Page 33 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

Sean’s office sat at the end of the corridor. I’d passed it before, even considered snooping around, but I chickened out each time. Staff treated it like a sacred place. I didn’t share their devotion. I stopped in front of it without hesitation and glanced around to make sure there weren’t any guards nearby. The door opened on the first try—no locks, no booby traps—and I stepped inside.

The room was exactly what I’d expected, precise and minimal to the point of intention. Every surface had clear space around it. Every object sat where it belonged, not where it had been haphazardly left. A stuffed bear’s head hung on the wall. I closed the door behind me.

For a moment I simply stood there, trying to find some explanation for the man who controlled everything outside this room. I didn’t find any. It frustrated me more than I wanted to admit. I moved to the desk. The drawers opened smoothly. Files were arranged with unsettling precision, categorized by a mind that didn’t forget anything. I pulled one out and scanned it. Then another. Names appeared immediately, and dates too. There were locations mentioned that I’d only heard about in fragments. My hands started moving faster.

I opened cabinets and dug through a drawer all the way to the bottom. Paper ruffled beneath my fingers. At first I read in fragments, just skimming them. These were stories from years ago. Not as a single event, as pieces and reports. I saw versions of the same story that didn’t quite match. Nothing aligned cleanly or showed one consistent truth.

I paused when I saw my father’s name.Wait a minute. My eyes moved over the line again, slower this time.What is this?The room suddenly felt larger. Every file I touched seemed to widen the shape of something I was never supposed to see. Ipulled out another folder. It was older, and the paper felt more fragile.

This was history, and it was inconsistent in ways that felt deliberate. I straightened slightly, still holding the folder, reading more carefully. My anger hadn’t disappeared; it had changed direction. It was less about being trapped inside and more about what had been hidden from me. My jaw tightened. Whatever I’d expected to find, this wasn’t it. None of this made sense. And worse than that, it was proof that the story I’d been circling wasn’t merely incomplete; it had been shaped to obscure the truth.

Suddenly, I heard a click behind me. I turned. Declan stood near the doorway. He wasn’t blocking the way; he was merely looking in. I straightened immediately.

The files were still in my hands. The edges of the papers were bent from how tightly I’d been gripping them. I didn’t hide them. I didn’t have enough time.

His eyes dropped to the files once, then returned to my face. He didn’t react, which unsettled me.

If he was angry, I could’ve responded. If he challenged me, I could push back. Instead, he simply looked at me, like finding me here wasn’t unexpected.

“What are you looking for?” he asked calmly.

I tightened my grip on the files. “Something I wasn’t supposed to see.”

His expression didn’t change as he stepped into the office. “That’s a wide category.”

I turned slightly, positioning myself so I was behind the desk. “I’m not here to play guessing games.”

Declan studied me. Then he said carefully, “Sean doesn”t like people going through his things.”

“I’m not people.” I lifted my chin. “I’m his wife.”

Declan acknowledged that with a small nod. It was respectful, but something changed behind his eyes.

“Understood.” But it didn’t sound like an agreement.

“Then stop looking at me like I don’t belong here.”

That earned me the smallest pause. “You belong here,” he said. “That’s not in question.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Then what is?”

He didn’t answer. Instead his gaze flicked briefly toward the files in my hands. Just once, but suddenly something turned in my stomach.

“You should be careful what you take from this room.”

“That sounded like a warning.”

“It was practical advice.” His tone didn’t match the words.

I stepped forward. “I don’t need advice.”

Declan studied me again, and the look was longer this time, as if he was deciding how much truth I could safely handle. Then he shifted back toward the door. “I’ll leave you to it.” At the threshold, he paused. He didn’t fully turn around when he spoke. “You should be careful if you’re trying to find out what Sean is hiding.”

Then he left. I stood motionless long after the door closed. The room felt different now. Not because I was alone; because I was no longer certain I ever had been.

And worse, I was beginning to suspect Declan hadn’t come in to stop me at all.

I wasn’t ignoring the warning, but I’d already crossed the point where stopping didn’t change anything. Declan’s words still sat in the room, but I pushed deeper into the files instead of turning away. I moved through them faster now, not searching carefully anymore but urgently, like something inside me had started to recognize patterns where there hadn’t been any before. That was when the timeline began to confuse me. At first I thought it was a mistake, a misfiled report or a clericalinconsistency, but then I found another inconsistency. And then another. Events that were supposed to follow each other didn’t. Dates overlapped in ways that made no sense. A financial transfer had been logged before the meeting it supposedly funded. A recorded exchange referenced a decision that hadn’t been made yet. An incident report was stamped days before the incident itself appeared in another folder. I froze slightly, holding two pages side by side. They didn’t align. Not even loosely. Even if I tried to force them to, they wouldn’t.