He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 158

Chapter 158

Chapter 158

Zara’s POV

I could breathe again.

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That was the first thing I noticed when I woke up this morning…. not relief exactly, not yet, just the absence of the tightness that had been sitting behind my ribs since the moment the handcuffs closed around my wrists. I lay in bed for a full minute just registering it. Air going in. Air going out. No knot stopping it halfway.

I hadn’t slept properly in days

Every phone call had made me flinch. Every knock at the door had sent my pulse into somewhere uncomfortable. I had spent the time since the station rehearsing versions of an arrest that hadn’t happened yet, certain it was only a matter of when.

Enjoy your freedom while it lasts

Reeves’s voice had been living in my head since he said it. I hated how much room he’d taken up there.

The call came at nine

I was sitting by the window with coffee I hadn’t touched, when my phone rang. A name I trusted… one of

the few left.

I answered.

I listened

And somewhere in the first thirty seconds, the knot behind my ribs loosened all the way.

The man I had hired…. the one who had brought a weapon to a wedding when he was only supposed to bring chaos…. was gone. Not in hiding somewhere in the city, waiting to be picked up on a tip. Gone. Out of the country, beyond extradition, beyond Reeves, beyond anything that could connect a name to a face

to me.

The call ended

I sat there for a long moment.

Then I laughed.

A real one, the first since the garden, since the music stopped and the screaming started and everything I’d built toward collapsed into something I hadn’t planned for

The sound surprised me coming out of my own mouth.

The police had nothing solid.

I ran it through again, the way I’d been running it through for days, except this time the running through

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Gapter 158

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didn’t produce the same cold weight at the end of it. The man who could connect me to the shooting was gone. The conversations Mason had overheard in that supply corridor were just that… overheard, secondhand, the kind of thing a clever lawyer could dismantle in an afternoon.

I could walk out again, if it came to that.

For several minutes I just sat with it. The relief. The lightness. The simple, uncomplicated pleasure of a body that wasn’t bracing for something

Then a different thought arrived.

What if I stopped playing defense.

The thought came quietly at first, the way the worst ideas always did… not as a plan, just a question, idle, the kind of thing you let yourself wonder without committing to wondering it seriously.

What if the investigation needed somewhere else to look.

Reeves wasn’t going to simply stop. Men like him didn’t stop because one lead went cold…. they redirected, found the next thread, kept pulling. If I wanted him gone from my life permanently, I needed to give him something else to pull on.

Someone else to pull on

My fingers tightened around the phone in my lap.

Maya.

The name settled into me with a kind of inevitability that almost felt like relief

Because it was true, wasn’t it… Maya always walked away clean. No matter what landed on her, someone was there to catch the fall. Alex defended her without hesitation. His family had absorbed her into themselves within weeks, despite everything Richard had said at the start

Even the scandal about the baby, even the wedding ending in blood on a white dress, had somehow turned into more sympathy for her rather than less.

People didn’t suspect Maya

They protected her.

I thought about my own morning…. the interrogation room, the handcuffs, the detective’s voice following me down a corridor like something that intended to stay. Maya had never once sat in a room like that. Maya had never once had her name said in the register that preceded something you didn’t want to hear.

The unfairness of it sat behind my teeth like something sharp.

What if that changed

What if the questions started landing somewhere else.

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Chapter 158

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I stood up

Started moving…. If Maya became the center of it, Reeves’s attention would have somewhere new to go. The detective who had stared at me down a hospital corridor with his arms folded would find a different name to fold his arms about.

And Maya would understand, finally, what it felt like

To be the one everyone wondered about. To be the one whose past got dragged into rooms with closed doors and recording devices….

To be the one who walked out of a station and felt every eye on the floor follow her to the elevator.

I crossed the apartment once. Twice.

What evidence could exist, plausibly, that pointed toward her instead of away.

What rumor would hold, if it was planted in the right place by the right person

Who, out of everyone circling this story, might already be inclined to believe the worst of her…. who wouldn’t need much convincing at all.

For the first time in days I felt something that wasn’t fear.

It had a different texture entirely. Warmer, somehow, in the worst possible way….

If I did this carefully, I solved two problems with one motion.

I saved myself.

And Maya…. who had taken everything, who had walked through every fire with someone catching her on the other side, who had never once had to sit alone in a room with her own name said like an accusation, would finally learn what it felt like to not be protected.

I picked up the phone again

Scrolled.

One name surfaced before any of the others, arriving with the particular certainty of someone I already knew would say yes before I finished asking.

Someone who hated Maya almost as much as I did 2

I pressed call.

It rang once.

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