Page 49 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

“This one is different.”

“Different how?”

“It didn’t come from Earl’s thread directly. It came from the gaps around it.”

I frowned. “Just say it.”

“Gabrielle De Succa.” The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it yet.

I looked down at the papers again without meaning to. “Why does that name matter?”

“It keeps appearing next to Earl-linked movement.”

“That doesn’t mean anything on its own.”

“It does when so much information around Earl has been edited.”

I didn’t answer. My mind was trying to force the name into something familiar.

“Hold on. I’m going to text you a picture of her.”

Nora’s text came through, and I opened it. It loaded slowly—a photo of a dark-haired woman with a composed posture.

It was the same woman from a few hours ago. The one I saw with Sean! My chest tightened.

I stared at the screen longer than I should have. “I think I know her. She was just here a few hours ago.”

“At the penthouse?”

“Yes.”

“So Gabrielle De Succa,” Nora said, softer now, “isn’t just a name in the pattern. She’s already inside Sean’s circle.”

I stared at the image again. Sean and Gabrielle. That moment between them I walked into, frozen in my head. Did he know she was part of this somehow?

“Thank you, Nora.” I ended the call.

I looked at the list of names: Peter Earl, Stuart Justice, Ian Rush.

And now Gabrielle. She’d said something to Sean about information moving underground. Yes, I’d been eavesdropping. If she was also connected to Sean’s past, she was somebody worth investigating thoroughly.

A quick check over the internet revealed her story. She’d been married three times, and her last husband was a South African prince who’d died of a mysterious illness. Interesting.

I stared at the names until they stopped being meaningless and started becoming something else. A connection. A thread pulled tight across too many years. I wrote Gabrielle’s name to the list, too. My finger tapped once against Gabrielle’s name. I didn’t need distractions. I didn’t need her face in my head. I pushed the page aside and leaned closer to the rest. Sean’s past kept coming up in fragments, not clean or linear—people mentioned in passing, records that didn’t sit right when I read them twice.

There were too many gaps that shouldn’t have existed if everything had happened the way it was supposed to. I pulled my laptop closer and opened it. The screen glow cut through the room. I started with Peter Earl.

Then Stuart Justice. Then Ian Rush.

Each search revealed something—pieces, disconnected reports, old mentions and government-linked documents that read too cleanly.

By ten, someone came knocking.

It was one of the maids asking if I wanted food, but I didn’t even look up.

“No,” I said. My eyes stayed on the screen. Another search. Another dead end dressed like information. I heard her footsteps retreating. I didn’t move.

At some point I stood without meaning to. I paced. The room felt smaller the longer I stayed in it, like it was folding in around the questions I couldn’t answer fast enough.