Page 48 of His Kidnapped Irish Mafia Virgin

I expected to find her there, waiting somewhere within the familiar rhythm of the house.

I imagined her upstairs with a book in her hands, or in the kitchen making tea she’d forget to drink while it grew cold. The image was so clear in my mind that, for a brief moment, I allowed myself to believe that all was well.

The moment I stepped through the front door, that belief vanished. The silence inside the house felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain immediately. I stood in the hallway for a second, listening for footsteps upstairs or movement in the kitchen. There was nothing.

“Nora?” I called, my voice carrying through the house.

A sharp unease settled in my chest as I moved quickly through the rooms, checking the kitchen first, then the sitting room, then the small library where Nora sometimes hid when she wanted to be alone. Every room was empty and untouched.

“Nora,” I called again, louder this time, but the house remained silent.

My unease turned into urgency as I took the stairs two at a time and pushed open the door to her room. The lamp was still on, casting a soft glow across the bed and the chair beside it, while her book lay open on the table, abandoned in the middle of a page, like she’d only stepped away for a moment.

I searched the room desperately for some sign that would make sense of the emptiness, but what I found only made the panic grow sharper. Her bag was missing, and some of her clothes were gone from the wardrobe.

Then it dawned on me. This wasn’t an abduction. Nora had packed and chosen to leave. Then I saw her phone lying on the table beside the lamp, dark and lifeless.

I crossed the room slowly, as though moving too fast might make it disappear, and when I picked up the phone and pressed the power button, nothing happened. I tried again and realized that she’d deliberately switched it off. That was the final confirmation that Nora hadn’t been taken by surprise; she’d walked away deliberately, and she’d made certain that I wouldn’t be able to stop her.

I stared at Nora’s phone for several seconds, my fingers tightening around it until the edges pressed painfully into my palm.

The realization that Nora had left it behind on purpose settled heavily in my chest, sharp enough to steal my breath for a moment. She’d known I would call. She’d known I would search for her the second I noticed she was gone. And she’d made sure there would be no way for me to reach her.

Panic rose inside me with frightening speed, but I forced it down. Panic wouldn’t help Nora. Panic wouldn’t bring her back. Action would. I pulled my phone from my pocket and called Diggs before I’d fully turned away from the table.

“Get back to the house now,” I said the moment he answered.

There was a brief pause on the line. “What happened?”

“Nora is gone.” The words tasted wrong in my mouth.

Diggs’s voice sharpened immediately. “Gone how?”

“She packed a bag, took some of her things, and left her phone behind. I want you, Paddy, and Michael here in five minutes. Call every contact we have and start pulling security footage from the surrounding streets.”

“I’m on my way,” he said. I ended the call and dialed Paddy next, then Michael, repeating the same orders with the same cold urgency. By the time I lowered the phone, my hand was trembling. I looked around Nora’s room again, forcing myself to notice every detail.

She hadn’t been taken.

The knowledge should have eased my fear, but it only made it worse. If Nora had walked out of this house willingly, then she’d walked toward something she believed was more important than her own safety.

My mind moved through recent events with brutal speed: the threatening note, the fixer’s confession, and the desperate urgency that had been hiding beneath everything Nora had said in the past few days. There was only one person she could be going to: the one responsible for all of this.

I closed my eyes for a brief second and tried to picture where she would go first. The bus station…the train station? Any place where she could disappear into a crowd before I noticed she was missing. I opened my eyes and looked at the dark phone in my hand.

“You should have told me,” I whispered into the empty room.

The front door slammed downstairs and footsteps rushed through the hallways. Diggs was the first to reach the doorway, followed closely by Paddy and Michael, all three men wearing the same expression of alarm they’d learned to hide from everyone else.

“What do we have to do?” Diggs asked.

I held up Nora’s phone. “We have a woman who planned her escape and doesn’t want to be found,” I said, my voice low and controlled, “and we have very little time before Victor Hale realizes she’s on her way to him.”

The room fell silent as my words settled over them.

***

I gave the order that sent the entire O’Connor network into motion.