He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 169

Chapter 169

Chapter 169

Zara’s POV

I had been managing the fear for days.

Not eliminating it…. management was all I had available, and I had become competent at it through repetition. When the anxiety arrived, I returned to the facts.

The shooter was gone. The police had released me. Caldwell had been clear: suspicion without evidence was a position, not a case. Reeves could carry his certainty around the station all he wanted. Certainty didn’t produce a

warrant.

I returned to those facts every time the anxiety found me. In the shower. In the cab to the office. At my desk, looking at documents I was supposed to be reviewing…

The facts held.

I held onto them.

The first cracks appeared before nine.

A contact who worked adjacent to the financial press messaged to ask whether I had seen the files circulating about Selina. I had seen them…. I had seen them at six in the morning when someone in a group thread had shared the first link, and I had read enough to understand that whatever was in those files was going to send ripple effects in every direction that connected to the Hargrove situation.

I had read them and filed them and told myself they were Selina’s problem

By nine-fifteen, three more messages had arrived from three different people telling me, in varying degrees of urgency, that the files had reopened investigative threads that had been sitting dormant.

Old cases being looked at again.

Financial records being cross-referenced.

Relationships between different events being examined by people whose job it was to find the relationships.

I sat at my desk and read each message…

I forced myself to stop.

I went through the facts again, more deliberately this time. The shooter was out of the country. The police had released me. Caldwell had stated clearly what the evidentiary threshold was and where it sat relative to what Reeves had. The files about Selina were about Selina…. they were about a clinic and a pharmaceutical arrangement and Maya’s pregnancy losses and a blackmailer who had been holding information for eighteen months. None of

that was mine.

None of that touched the wedding.

None of that touched me

I repeated this to myself…..

My breathing steadied.

My hands, which had been tense around my phone, relaxed,

I put the phone face down on the desk.

For several minutes, that approach worked.

1/4

Chapter 169

+25 BONUS

The message arrived

An unfamiliar number…. not anonymous, a real number, the kind attached to a device rather than a disposable account. I looked at it for a moment before opening it, the instinct of someone who had developed a healthy relationship with unfamiliar contacts over the past several weeks.

The message was short.

I know about the payment to Marcus Webb. I know what you hired him to do. I know what he did instead. And I know you were there.

I read it.

Read it again.

The third time I read it, the words stopped being possible to dismiss as guesswork. Not because of what was said…. because of how it was said. The name. Marcus Webb. Not a description, not a category, the name of the man I had paid. A name I had never spoken to anyone except the man himself, conducted through a channel I had believed was clean, in a conversation I had believed was private.

I know you were there..

I had been at the edge of the guest seating.

The anxiety that returned was different from the anxiety I had been managing.

Reeves had been working from suspicion toward evidence

Whoever this was was working from evidence outward.

That was a different position entirely…..

I typed back: Who is this?

The reply came in under a minute.

Someone with more than the police have. And unlike them, I don’t need a courtroom.

I put the phone on the desk.

Stood up.

Walked to the window.

Came back to the desk

Sat down.

In the weeks since the wedding, I had identified the threats and placed them in order. Reeves, with his investigation and his certainty and his exit line. The shooter, who knew enough to put me in the picture….. who was now out of the country and therefore outside the jurisdiction and therefore no longer an active threat provided he stayed outside it. Mason, who had heard a conversation in a hospital corridor and had used it, and with whom the dynamic was complicated but known.

I had not identified this person.

This person had not been in my threat assessment.

They had appeared from outside every perimeter I had constructed, with a name I had kept out of every accessible record, and had communicated something that could only have come from a position of genuine knowledge

2/4

Chapter 169

+25 BONUS

Marcus Webb.

I had found him through three removes…. a contact who knew a contact who had worked with someone who knew how to find the kind of person I had needed. Each remove had been a distance between me and the name. I had been careful. I had been more careful with this than with almost anything else I had done in the past six months.

And this person had the name

The second notification arrived four minutes after the first.

Below the exchange. Same number.

An attachment.

I looked at it for a moment.

Opened it.

A photograph.

The timestamp in the corner: the evening of the wedding.

The location: the far end of the venue, the edge of the garden where the guest seating had been arranged….

And in the foreground, catching the ambient light from the venue, a figure I recognised because I recognised my own profile, my own coat, my own posture at the moment of standing.

Looking.

Looking at the figure at the front of the gathered guests.

Looking at the moment, caught between the sound and the falling, that I had been convinced no camera could have been positioned to see.

I stared at the photograph.

At myself in it.

At the timestamp

At the angle…. not from the main event coverage, not from the official photographer’s position, not from any of the cameras I had identified and been careful to avoid in the hours before the ceremony.

Someone had been there with a lens pointed in my direction before anything happened.

Positioned.

Waiting.

Not for the ceremony.

For me.