He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 192

Chapter 192

+15 Bonus

Chapter 192

Zara’s POV

I drove home in the kind of silence that required effort to maintain.

Not because I had anything to say, there was no one in the car…. but because the silence was itself something I was choosing to hold rather than fill, the way you held something when you understood it was the last calm thing available before the next several hours became what they were going to become.

The meeting had lasted forty minutes…. I had shaken Mason Hargrove’s hand.

I had agreed to work with a man who had killed someone in the past month and had described it with the flat vocabulary of a person cataloguing administrative tasks.

I handled the problem myself….

The apartment was dark when I got in.

I didn’t turn on the lights immediately. Stood for a moment in the entrance with my coat still on and my

bag still over my shoulder and let the dark do what dark occasionally did, which was simply exist without requiring anything.

Then I turned on the lights….

Set my bag down.

Went to the kitchen….

I had agreed to work with Mason Hargrove because the calculation produced no better outcome….

I knew this with clarity

The alternative…. refusing, walking away, attempting to extract myself from a situation where Mason held knowledge of the IV tampering I had become adjacent to, the photographer I had hired, the fake story, the meeting at the empty restaurant, the alternative produced a shorter timeline to the same destination I was trying to avoid.

He had leverage….

I had leverage

That was the logic.

The logic was correct….

The logic did not prevent the specific, cold awareness that I was in business with a man who had arranged the death of a witness and had told me about it in an office lobby to establish the terms of our relationship

What stopped him from doing the same to me.

1/3

Chapter 192

+15 Bonus

Usefulness.

That was the answer.

For as long as I was useful… for as long as I had access to Alex’s network, to the social geography of the Voss family, to the specific history that gave me proximity Mason didn’t have, I was an asset rather than

a liability.

The transition from asset to liability was the thing to manage

I understood this.

What I was less certain about was whether I could manage it in practice with a man whose risk tolerance appeared to have no lower bound I could identify.

A man capable of killing another person to protect himself would never hesitate to betray his own partner if it benefited him.

I had thought this in the lobby….

It was still true.

I poured water.

Stood at the counter and drank it and looked at the dark window above the sink, which showed me the kitchen rather than the night…. the reflection of the room, the reflection of myself standing in it, the woman who had come to this city to reclaim something and had arrived at a partnership with a man who killed problems when they became inconvenient.

The version of Zara Collins who had stepped off a plane almost three months ago had had a plan.

The plan had been elegant, or had seemed elegant from the outside of it…. reintroduce herself into Alex’s life, demonstrate that the woman he had been with for four years was present and willing and real,

allow the contrast with

Maya’s complicated history to do its natural work.

The plan had assumed Alex was available to be influenced

The plan had not accounted for the degree to which Alex, lying unconscious in a hospital bed, had been more specifically and completely Maya’s than the version who had been walking around and making decisions.

The plan had underestimated what two people looked like when they had been tested.

Alex was awake….

He was in a hospital bed with Maya beside him, and he was going to leave that hospital and go home with her, and they were going to finish the wedding that the shooter had interrupted, and they were going to raise a child together, and the trajectory of their life together had a momentum that a fabricated photograph and a security camera I hadn’t noticed in the lobby could not individually produce.

2/3

Chapter 192

+15 Bonus

But momentum could be disrupted….

Not by a single event

By a series of smaller events, each one individually manageable, collectively producing the kind of friction that wore at even the most solid structures.

Mason understood this

This was what he was offering.

Whether I trusted him was irrelevant.

Whether his plan worked was the only relevant question.

My phone buzzed on the counter

I looked at it.

Mason….

The first step of our plan starts tomorrow.

I read it.

Stood with it for a moment.

日

Comments

Support

Share