He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 135

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Chapter 135

Zara’s POV

The room was a supply corridor off the hospital’s east wing.

Not chosen for comfort…. chosen because it was the only space I had found in forty minutes of moving through this building that didn’t have people in it who knew my face.

I had texted the number.

He had appeared within seven minutes, which told me he had been in the building already, which told me something about how little he understood about the situation he had created.

“You shot him,” I said

My voice was not the one I used in rooms where I needed to be composed. It was the real one, the one that had been building since the moment I heard the sound in the garden and turned and saw Alex on the ground

“The situation….”

“You shot him.” I said it again because saying it once had not been sufficient. “Alex Voss…. The person I was trying to keep alive and present in my life. You shot him”

The man…. mid-forties, the specific, unremarkable appearance I had paid for because unremarkable people moved through spaces without being tracked, looked at me with the expression of someone who had been in difficult conversations before and was applying his methodology.

“The target moved,” he said

“The target,” I said.

“Ms. Hargrove. She moved at the moment I…..’

“She was standing at the altar,” I said. “She was standing still. At a wedding ceremony. In front of forty people.” I pressed my hand against the wall behind me. “You had a specific, simple brief. Make the event chaotic enough that the wedding couldn’t proceed. Create enough disruption that the situation became untenable.” I held his

gaze.

“That was the brief”

“The brief as delivered required a credible threat….”

“A credible threat does not involve a weapon being discharged,” I said. “A credible threat involves the presence of one. The appearance of danger. The disruption of proceedings.” I looked at him. “Not a bullet in Alex Voss’s body.”

He looked at the corridor.

“Events developed faster than the timeline allowed,” he said.

“That is not an explanation,” I said. “That is a sentence”

He looked at me with the flat assessment of someone who had decided this conversation was not going to go anywhere useful and was managing his exit from it.

“The police have footage,” I said. “From four separate cameras. They have tracked your movement through the venue from two hours before the ceremony. They have your entry point and your exit route and the position you occupied during the event.” I looked at him.

“They do not yet have your name. But they have a picture that is going to produce a name, and when it produces a name it is going to produce everything attached to it, and everything attached to it is going to produce a thread that leads back to the communication between us.”

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He was quiet

“You need to disappear, “Tsaid. “Completely. No contact. No location that connects to either of us. Nothing that creates a thread. “I held his gaze. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?

“I understand what you’re telling me,” he said

“Then do it,” I said

He looked at me for one more moment.

Then he walked out

I stood in the supply corridor and put both hands flat against the wall and breathed.

The wall was cold and smooth and real in the specific, grounding way of physical surfaces when the mind was running too fast for itself…

I had hired someone to disrupt a wedding.

The word disrupt was the one I had used, internally and in the communication, because disrupt was a word that could be managed into something that sounded like a bad idea rather than a criminal one. People disrupted things. Events were disrupted. The word existed in a register that was uncomfortable without being the other register.

The man I had hired had brought a weapon to a wedding and discharged it….

Alex was in surgery.

And the police were working backward through four cameras.

I pressed my forehead against the wall…

The image refused to leave.

Alex on the ground in the garden.

The white shirt

Maya’s hands…

I had watched it from the back of the guest area….. had been positioned near the end of the row because I had not been fully invited and had understood that the edge of the space was where I belonged. I had been watching Alex’s face during the vows, which was the self-destructive quality of someone who could not stop observing a thing that was hurting them.

And then the sound

And Alex…. not dropping, not falling the way people fell in the abstract imagination of an event.

Real.

The weight of a person who had moved with deliberate intent and the physical cost of it arriving all at once.

I had stayed still

For approximately four seconds I had stood at the back of the garden and been completely still while the room became chaos, and those four seconds were going to be in my memory for the rest of my life in the specific way of things that told you something about yourself you had not known you needed to know.

I had not moved toward him

I had moved toward the exit…

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I had told myself I was protecting him.

I had hired a inani with a weapon..

The distance between those two things was not a nuance.

“That was an interesting conversation.”

The voice came from the far end of the corridor.

I turned

Mason Hargrove….

Standing in the doorway where the supply corridor connected to the main hospital passageway…. the unhurried composure of a man who had been standing somewhere long enough to hear what he had wanted to hear and had decided the momëtit to step forward had arrived

I looked at him.

At the expression on his face…. not the cold certainty of the boardroom version, not the gracious loser performance. Something else. The expression of a man who had been handed information he hadn’t sought and was running it forward

“How long have you been there?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

He straightened slightly.

Looked at me with the assessment of someone who had identified a variable and was deciding how to deploy it.

“You hired someone,” he said. “For the wedding….. For Maya.” He paused. “And it went wrong”

I said nothing.

“You didn’t want Alex hurt,” he said. “That part I believe. What you wanted was the wedding stopped. The situation destabilised. Maya’s position weakened.” He tilted his head slightly. “We have more in common than you’d like to admit….”

“We have nothing in common,” I said.

He smiled

Not the warm version.

“You’ve been trying to remove Maya from Alex’s life for weeks,” he said. “I’ve been trying to remove Maya from my former life for months.” He folded his arms.

“The methods have been different. The outcome we both wanted has not arrived.” He looked at me steadily. “Perhaps the methods needed recalibrating.”

“You need to walk away from this corridor,” I said.

“I will,” he said. “Shortly.”

He looked at me.

“Since we both want Maya out of the picture,” he said, “how about we work together?”

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