Page 11 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

“And?” I asked.

“Those people usually stop having those problems. People listen when he talks,” she said.

“People listen because they’re scared of him.”

“Maybe,” Nora said. “But he might know something about your dad.”

I laughed, even though it wasn’t funny. “That sounds completely normal and not suspicious all.”

Nora lowered her voice. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.” I leaned against the counter, trying to steady myself. “If something is wrong, my dad and I will deal with it.”

Nora watched me for a moment, and I could feel her disagreeing with me even before she said anything. “And if you can’t?”

I straightened immediately. “I can.”

Nora held my gaze for another second, then nodded once. “Okay.”

That should’ve buried it, but later, while I carried drinks across the room, I looked toward the back corner, the place where Sean O’Connor usually sat when he came in and pretended not to watch me.

It was empty tonight. I looked away quicker than necessary, then hated myself a little for noticing.

Murphy’s emptied out slowly that night, the way it always did. The drunks stuck around after closing time until the chairs were dragged back into place. The floors got wiped down whilesomeone complained about tomorrow coming too quickly. I usually liked the time after the noise died down, the part where the noise faded on the walk to my house.

Tonight the noise followed me all the way home. My key scraped into the lock, and I pushed the front door open. Something felt wrong. I didn’t know what it was at first, just that small irritating feeling that something wasn’t where it should be.

Then I saw the hallway light and stopped by the door. My dad hated wasting electricity. Years of having to stretch our money had made it a habit for him to always turn the lights off. The yellow bulb cast a glow down the hall as I closed the door behind me more slowly than I usually did.

“Dad?” My voice carried through the house, but there was no answer.

That wasn’t strange. Sometimes Dad fell asleep in front of the television. Other times he sat outside longer than he meant to, and sometimes he just didn’t hear me. I hung my jacket by the door and noticed something else—his coat was missing, the heavy dark one he wore almost every day.

My eyes lingered on the hook for a moment. That didn’t necessarily mean that he’d left the house. I still found myself moving toward the kitchen. A glass sat beside the sink, half full of water. My dad never left dishes on the counter.

“Dad?” I called again, louder this time. The house stayed silent, and a small knot tightened in my chest. If he’d gone somewhere this late without saying anything, I already had a lecture prepared for when he got back.

The living room was empty. The television was off, a blanket badly folded over the armchair. Dad never folded anything neatly. My pace slowed as I walked down the hall toward his room. The door was open, and I stared at it for a second before stepping inside.

The bedside lamp was still on, and the bed hadn’t been slept in. My eyes moved across the room until they landed on his watch, which was sitting on top of the dresser. I felt something cold settle low in my stomach. Dad always wore that watch whenever he left the house.

Everything that had looked normal at first glance wasn’t normal at all. One drawer stood slightly open, and the wardrobe wasn’t fully shut. It looked as though he’d been looking for something in a hurry. I scanned the room again. The old leather wallet he normally kept near the dresser was gone, his keys were gone, his coat was gone, but the watch remained.

I stood there trying to make the pieces fit together. There was no note, no message, no explanation, just his absence. My hand moved to my phone before I consciously decided to reach for it. I called my dad and the phone rang three times, then went to voicemail.

I ended the call and dialed again, and this time it went straight to voicemail. The silence inside the house seemed louder after I put the phone down. I looked out of the window overlooking the street. Nothing was moving outside.

Standing there in his half-lit room, staring at everything he’d left behind and everything he hadn’t, irritated me. My dad lying to me was familiar, my dad avoiding questions was familiar, my dad keeping secrets was familiar, but this…this felt different. For the first time since I saw those men on the street with him, a thought entered my head that I didn’t want to think about.

If something actually happened to my dad…who was I supposed to call?

CHAPTER FOUR

Sean

The first problem reached me before eight in the morning. By nine, there were four. By ten, Declan was standing across from my desk with a folder in one hand and his usual unreadable expression fixed in place, unchanging in the way it always was when something had already started moving beneath the surface.

The office overlooked several half-built steel skeletons rising over South Boston. Men moved below, cranes lifted beams, trucks reversed, concrete poured. O’Connor Construction looked legitimate from the outside, mostly because I made sure it did.