Page 38 of His Kidnapped Irish Mafia Virgin

I smiled awkwardly and looked at the door again. “That man who just left...did he seem a little odd to you?”

Sofia looked a little confused. “The man by the window? Not really. He seemed quiet more than anything. Why? Did he say something?”

I hesitated before answering. “Not exactly. It was just...some of the things he asked felt a little personal. He asked how long I’d worked here, if I liked my job, and if people noticed when I was away. None of it sounded bad on its own, but by the time we were done talking he knew more about me than I knew about him.”

Sofia put her elbow on the counter. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing important. The same things I would tell any customer. I didn’t tell him where I live or what time I get off work or anything like that.”

She looked at my face for a moment. “You still look a little upset.”

I shrugged. “I’m probably just overthinking it. After everything that happened, I guess even normal conversations can feel weird.”

Sofia nodded slowly, but I could tell she wasn’t entirely convinced. “Maybe your instincts are trying to tell you something. If he comes back, tell me.”

I smiled, trying to end the conversation. “I promise.” Then I picked up my tray and walked back out onto the café floor, trying to convince myself that I was just letting old fears bother me on a perfectly ordinary morning.

The weird feeling stayed with me longer than I wanted it to. I tried to distract myself by getting to work, hoping that if I stayed busy the feeling would go away. A family with two kids came in for lunch. One of our customers asked me to suggest a pastry for his granddaughter, and Sofia found another reason to complain about customers who change their orders.

The café started to quiet down as the lunch rush came to an end. Most of our morning customers had already left, leaving only a few people sitting around. Sofia went into the kitchen to help unpack a delivery. I picked up a tray and started clearing the empty tables, collecting used cups and wiping down surfaces.

Mrs. Henderson had finally gone home with her book. Michael had packed up his laptop and left in a hurry to get to class. The table by the window where the stranger had been sitting was the last one I had to clear. The stranger’s cup was empty. The plate for his blueberry muffin was empty, too. Everything looked just like I expected it to. I reached out to gather the dishes.

When I lifted the coffee cup, I saw something under it. A tissue. At first I didn’t think much of it. Customers often left tissues behind, so I reached for it without giving it a second thought. But when I picked it up, I felt that it was different. It was folded into a square, like someone had wanted to make sure it stayed put until the right person found it. I stood there for a moment, looking at the tissue in my hand. Curiosity made me unfold it. As the paper opened up, I saw handwriting in the middle.

He cannot protect you forever.

For a second I didn’t understand what I was reading. I read the sentence again, slower this time, hoping I’d misunderstood it, but the words were still the same.

I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. The conversations around me were still going on, but they sounded distant. Someone laughed near the counter, a spoon clinked against a cup, and the bell above the door rang as someone walked in. All those sounds felt far away.

Without thinking, I looked out the window and onto the street. People were walking past. They weren’t paying attention to the café. A woman pushed a pram, two office workers crossed the road with coffee cups, and a cyclist rode between cars. The stranger was nowhere to be seen.

I looked at the tissue again. My fingers tightened around it. A few hours ago I’d thought my life was finally back to normal. Now, with those five words on the tissue, that feeling of safety was gone.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Liam

I was halfway through signing a supplier invoice when the office door opened. Normally I would have finished what I was doing before looking up, but something about the silence made me raise my head almost immediately. Nora stood just inside the doorway with one hand still resting on the handle. She looked too calm, and I’d learned the hard way that her quiet moments worried me far more than the loud ones. She closed the door behind her and walked toward my desk without saying anything.

I put my pen down. “I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t walk into my office like this unless something happened. Tell me what’s wrong.”

She reached into the pocket of her apron and carefully placed a neatly folded tissue on my desk. “I need you to read this. I’ve been trying to convince myself all the way here that there’s another explanation for it, but I can’t think of one. I think if I tried to explain it before you saw it, it wouldn’t make sense.”

I looked from the tissue to her before unfolding it. There were only five words: He cannot protect you forever. For a long moment, I said nothing. Then I folded the tissue exactly the way I’d found it and placed it back on the desk before meeting Nora’s eyes again.

“Start at the beginning and tell me everything, exactly the way it happened. Don’t leave out anything, no matter how small or unimportant it seems, because I’ve learned that the details people dismiss are usually the ones that matter most.”

She nodded slowly before taking a seat opposite me. “It happened at the café this morning, during the quieter part of the shift. A man came in by himself and sat at one of my tables near the window. At first he seemed completely ordinary. He ordered a black coffee and a blueberry muffin, made a few jokes about the food, and talked about how much he liked quiet cafés. Nothing about him made me think he was dangerous, and if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t have remembered him at all if everything had ended there.” She paused, searching her memory. “The longer we talked, the more personal his questions became. They still sounded polite, but he wanted to know how long I’d worked there, whether I enjoyed the job, and if I knew all the regular customers. Then he mentioned that people seemed happy to have me back, and I remember thinking it was a strange thing for someone to notice after sitting in the café for less than an hour. I brushed the feeling aside because I thought I was letting everything that happened get into my head.”

She looked down at the folded tissue. “When he finished his coffee, he paid the bill, thanked me for looking after him, and walked out like every other customer. I cleared his table a little while later and found that tissue folded underneath his coffee cup. It had been placed there so carefully that I couldn’t ignore it. Something made me open it, and when I read what was inside...” She drew in a slow breath. “I realized that conversation had never been ordinary.”

I listened without interrupting her once. When she finished speaking, I picked up the tissue again and looked at the message a second time.

Someone had walked into the café, sat across from Nora for almost an hour, studied her, left a message that was meant as much for me as it was for her, and then walked back out again without attracting the attention of a single person working for me.

That thought settled over me like ice. I pressed the intercom button on my desk.