Page 79 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

I kept checking the time. Then the hallway. Then the security pattern I’d been watching since I got here.

Not once. Over and over, until it stopped feeling like observation.

The guards outside weren’t careless. They were consistent, and consistency could be predicted.

One of them always paused near the end of the corridor in the afternoon to check his phone. Another stepped away briefly whenever deliveries came in downstairs. The third spent too long talking to staff, longer than he probably noticed himself.

None of it mattered on its own, but together it created gaps. Small ones, predictable ones. I waited until those gaps matched up. Then I moved.

I walked toward the service corridor near the main staircase. Sean and I never used it. Staff did. That was why it worked.

The air inside smelled faintly of detergent and clean laundry. The corridor was quiet in that controlled way buildings like this always were behind the scenes. I turned one corner, then another.

A maid passed me with a cart and nodded. I nodded back. Neither of us stopped.

At the far end of the corridor was a storage room I’d noticed weeks earlier while moving through the upper floors. It wasn’t hidden. It didn’t need to be. People ignored it because it blended into everything else.

It connected to a secondary elevator. I pressed the button and waited. For a moment, I thought I heard footsteps behind me. My body tightened, ready for a guard to appear and drag me back to the living room.

No one came. The doors opened. I stepped inside, and only then let myself breathe properly.

The elevator dropped through the building, opening onto a lower service level filled with movement and noise. Workers carried boxes, checked lists, and moved between stations without looking up. I joined them. I put my head down and walked at a steady pace, nothing to draw attention.

I was just another person moving through a place they were supposed to be. The final checkpoint was near the loading exit. Two guards stood there.

One was distracted by an argument with a delivery driver over a stack of crates that didn’t seem to match the paperwork. The other was focused on the documents in his hand. Neither noticed me pass. I walked through the gap without stopping.

A moment later I pushed through the exit doors. Cool air hit my face. I stopped on the pavement just long enough to glance back at the building rising behind me.

No alarms went off. There was no shouting, no panic. No reaction. I turned away before I gave myself time to think. Then I disappeared into the crowd.

***

I stopped walking once I was far enough from the building that I couldn’t feel it behind me anymore. Not because it was safe. It wasn’t about safety. I just needed space to think without the weight of it sitting on my back.

Nobody looked at me twice. I was grateful for that. I kept my head down, pulled out my phone, and called my dad. It rang twice before he picked up.

“Dad,” I said.

“Maeve,” he said.

“Where are you?”

A pause. “Are you in danger?”

“I’m not in danger. I want to see you.”

The silence changed after that. He was thinking now. I could picture it—him standing somewhere in the house, deciding what to say.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“In the city. I’ll come to you no matter where you are.”

“No,” he answered immediately, sharp this time, the first real emotion in his voice. “You can’t come here.”

“I’m already coming, and I’m alone,” I replied.

“That’stoo dangerous.”