He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 146

Chapter 146

Zara’s POV

The documents had been on my desk since eight.

By ten-thirty I had moved them twice…. once to the left, once back to the center, and had not read a word of either stack. My assistant had come in at mine with coffee and messages and had looked at my face and left without asking whether I needed anything, which was the kind of reading of a room that made people good at their jobs.

I sat at my desk and looked through the window at the harbour and thought about the garden.

The music had been the first thing.

The string quartet that Catherine had arranged, playing something she had chosen with the care she brought to every detail of the event. I had been at the edge of the guest seating…. the position that communicated I was there without communicating I had been invited, the edge that I had become accustomed to occupying in every space connected to Alex’s life.

The vows had started.

I had been watching his face.

He had been looking at hers.

And then.

The sound.

The three seconds that had restructured everything

What I could not make sense of…. what had been sitting in my chest since the garden like something stuck…. was the movement itself. The way Alex had turned and placed himself between Maya and the direction the threat was coming from without a visible moment of decision. No calculation. No assessment.

The body moving before the mind could catch up, the way bodies moved when the instinct was too deep to be interrupted by thought.

He had done it without thinking.

Which meant he had been doing it, in some form, from the moment she came back into his life.

I had spent weeks trying to understand what I was up against.

Sitting at a desk with untouched documents and an untouched coffee, I understood it.

I had never been up against Maya

I had been up against what he became when she was in the room.

And those were not the same battle.

My phone rang at eleven.

The call lasted four minutes

Forty seconds in, I stood up.

By the time it ended I had my coat on and my bag on my shoulder and I was moving toward the office door because

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I needed to see that he was alive and getting better and I needed to see it with my own eyes rather than through the secondhand reports that had been arriving through Catherine’s messages and Olive’s updates and the news coverage that kept reducing everything to a headline.

I needed to see his face.

I reached the door.

It opened before I got there

Three officers.

The office floor went silent in the way floors went silent when something entered them that didn’t belong…. conversations dropping mid-sentence, keyboards going still, every head lifting with the instinctive awareness of a room registering something significant.

They walked toward me

I stood still.

Not from composure….. from the frozen quality of a person who had been moving toward a door and had encountered something on the other side of it that had locked their legs.

The lead officer… mid-forties, the unhurried manner of someone who had done this many times and had learned that urgency was rarely useful…. stopped in front of me.

“Ms. Collins,” he said.

My name.

“Yes,” I said.

“We need you to come with us,” he said. “You’re wanted for questioning in connection with the shooting at the Voss Wedding….”

The office was completely silent.

I could feel every person on the floor not looking at me, which was its own kind of looking.

“I’m happy to cooperate,” I said. My voice arrived steadier than I had any right to expect. “I’ll need to contact my lawyer.”

“You can do that at the station,” he said.

He stepped to the side

An officer behind him moved forward.

The handcuffs

I looked at them.

Then at the officer’s face….

Then at the floor of the office, which I had been in for nine months, which knew me as a professional person with a portfolio and a desk and a client list, which was now watching me be handcuffed in front of the window with the harbour visible behind me.

The metal closed around my wrists….

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Chapter 46

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Cold. Real.

I thought about the supply corridor at the hospital.

The man I had hired. His voice. Events unfolded too quickly.

I thought about Mason’s face stepping out of the shadow at the end of the corridor.

Someone has talked

The question was whether the someone was the man who had discharged the weapon, doing what people did when police investigations narrowed and self-preservation calculated the cost of loyalty……. or the man who had been standing in the corridor long enough to hear everything and had folded his arms and offered an alliance.

I thought about what Mason had said before he walked away.

I’m the only reason you’re here anyway.

The officers moved me toward the door.

The office watched

And I understood, with the cold and arriving certainty of someone who should have seen it sooner, that the person who had put me in this corridor was not the man who fired the shot.

It was the man who had been standing in the shadow, listening, smiling.

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