He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 244

Chapter 244

Alex’s POV

The call came at seven-forty.

Not my new assistant…. the board chair’s direct line, which meant whatever was happening had bypassed the ordinary triage and had arrived at the level that required the board chair to call personally.

“You need to come in,” he said.

Not good morning. Not the usual professional preamble.

“What’s happened?” I said.

“You’ll see when you get here….”

The screens in the boardroom were running three financial channels simultaneously.

The executives were already present…. Some of them were on phones. Some of them were watching the screens. Some of them were doing both

The Hale Group documentation was everywhere.

Not a summary. Not an excerpt. The full internal materials… the account structures, the transaction records, the sensitive architecture of a corporate entity that had been designed to be invisible and was now visible to everyone with a screen and a financial news feed.

I watched the coverage for three minutes

Then I turned to the room.

“When?” I said.

“Overnight,” the board chair said. “The first reports appeared around two. By six it had spread across every platform.”

“Source?”

“Unknown.”

“Verified as authentic?”

“Yes,” he said.

He didn’t say anything else.

He didn’t need to.

The day.

The breach.

The materials that had leaked.

The records I had found in the financial archive at six-thirty in the morning.

The records I had locked in the safe

1/7

+15 Benus

I kept coming back to this.

Not during the calls….. I did not have the space to come back to anything during the calls, which required full attention and produced the responses they needed to produce. But in the margins.

The records I had found.

The records I had locked.

The records that were now on every screen.

The sequence.

How is it possible that the records I had and locked in my volt is now in screens…

She came in…

The day was winding down. Not finished…. the communications team was still managing the coverage, the legal team was still in the conference room, the investors who hadn’t been reached were still on the list.

But the acute phase had passed.

The door. The knock….. three times, deliberate, the knock of someone who had been in the building long enough to know the rhythm of how the day had gone and was choosing a careful moment.

“Mr. Voss.”

I looked up.

She was in the doorway. The professional presentation she brought to everything….

She was looking at me with the expression of someone who cared how I was.

I looked at the expression.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “I saw the light was still on. It’s been an intense day. I wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything before I return to my desk”

The care in the voice….

The care in the expression.

I looked at both.

Something.

The care in her voice.

The care in her expression…

The eyes.

I was aware I was exhausted.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m fine. You can go.”

She smiled.

“Have a good evening,” she said.

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44

Turned.

Left.

I sat in the office for another twenty minutes

The screens were dark. The boardroom was empty.

I thought about the safe.

About the code I had entered.

Twice.

I thought about the timing.

The records I had found at six-thirty in the morning.

The board chair’s call at seven-forty

The leak that had appeared overnight…. I had not caused the leak by finding the records.

The leak had happened before I found the records.

Which meant someone else had found them first.

Or had placed them where they needed to be placed before I knew they existed.

The safe.

The code.

Two entries.

I opened my phone

Called Maya.

“Something happened today,” I said. “Beyond the leak.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“Not on the phone,” I said. “I’ll be home in thirty minutes.”

I stood.

Put my jacket on.

Looked at the office.

At the door my new assistant had come through.

*MAYA’S POV*

The elevator opened onto a floor that had changed its atmosphere overnight.

I had been in enough professional environments under pressure to recognise what this felt like…

+15 ernus

3/7

+15 Benus

I carried the lunch from the restaurant around the corner.

The one Alex had been wanting to try.

I had ordered for both of us from memory and habit, which was its own small documentation of how much had changed since the hospital.

He was standing at the screen when I came through the door

Not watching it…. looking at it with so much keen Interest.

I set the lunch on the desk.

Looked at the screen….

The headline was running across every channel.

Hale Group Confidential Documents Leaked…. Source Unknown.

Below it: the coverage that had been building since overnight. The investor response. The stock movement…

Questions Arise About Voss Maritime CEO’s Role in Hale Group Breach.

Alex switched off the screen.

Pressed his hand against the back of his neck

“I still can’t figure out how this happened,” he said. “Only a handful of people knew those files existed in that form.”

A knock at the door.

We both turned.

She came through the door….

She stared at me.

One second.

Then her expression settled.

Professional.

Warm.

The composed version.

“Mr. Voss,” she said. “I have the updated communications brief from the PR team. They need your approval before the end of today…”

Alex looked at her.

Then at me.

Then at her.

“You two know each other,” he said.

Not a question.

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N

44

+15 Berus

“We met in Paris,” I said.

The words arrived before I had fully decided what to do with the information I was assembling.

In Paris.

A hotel lobby….

A collision.

She had been in my life for some weeks.

She was in Alex’s office.

She had been hired by Alex.

The two facts sat in the room simultaneously, and neither of them had known about the other, and she had been inside both.

“We’ve been friends,” she said.

Her voice was the warm version.

Directed at me, then at Alex….

Too well.

“Maya,” Alex said.

I looked at him.

“Small world,” she said.

She placed the communications brief on Alex’s desk.