He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 132

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Chapter 132

Maya’s POV

The dress was the right dress.

I knew it the moment I stood in front of the mirror at seven in the morning with Catherine beside me and Olive doing something precise with the buttons at the back and the light coming through the east-facing window exactly as it had been described.

The simple one. The one I had said yes to in the shop before everything else had happened.

It still fit.

Both the dress and the decision

The ceremony was in the garden.

White chairs arranged in the unhurried configuration of an event that had been planned by someone who understood proportion. The structural peonies at each end of the aisle. The morning light doing what morning light did when you positioned the ceremony to receive it

I stood at the garden entrance with the sound of the guests settling into their seats and looked at the aisle and thought about what was at the end of it.

Alex

Standing with his back to me, in the suit he had worn to board meetings and then chosen deliberately for this….. the specific, considered quality of a man who had thought about what he wanted this to look like.

He turned when he felt the room’s attention shift

Saw me.

His face did the thing it had been doing since the study…. open, unguarded, the version that existed only in the spaces where he had stopped managing what was visible.

I walked

The aisle was not long.

Twenty steps, approximately. Each one carrying the specific weight of everything that had led to this twenty steps….. the apartment with the candlestick, the kitchen table, the warehouse, the bedroom floor, the book on the shelf, the two documents on the sitting room table, the question asked from a chair near

a bookcase.

All of it leading here

I reached him.

He looked at me

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“Hi,” he said. Quietly. Just for me.

“Hi,” I said back

The officiant smiled….

The ceremony began.

The vows were the ones we had written ourselves.

Nat performed….. honest.

The officiant looked between us.

The garden was very quiet.

“Do you…….” he began.

The sound came from the back of the seated guests.

Not loud

The specific, wrong quality of a sound in a space where that sound had no business being.

A figure, standing. Dark. Something in their hand.

It happened in the time it took to register

The movement in Alex’s peripheral vision….. I saw him see it, his head turning, the full-body assessment arriving in the space of a second.

He was already moving when the figure raised the weapon

Not away.

Toward me.

Between me and the direction the barrel was pointing.

The sound.

The garden screaming.

Alex’s weight.

The ground coming up.

I was on my knees.

The dress.

My hands.

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Alex beside me, not standing.

“Alex.” My voice. Someone else’s voice. Both of them.

He was looking at me.

His face was the open version…. the unmanaged one.

“Don’t…..” His voice, different. “Don’t move”

“Alex.” I pressed my hands to his side where the dark was spreading through the white of his shirt. “Alex, look at me.”

He was looking at me.

“I’m looking,” he said.

“Stay looking,” I said. “Don’t stop.”

The garden was chaos….. movement, voices, the specific, terrible sound of people who had been at a wedding and were now at something else.

His hands found mine

“Hi,” he said again. The same word. The same quiet.

“Stop talking,” I said.

“You’re crying,” he said.

“I know,” I said

“You never cry,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

My hands were red.

His eyes were still open

“Stay,” I said. One word. Everything in it.

He held my gaze

And held it.

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