Chapter 9
Skye
By the time we returned to the safe flat, the rush of escaping the surveillance teams had worn off enough for my hands to start shaking.
I hated that Irish noticed before I did.
He said nothing when we climbed the stairs, nothing when Trigger locked the door behind us or when Storm came across the room demanding to know what had happened at Croft House.
He simply took the work bag from my shoulder, set it beside the dining table, and pushed a mug of coffee toward the place I had occupied earlier.
The gesture was so ordinary that I almost missed what he was doing.
No questions. No insistence that I sit down.
No hand on my back steering me toward a chair.
Just coffee placed within reach while he gave me the choice to take it.
Two days ago, I would probably have accused him of trying to manage me.
Now I recognized the difference between someone deciding what I needed and someone making sure it was available if I wanted it.
I wrapped both hands around the mug, absorbing the heat into fingers that still remembered the moment I had seen Isla's name on that medication sheet, and forced myself to concentrate on the room rather than the woman I might have left behind one of Croft House's sealed walls.
Storm waited until I had taken several drinks before asking, “You really heard somebody say your name?”
“I think so.”
Raze had been leaning against the kitchen counter, but he straightened at the uncertainty in my answer. “Think?”
“The wall was thick, and Dr. Croft was talking. I heard something from the other side, then a woman said my name. It was faint.” I stared into the coffee. “I wanted it to be Isla badly enough that I'm not going to pretend I'm certain.”
Irish's eyes met mine from across the table, and the approval I saw there mattered far more than it probably should have.
Storm came closer. “And the medication record?”
“That was clear. Isla. I only saw the first name, but the nurse reacted like I'd nearly picked up something she didn't want me reading.”
Cipher's face appeared on the wall screen before anyone could respond. “There are three Islas associated with medical records within a fifty-mile radius of Croft House.”
My hope fell so quickly I nearly resented him for giving me facts.
He continued, “Only one is missing.”
I looked up.
“Isla Lennox?”
“That's the working assumption.”
Eli leaned into view behind him. “And Croft House scrubbed something from its patient-registration database roughly nineteen days ago. We can't recover the full record yet, but the timestamp matches the period after Isla disappeared.”
The coffee cup touched the table harder than I intended.
“She’s there.”
Irish stepped forward. “Likely.”
I glared at him.
He didn't retreat.
“Don't,” I warned.
“Don't what?”
“Turn something obvious into operational language because you're frightened to let me believe it.”
His jaw flexed.
Nobody else in the room spoke.
Then he nodded once. “I think she's there.”
The words settled differently because he wasn't offering certainty or making a promise he couldn't keep; he was simply telling me he believed Isla was there, and for the moment that was enough.
I opened my work bag and pulled out my notebook. “Then we need the inside of the building.”
“We do,” Irish said.
“I can give it to you.”
For the next two hours, Croft House existed on paper before us.
I began with the entrance hall and worked outward, drawing walls in thick lines and doors in thin ones, marking camera positions, fire panels, staff stations, residential rooms, windows, flooring transitions, and every section that had felt structurally wrong.
Irish stood beside me while Trigger and Hawkeye listened from the opposite side of the table.
Raze and Storm periodically interrupted with questions about guards or residents, while Cipher compared my memory against every plan and photograph he could access remotely.
“The dining room was here,” I said, sketching a rectangle off the western corridor. “Two doors. One toward the main hall and one toward the kitchen. The second door had a keypad on the staff side.”
“Camera?” Trigger asked.
“Corner above the entrance.”
Hawkeye looked at the line of sight I had drawn. “Blind spot here?”
I studied it.
“Yes. Maybe two meters, depending on how wide the lens is.”
He marked it without another word.
We continued.
By the time I reached the hidden wing, the original Croft House plan lay beside my reconstructed version.
Irish leaned over the table, one hand planted near my notebook.
“What makes you certain this continues?”
I pointed toward the exterior wall. “Five windows.”
He looked at the plan.
“Four rooms.”
“Exactly.”
“That only accounts for one.”
“Not necessarily. Historic window spacing doesn't always correspond one-to-one with rooms. But the ventilation system is larger than the visible floor plan requires, the main corridor ends too early, and the exterior length exceeds the interior measurement by almost six meters.”
Raze stared at me. “You got all that walking through once?”
“I design spaces for a living.”
“I'm starting to feel unobservant.”
Storm patted his arm. “You are.”
He gave her a wounded look.
I smiled despite myself and reached across the table for another sheet. “There's more. Dr. Croft said the section had been refurbished last year, but the skirting profile was older. Someone wanted me to believe the wall was newer than it actually was.”
“Why?” Irish asked.
I considered the question.
“To normalize it. If I think the wall was added during a recent remodel, I stop asking what the original building did there.”
Cipher enlarged an old photograph of Croft House.
“There.”
The image showed the property nearly twenty years earlier.
A side entrance stood exactly where the modern wall now ended.
I leaned closer.
“That isn't decorative.”
“What is it?” Storm asked.
“Service access. Probably connected to laundry, deliveries, or medical storage.”
Irish's hand moved beside mine as he followed the old route.
“If the corridor still exists behind the wall…”
“It could lead directly into the concealed wing.”
We looked at one another.
The realization seemed to occur at exactly the same moment.
Cipher started talking about obtaining drainage and electrical records, but I barely heard him.
Irish stood close enough that his shoulder almost touched mine, his attention still fixed on the plan while mine had wandered to his face.
He looked different when he concentrated.
The guarded expression loosened, leaving something quieter beneath it, and a small line appeared between his brows whenever the pieces refused to align quickly enough.
I found myself remembering the moment in the warehouse when he had kept hold of my hand several steps longer than necessary.
Then the way he had remembered how I took my coffee.
The fact that he had let me lead him through a building without making the decision into a battle over control.
His gaze lifted from the plans and caught mine, and for a moment neither of us moved.
Then Raze said, “Are we interrupting something?”
I looked down immediately.
Irish didn't.
“No.”
Raze's grin suggested he believed exactly the opposite.
Storm threw a folded napkin at him.
We returned to the plans.
Hours passed without anyone noticing. Maverick brought food from somewhere nearby, and Hawkeye disappeared briefly before returning with additional photographs of the roads surrounding Croft House.
Trigger mapped likely security rotations.
Cipher and Eli identified electrical circuits and an underground utility route.
By evening, the dining table had disappeared beneath enough information to make Croft House feel less like an impenetrable institution and more like what it actually was.
At the end of the day, Croft House was still a building, and buildings had limitations. People could lie about what existed behind a wall, but they couldn't make its square footage disappear.
Irish eventually carried two mugs toward the window and nodded for me to follow. I almost told him I wasn't finished, then realized everyone else had drifted into separate conversations and my eyes were beginning to blur from staring at lines.
We stood beside the window overlooking the wet street below.
He handed me the second mug.
Tea this time.
“Trying something new?” I asked.
“You've had enough coffee to vibrate through the floor.”
“That's an exaggeration.”
“You're tapping your foot.”
I immediately stopped.
His mouth curved.
“Insufferable.”
“So I've been told.”
We watched a bus move through the intersection below, its headlights stretching across the wet pavement.
For several minutes neither of us spoke, and although the silence should have felt awkward, I found myself unexpectedly comfortable inside it.
“Why Ireland?” I finally asked.
His shoulders tightened so slightly I might not have noticed if I hadn't been watching him more carefully than I should.
“What about it?”
“You recognized the Order's routes there.”
“Aye.”
“You knew one of the foundations.”
“Something similar.”
“And every time someone mentions Ireland, you look like you've remembered a funeral.”
His gaze moved from the street to me.
I expected him to shut down.
Instead, he said, “That's a very specific comparison.”
“Is it wrong?”
A long pause.
“No.”
The answer surprised me.
I waited, giving him the opportunity to say more.
He didn't.
Normally silence made me want to fill it. Isla used to tease me that I could interrogate paint until it confessed what shade it really wanted to be. With Irish, I was learning that pushing against every closed door only made him brace harder against it.
“You know,” I said eventually, “you can tell me something without telling me everything.”
His eyes stayed on mine.
The street noise below seemed to fade.
“Is that what you do with old houses?”
“What?”
“Wait for them to tell you what they're hiding?”
I smiled faintly. “Sometimes. Other times I start removing wallpaper.”
That earned a quiet laugh.
There was that rare, unguarded version of him again, and seeing it somehow felt as though he had trusted me with something private without saying a word.
He looked down into his coffee before speaking.
“I grew up in County Clare.”
That was more than he had given me before.
“Near the coast?”
“Aye. Small village. Smaller than it felt when I was a kid.”
“You liked it?”
His expression changed.
“I loved it.”
The fact that he had spoken of loving County Clare in the past tense carried enough weight that I chose not to ask why he had left.
Instead, I said, “I've never been.”
“You'd complain about the weather.”
“I'm Scottish.”
“You complain about our rain differently.”
“Our rain has character.”
“Of course it does.”
I smiled into my tea.
When I looked up again, Irish was watching me.
He wasn't watching me casually or with the same analytical attention he gave doors, windows, and people passing on the street. This time his attention was entirely on me.
The air between us changed.
I couldn't have explained exactly how. He didn't move closer, yet suddenly the distance between us felt deliberate.
I became aware of his hand resting against the windowsill beside mine, the roughness of his knuckles, the faint scar cutting across one finger, the warmth of his body in the cool space beside the glass.
My eyes dropped to his mouth before I could stop myself, and the immediate sharpening of his gaze made it painfully obvious that he had noticed.
“Skye.”
The way he said my name carried a warning that had nothing to do with danger.
I looked back at his eyes.
“What?”
His jaw tightened.
He was close enough that if either of us moved even slightly, the decision would stop being theoretical.
For one ridiculous second, I wanted him to.
Then Irish straightened and put several inches between us.
The moment broke.
I took a slow breath.
“Interesting.”
He looked suspicious. “What?”
“You retreat when you're nervous.”
“I don't retreat.”
“You just did.”
“I stepped back.”
“That is generally how retreating works.”
He stared at me.
I smiled sweetly.
Irish muttered something under his breath in Irish or possibly just profanity with a better accent.
Before I could enjoy myself further, Cipher's voice carried across the room.
“Found something.”
We returned to the table.
A satellite image occupied the main screen, showing Croft House and several surrounding parcels.
Cipher highlighted a narrow service road running behind the estate.
“This route doesn't appear on the facility's public map, but deliveries use it twice a week. Medical supplies come in through the rear.”
Eli brought up another image.
“And a vehicle registered to Croft House left through that entrance three nights after Isla disappeared. It traveled south, stopped at Blackridge Hall for forty-seven minutes, then returned.”
Storm frowned. “Moving people?”
“Maybe.”
Irish leaned over the table.
“Next delivery?”
Cipher checked.
“Tomorrow night.”
The room went silent.
Trigger looked toward Irish.
“Best window we've got.”
Irish nodded before his gaze found mine, a silent question in his eyes that I understood immediately.
Tomorrow night would be the first time we approached Croft House without the protection of a legitimate appointment. It would also be the first time I went near the property knowing exactly what they might be hiding and knowing Irish had accepted me as part of the operation.
I looked at the service-road image.
Then at him.
“I’m going.”
“I know.”
There was no argument and no attempt to stop me, only acceptance of my place in the operation.
Something warm settled unexpectedly beneath my ribs at that realization, equal parts trust and attraction and increasingly difficult to separate.
Whatever existed between Callum O'Brien and me, I could no longer pretend he was merely the man helping me find Isla, and judging by the way his eyes lingered on me before returning to the plans, I wasn't the only one having that problem.