The Mafia Heiress They Could Never Find novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Foyer

The federal car came up the drive twenty minutes early.

I was standing in the foyer with my black suitcase at my feet when its headlights crossed the front windows.

A dark sedan stopped at the iron gates, and a second truck pulled in behind it with two armed men inside.

Our guards went out at once, because nothing gets onto the Doran grounds without being looked at first.

One of the federal men held up a badge to the window.

The head guard made a phone call and listened to someone for a long time.

Then he stepped back and opened the gate.

I waited for somebody to come down the stairs.

Dinner noise carried from the dining room, where Mom was arranging the flowers and Declan was arguing about chairs.

Nobody came.

I looked at the house I had grown up in, with the long staircase, the portrait of Dad, and the rug where Finn and I once raced toy cars.

All my life the Doran name had been a wall around me.

For three months I had been learning how fast a wall can move when the family decides to protect somebody else.

I went upstairs one last time and left my bedroom door standing open.

I didn't look back at it.

At the front door a federal officer in a gray suit checked my face against a photograph.

"Maeve Doran?"

"Yes."

"As of tonight your name is sealed," he said. "Every record will carry your project designation, Researcher Nine. Your real name stays locked until the program closes."

He held out a clipboard, and I signed the last transfer form on the line he pointed to.

He gave me a thin folder.

"No visitors, no personal messages while the program is closed, and you never say where you are."

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