CHAPTER ELEVEN #2
Yesterday morning, I’d still been wondering whether I truly belonged here.
Now I was lying beside him with my head resting against his chest, listening to his heartbeat.
I traced circles across his chest with my fingertips, following one of the faint scars that disappeared beneath my hand. He looked at me and chuckled.
“You still haven’t run away,” he said.
“I might,” I said. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
“I appreciate the warning,” he said.
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t stop smiling.
I’d just settled against him again, perfectly content to waste another hour doing nothing, when the bedroom door opened.
“Boss, I need you to—” The words died in Paddy’s throat as he froze in the doorway. For one long second, nobody moved. Paddy’s eyes widened before years of discipline erased every trace of surprise from his face.
“My apologies, boss,” he said. He turned so quickly that he nearly walked straight into the doorframe, but he caught himself at the last second and stepped into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him with quiet precision.
The click of the latch echoed through the room.
I stared at the door, and then I slowly turned toward Liam.
“Oh...my God,” I said. For a heartbeat, Liam said nothing. Then the corner of his mouth twitched. “No. Don’t you dare,” I said.
That was all it took. He burst into laughter.
Not the restrained chuckle I’d become used to hearing from him, but genuine laughter that seemed completely beyond his control.
He leaned back against the headboard, rubbing a hand across his face as though he was actually trying to stop, which only made it worse.
I picked up a pillow and threw it at him.
“This isn’t funny, Liam! You’re enjoying every second of this. God, that’s embarrassing. I can never look that man in the eye again!”
“You’ll be surprised how quickly this becomes yesterday’s news,” Liam said.
“I don’t want it to become yesterday’s news. I want it never to have happened!” I said. He laughed again, and I buried my face in my hands. “That was the most embarrassing moment of my life.”
When we came downstairs, Paddy was waiting in the sitting room with a thick brown folder resting on the coffee table.
Paddy stood when Liam entered and acknowledged both of us with the calm professionalism he always seemed to have.
If the interruption upstairs had embarrassed him in the slightest, there wasn’t any sign of it on his face.
I found myself envying that kind of self-control, because I was still avoiding looking at him for more than a second at a time.
“Boss. My apologies again,” he said. “Miss Walsh.”
Liam shrugged as he walked past him. “Forget it. I forgot to lock the door. Let’s leave it there.”
“If you say so,” Paddy said. That seemed to settle the matter. Liam sat on one side of the sofa, and I lowered myself beside him, trying very hard to convince myself that nobody in the room remembered what had happened upstairs.
Judging by the amusement still lingering in Liam’s eyes, I was the only person making that effort. He reached over absent-mindedly and squeezed my hand. His attention shifted completely a second later.
“What have you got for me?” he asked.
Paddy picked up the folder, opened it carefully, and spread photographs and printed documents across the table between us.
The easy atmosphere that had filled the room moments earlier disappeared so quickly that it almost felt as though somebody had switched it off.
Liam’s posture changed. The relaxed man who’d teased me upstairs was gone, replaced by the one who always seemed to notice everything.
“We’ve been working two investigations simultaneously,” Paddy began.
“We needed to confirm the two incidents were connected: Miss Walsh’s kidnapping and the letter reaching this house.
The methods were different enough that there could have been two different teams of people trying to reach her.
” I looked from the photographs to Liam, then back to the folder again, trying to make sense of what Paddy had just said.
For a moment I wasn’t even thinking about what the documents contained.
My mind had stopped at one word: investigations.
It caught me off guard. Until that moment I’d honestly believed Liam’s men were simply protecting me by watching the house, checking vehicles, and making sure nobody got close enough to grab me.
I hadn’t imagined that while I’d been trying to convince myself my life had settled into some kind of normal, they’d been quietly pulling everything apart behind the scenes, following leads I didn’t even know existed. I leaned forward before I realized I was doing it.
“You’ve been investigating this?” I asked.
Paddy looked at Liam instead of answering immediately. I caught the silent exchange that passed between them. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that look. Paddy was waiting to see how much his boss wanted me to hear. Not long ago, Liam would have told me to go into another room.
He would have talked to Paddy alone, then told me an edited version of their conversation that revealed almost nothing. I knew that because he’d done it before. This time, he didn’t. He picked up one of the photographs, studied it briefly, and then placed it back on the table before looking at me.
“Of course we have,” he said quietly. “Did you think we were just sitting here waiting for whoever did this to make their next move?”
I hesitated, feeling strangely foolish. “I...I don’t know what I thought. I assumed the priority was keeping me hidden.”
“It is,” he replied. “Keeping you alive has always been the priority. But finding the people who want to hurt you is how we make sure you don’t have to keep hiding forever.”
His answer settled over me in a way I hadn’t expected.
For the first time since all of this had begun, I realized Liam hadn’t been reacting to events as they happened.
While I’d been waking up every morning wondering whether the danger had finally found me again, he’d been trying to find the danger itself.
I looked back at the photographs spread across the coffee table. Suddenly they didn’t seem like ordinary pieces of paper anymore. Every page represented days of work I hadn’t known existed. Every photograph was another attempt to understand the people who’d turned my life upside-down.
“So...” I said slowly, unable to keep the knot from tightening in my throat. “You found something?”
Nobody answered immediately. The silence that followed told me that the answer wasn’t going to make me feel better.
Liam rested his forearms on his knees, his eyes still fixed on the papers in front of him. Paddy closed the folder and moved one photo to the top of the pile.
“We did,” Liam said finally. “I think it’s time you knew what we’ve been dealing with.”
Paddy took a deep breath before continuing his report. “We started with the kidnapping attempt.”
The conversation went on around me. I stopped listening when Paddy explained how they were tracking my attempted kidnappers through how my assailants had tracked me. Liam asked another question. The words started to sound like meaningless noise. One thought stuck in my mind: I couldn’t outrun this.
My would-be kidnappers hadn’t found me through guesswork. They had evidence, names, photos, and money trails that connected my old life to the city where I’d thought I was hidden.
Fear started to creep in. It felt familiar and cold.
For the first time since waking up beside Liam that morning, the peace I’d found started to break.
This wasn’t over. The danger was still there, still looking for me, still moving closer.
Strangely, I didn’t want to run. I couldn’t spend my life looking over my shoulder and hoping my past would give up.
One of us would have to stop running sooner or later.
For the first time, I knew it wouldn’t be me. Liam and Paddy were dealing with it. They had evidence. They were getting close. And if they found answers, I’d finally feel safe.