He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Maya’s POV

The candlestick was heavy.

Good. I wanted heavy. I wanted something solid in my hands that would make a satisfying sound against a skull if it came to that Mason’s, a lawyer’s, a journalist’s, whoever was standing on the other side of that door at whatever time this was in the afternoon.

I crossed the sitting room in my socks, stepped over the legal pad on the floor, and pressed my eye to the peephole.

Then I stopped breathing entirely…..

Ten years will change a person. Fill them out. Settle something behind the eyes that wasn’t there before. Add a few lines to the jaw, a little more certainty to the way they hold their shoulders.

But grey–green eyes are grey–green eyes. I would have known them through frosted glass at fifty p

Alexander Voss.

at fifty paces.

Standing in the third–floor corridor of my dead parents apartment building in a tailored navy coat that probably cost more than the entire annual maintenance f*e of the building, looking for all the world like he had every right to be there. Which was, I recalled with a rush of something I immediately suppressed, exactly how he had always looked everywhere.

I stood at the peephole for four full seconds.

Then I opened the door.

But I did not put down the candlestick.

He looked at it first. Then at me. One eyebrow climbed his forehead a slow, precise movement and the corner of his mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but was in the same postcode….

“The ceramic frog outside has a key,” he said. “I didn’t use it.”

“Points for restraint.” I kept the candlestick level. “Why are you here, Alex?”

“You’re going to make me have this conversation in a corridor?”

“I’m going to make you answer the question in the corridor, yes”

He exhaled once through his nose, the sound of a man recalibrating and settled his weight back slightly, hands going into his coat pockets. Unhurried. He’d always had that quality, the ability to make waiting look like a choice he’d made rather than one imposed on him.

“I heard what happened,” he said. “The divorce. The coordinator reassignment. The hallway.” His eyes didn’t leave mine.”

My grip tightened on the candlestick. “The shipping world.

“Is very small. And Mason was never particularly subtle when he thought he’d won.” A pause. “I’m not here to pity you, Maya. I want to be clear about that upfront.”

“What are you here for?”

“Business.”

I stared at him.

Then, entirely against my will, I laughed.

It came out shorter than intended a sharp, involuntary sound because of course it did. Of course Alexander Voss showed up at my door in the ruins of my life, ten years older and twice as composed, and led with business. Of course. The man could walk into a burning building and ask whether anyone had reviewed the insurance documents.

“You find that funny,” he said.

“I find it extremely you,” I said. “Which is a specific kind of funny, yes.”

Something shifted in his expression. Warmer, briefly, before the composure reassembled itself. “Are you going to let me in?”

I looked at him for another moment.

Then I stepped back from the door. I kept the candlestick.

He came in slowly, the way people enter spaces they know have weight to them. He didn’t comment on the dust or the frozen–in–time quality of the rooms. He looked at the family photographs on the mantel… paused, almost imperceptibly, at the one of my father at my wedding and then turned to face me.

I stayed near the door. Old habit with Alex. Keep an exit in your sightline.

“Talk,” I said.

He glanced at the candlestick. “Are you planning to put that down at any point?‘

“Jury’s out. Talk.”

He almost smiled. “I’ve been watching Mason’s operation for eighteen months. The New York coastal corridor, specifically the same expansion project you built from the feasibility study up.” He let that land. ” His new logistics routing has three structural weaknesses that he doesn’t know are weaknesses yet, because the person who understood the routes well enough to spot them just resigned”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday,” he agreed. “I have two port authority contracts in the northeast that could move within the quarter if I had someone who knew exactly how Mason’s network is jointed. Where the pressure points are, Which partners are loyal to the operation and which ones are loyal to you.”

I studied him. “You want me to help you dismantle his expansion.”

“I want to offer you a partnership in building a better one.” His voice was even, measured. “There’s a difference. I’m not asking you to burn anything down, Maya. I’m asking you to build something that makes his version irrelevant.”

“Phoenix Logistics,” I said, half to myself.

He tilted his head. “You’ve already thought about this.”

“I’ve had a productive forty–eight hours.”

He looked at the legal pad on the floor. The yellow pages dense with my handwriting, the cap off the pen lying beside it. He didn’t pick it up, didn’t try to read it. Just noted it and looked back at me.

“You were always three moves ahead of everyone in that building,” he said. “Including him. He just never looked up long enough to notice”

I looked at him. He looked back. That same quality he’d always had, absolutely comfortable with silence, never filling it unnecessarily, waiting with the patience of someone who’d already decided the outcome and was simply allowing events to arrive there.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“You weren’t at the penthouse. You weren’t at a hotel…. I had someone check the obvious ones. This apartment has been in your family for thirty years.” He paused. “You’ve always gone to ground in the places that feel like before. You did it the summer we met, when your father first told you about the Mason arrangement”

The room was very quiet.

I had forgotten I’d told him that.

“Alex.” My voice was careful. “How long have you been watching this situation?”

He looked at me steadily. “Long enough.”

I picked the candlestick back up.

He didn’t flinch. He reached into his inside coat pocket instead and produced a slim business card, which he set on the side table where the candlestick had been. New number, presumably. New everything, probably.

“Think about the proposition,” he said. “I’ll give you forty–eight hours.”

He turned toward the door.

“Alex.”

He stopped.

“How did you know to come today? Specifically today?”

He was quiet for a moment, hand on the door frame, back still to me.

Then he turned just enough.

“I didn’t just come because of business,” he said. “I came because of the text I sent you last night‘ The air went out of the room.

I stared at him.

He held my gaze for exactly three seconds… grey–green, steady, giving nothing else away and then he walked out. His footsteps moved unhurried down the corridor toward the stairwell.

The door swung slowly shut behind him.

I stood in my mother’s sitting room holding a brass candlestick, staring at the space where he’d been, with his business card on the table and the legal pad on the floor and my father’s letter in the study and forty- nine percent of an empire I hadn’t known I owned until yesterday.

From the street below, the cat was still calling.

I looked at the card.

He doesn’t deserve what’s coming. Neither do you. Be careful, Maya.