He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Selina’s POV

I saw her face on the television at seven in the morning.

I had been half-awake, propped against the headboard with my tea going cold, scrolling through the overnight news on the bedroom screen the way I did most mornings, scanning for anything that required managing before Mason was fully awake. A habit. Protective surveillance dressed as routine.

And then the financial news channel cut to a press conference clip, and Maya Hargrove walked to a podium in my screen wearing her mother’s pearls and looking like she had never once in her life been uncertain about anything.

I sat up so fast the tea spilled across the duvet.

“My name is Maya Hargrove. I am the founding CEO of Hargrove Meridian….

The anchor was already talking over the clip, former wife of billionaire Mason Hargrove, daughter of the late Edwin Hargrove, co-founder of Mason Empire, but I had stopped hearing the words. I was watching her face. The way she stood at that podium. The way the room leaned toward her. 1

She was not the woman who had tiptoed out of a boardroom with tears on her face some months ago.

She was not the woman I had spent fifteen years watching from the corner of every room, the one I had always been able to manage by being louder and warmer and more immediately present.

This woman had a company. A press room. A name on a building.

And the smile she was wearing… controlled, confident, aimed precisely at the cameras was the smile of someone who had been patient for a very long time and had finally decided to stop.

I put the teacup down on the nightstand.

My hands were not entirely steady.

Mason was already in his office when I came downstairs. I could hear his voice through the door…. low, rapid, the specific register of a man absorbing unwelcome information. He’d seen it too.

I didn’t go in.

I went to the kitchen instead, and I stood at the counter and I thought.

Maya. She had been building in the shadows for weeks.

While Mason had been running his ROFR and planting friendly investors and congratulating himself on closing the window, she had been building A company. A strategy A position that was now public and named and entirely, legally hers.

Everything I had worked for

Everything I had sacrificed, my reputation, my friendship with Maya, my professional standing, fifteen years of patience and positioning all of it depended on Mason’s control of that company. On his fifty one percent holding the line. On the board answering to him and the empire moving the way he directed it.

And now Maya Hargrove had forty nine percent, a competing company, a public profile, and Irene Cho sitting in the front row of her press conference

My child’s future, the security, the name, the legacy I had spent years engineering was contingent on Mason

1/4

Chapter 28

+25 Bonus

winning this.

And Mason, for the first time since I had known him, was not clearly winning.

I made one call.

I went to the far end of the garden where the house’s surveillance didn’t reach, Mason had shown me the blind spots himself, once, as a demonstration of thoroughness and I called a number I had kept in a separate phone for exactly the kind of situation I had always known might come.

“I need something handled,” I said, when he picked up. “Quickly and cleanly. And it cannot, under any circumstances… come back to me or this house.”

I told him what I needed.

I told him where she had been, or where she had been last known to be. I told him what she looked like, as though the man on the other end of the phone hadn’t just watched her on the same morning news I had. I told him that this was not optional and that the compensation reflected that.

He confirmed.

I hung up.

Then I went back inside and I threw a glass at the kitchen wall.

It shattered well. Satisfyingly. The sound of it filled the room for exactly one second before the silence came back louder.

I threw another one.

Then the ceramic bowl that sat on the counter for decorative purposes and had always vaguely irritated me. Then the stack of mail on the edge of the island that Mason hadn’t opened.

I stood in the kitchen surrounded by broken things and breathed.

She had been my friend.

That was the thought I kept circling, under the rage, under the calculation. She had been my friend for fifteen years and somewhere in those fifteen years the friendship had curdled into something else and I had told myself it was justified, that what I had now was worth what I had done to get it, that Selina Reeves deserved everything Maya Mason had been given and more….

I believed that.

I still believed it.

But standing in a kitchen full of broken things at seven thirty in the morning, I understood with uncomfortable clarity that believing something and being at peace with it were not the same thing

I picked up a shard of glass from the floor

Then I felt it.

The first pain arrived like a warning. Low, spreading, the particular sensation I had been anticipating for weeks and had somehow not expected to arrive today, now, in this kitchen, in the middle of everything.

I straightened slowly.

274

Chapter 28

+25 Bonus

The second pain followed twenty seconds later. Longer. Definitive.

“No,” I said, to no one. “Not now.”

My body, entirely indifferent to my schedule, disagreed.

I pressed one hand flat against the counter and breathed through it and assessed. The baby was four days from its due date. This was not early. This was not a complication. This was simply… catastrophically bad timing.

I picked up my phone.

Mason answered on the second ring. “I’m in the middle of…..”

“My water broke,” I said. “Come now.”

Silence. Then, in a completely different voice: “I’m coming. Don’t move. I’m coming right now.”

He came.

The hospital was twenty minutes away.

I sat in the back of the car with Mason’s hand in mine and watched the city move past the window and thought about Maya’s face on the screen and the call I had made in the garden and the glass on the kitchen floor and the child arriving in my body right now without asking permission or consulting the timing.

“Are you alright?” Mason asked.

“I’m having a baby,” I said. “Define alright”

“Selina.” His voice was different. Not the boardroom voice, not the strategic voice. Something underneath those, quieter and less certain. “I’m here.”

I looked at him.

He looked genuinely frightened. Not of losing control or of shareholders or of a woman with forty-nine percent of his company. Frightened in the way that only one thing makes a person frightened, the way that comes from caring about the outcome.

I held his hand tighter.

Whatever else was true about us, the calculations and the strategy and the years of wanting what Maya had.. Mason was here, and he was frightened, and the child arriving was his.

That had to count for something

Labour was eleven hours.

Eleven hours of pain that reorganised my understanding of what the word meant, during which I did not think about Maya or forty nine percent or the call I had made in the garden. I thought about breathing. I thought about Mason’s voice telling me I was doing well, which I chose to believe even when I suspected he was lying. I thought about the child

Just the child.

He arrived at nine forty seven in the evening

Small and outraged and entirely, specifically real

The nurse placed him in my arms and I looked at him… this person, this complete and specific person who had

3/4

Chapter 28

+25 Bonus

not existed this morning and existed now, and felt something move through me that had no strategic dimension

whatsoever.

“He’s perfect,” Mason said, from beside me. His voice was wrecked in the way voices get when feeling arrives faster than composure can manage….

I looked at my son.

He had Mason’s jaw and, inexplicably, my mother’s ears, and he was looking at me with the unfocused intensity of someone who had arrived somewhere new and was already assessing the situation.

My child.

Mine.

I pressed my lips to his forehead and felt, underneath the exhaustion and the love and the specific ferocity of a thing I hadn’t known I was capable of until this moment….the cold return of clarity.

Maya was out there.

With her company and her shares and her press conference pearls and her plans that were already in motion, that had been in motion for weeks while I had been too focused on Mason to track them properly.

She was going to come for everything.

For the empire. For the name. For the legacy that this child, my child, sleeping now against my chest was supposed to inherit.

I looked at his face.

“I will not let her take this from you,” I said, quietly enough that Mason didn’t hear it.

The baby slept.

Outside the hospital window, the city continued not caring.

And somewhere in it, Maya Hargrove was already making her next move.

ENJOYING THE BOOK?

Give it a rating to show your support!

u

៦៖

Comments