busy with work to forget about my problems. Nora was doing the same thing with books.
It was quiet for a while. It wasn’t uncomfortable; it was like we were both thinking. Nora was the one who spoke up first.
“When can I have my life back?” She asked the question softly. She wasn’t angry, just tired. That made it harder to answer.
I looked at her. “I don’t know.”
She looked at me for a moment. She was trying to find an answer in my face, and I didn’t have one.
She didn’t answer. Instead she turned back to the window, put one hand on the frame, and looked out at the garden.
The sun was still shining on the lawn. A gentle breeze blew the branches beyond the stone wall.
It was so peaceful that anyone looking in from the outside would think the house was in a fantasy world.
“I know you saved my life,” she said finally. “If you hadn’t been there that night I don’t know what would have happened to me.” She took a breath before she continued. “I’ve thanked you before, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to thank you enough.”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing for me to say. She turned away from the window and faced me again.
“But why are you still doing all of this?” she asked.
I frowned. “Doing what?”
“All of it.” She waved her hand around the room.
I knew she meant more than the library. “Keeping me here. Deciding I can’t leave.
Trying to find the men who attacked me.” She shook her head slowly.
“You didn’t know me before I started working at the bar.
We weren’t friends. We’re not friends.” There was no anger in her voice, only confusion.
“You helped me. You saved me. I understand that. But why is that not enough? Why can’t you not let me go so I can live my life?
” The question hung in the air between us.
I’d expected her to be angry, not this honest.
“Because the men who came after you are still out there,” I said.
Her face didn’t change much. “That’s not what I asked. I asked why you’re doing this.”
“Because you’re not safe,” I said.
She let out a breath and looked down for a moment before she looked back at me. “Then let me decide if I’m willing to take that risk.”
Neither of us moved. The silence between us felt heavier now. I was talking about danger. Nora was talking about choice.
“You keep making decisions for me,” she said. “You keep telling yourself it’s for my own good, but they should still be my decisions to make.”
“They stopped being your decisions when those men grabbed you,” I said.
“No.” She shook her head. “You decided they stopped being mine.”
Her words hit me harder than I’d expected. She wasn’t shouting. She wasn’t trying to provoke me. She simply believed what she was saying.
“I spent a year building a life where nobody told me where I could go or what I was allowed to do,” she said.
The words came out before she seemed ready to say them. She became quiet after that, like she’d said more than she meant to. She didn’t explain what she meant, but she didn’t have to. She looked away, and her voice was barely above a whisper when she spoke again.
“I don’t want someone else to control my life,” she said. I understood what she meant. More importantly, I understood why she couldn’t separate what I was doing from what someone else had clearly done to her in the past. I looked into her eyes and answered as truthfully as I could.
“I won’t let you walk back into danger.” My voice didn’t get softer, and neither did her face.
At that moment I realized we’d reached a point where neither of us was trying to change the other’s mind.
She wanted her freedom back. I wanted her to be alive.
Until one of those things became possible without sacrificing the other, neither of us was going to be satisfied.
The quiet in the room felt different now. It wasn’t the silence of two people trying to understand each other. It was the silence that happened when two people knew where they stood and neither was willing to give in.
I’d dealt with men who yelled, men who threatened, and men who used anger to get what they wanted.
Nora was different. She didn’t need to raise her voice to make me feel the weight of her words.
She’d spent years learning how to take care of herself without waiting for someone to save her.
I was starting to understand that my trying to protect her, no matter how well-intentioned I was, felt like another kind of trap to her.