He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Alex’s POV

She had been returning my calls with silence for five days.

I knew exactly why. The bar’s private hallway. The dim warmth of it. Maya’s back against the wall and her hands pulling at my jacket with an urgency that had undone ten years of careful professional distance in approximately thirty seconds. The way she’d looked at me, not the boardroom version, not the guarded, assessing version …just her, fully present, every wall down simultaneously.

I had held her face and she had let me.

What followed was not planned and not careful and not anything either of us had been pretending we didn’t want for a decade. Her breath against my throat. Her fingers in my hair. We did a lot of naughty stuff, but it was real for me. The sounds she made that I had no intention of forgetting. The way she’d pressed her face into my shoulder afterward and laughed genuine, unguarded, the laugh she only produced when something arrived before she could manage it.

That woman had not been frightened.

The morning version had been…….

I understood it. Maya had spent eight years having her devotion weaponised by a man who had never once been fully present in the same room as her. Wanting something, wanting someone with that kind of intensity was its own specific terror when your history had taught you that need was a liability.

I understood it.

I was developing a considerable fear of my own.

I had spent ten years building an empire partly to prove I didn’t need her.

I had told myself that story in so many configurations that I had come to believe it the way you believe things that are partially true…. confidently, selectively, ignoring the parts that didn’t fit. I had worked and expanded and acquired and filled every available hour with productive noise, and I had told myself the harbour-dock memory was simply a data point from a decade ago with no bearing on present circumstances.

The night at the bar’s private bathroom, the heat of it, the specific quality of finally after ten years of almost… had not been a mistake. It had been the most honest thing either of us had done in years. And Maya had felt it too. I had heard it in her breathing and felt it in the way she’d held on, and the woman who pressed her face into my shoulder afterward and laughed… that woman had not been frightened.

The morning version had been.

I needed to tell her that it didn’t have to be frightening. That I was not Mason. That I had no interest in her devotion or her performance or the careful, shrinking version of herself she had learned to offer people who demanded it.

I needed her to answer her phone first.

Marcus mentioned the apartment in his daily briefing. A single line, sandwiched between shareholder updates.

Re: M.H….letting agent contact confirmed. Property search active, city-center radius.

I read it at my desk and set the briefing down and looked at the harbour for a long time.

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She was moving out.

I understood it. Professionally, practically, symbolically, Hargrove Meridian’s CEO needed her own address, her own door, a life that was visibly and entirely hers. These were good reasons. Correct reasons.

The knowing did not make it land gently.

The thought of losing her again, not to circumstance this time, not to a family arrangement or a phone ringing at the wrong moment, but to her own fear of needing someone… was unbearable in a way I had not given myself permission to examine until this moment.

I was done giving myself that permission.

I picked up my phone.

She declined the call.

I waited. Called again.

Declined.

I typed: I know about the apartment. I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I just need ten minutes.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared.

Then: Alex. I’m fine. I just need some space.

I know, I sent back. Ten minutes. That’s all I’m asking.

No response.

I put the phone down and pressed both hands flat on the desk and thought about the specific, maddening quality of caring about someone who was better at building walls than almost anyone I had encountered.

Then Marcus’s priority alert came through.

The separate channel. The one with the tone I had specifically chosen to be impossible to ignore.

I read it once.

Then I was already moving.

Re: M.H….threat confirmed active. Selina Reeves commissioned outside operative three days ago. Target: Maya Hargrove. Operative has been mobile since this morning. Location of subject currently unconfirmed. Recommend immediate contact.

Three days ago.

The day after the press conference. The morning Selina had gone into labour

She had made that call from her kitchen and then gone to hospital to have her baby as though both were simply items on the same list.

I called Maya.

Declined.

Called again.

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Declined.

Typed: Maya. Pick up. This is not about us. You are in danger right now.

Called again.

Four rings this time, longer than the previous declines, which meant she was looking at the screen, deciding.

Then the line opened.

“Alex….”

“Where are you.” Not a question. “Exactly where.”

A pause. “I’m at the apartment I’ve been viewing. I was just….”

“The address. Give it to me right now”

“You’re frightening me.”

“Good. Stay frightened. Give me the address and do not open the door for….”

I heard it through the phone.

Soft. That was the thing, it was never loud the way you imagined. A sound. Maya’s sharp intake of breath, involuntary, not a word. Something falling. A scuffle… brief, muffled.

Then silence.

Not disconnected. The line was still open. Still live.

Just Maya no longer on it.

“Maya.” My voice in the car. “Maya.”

Nothing.

I don’t remember the drive with clarity.

I remember giving the address to Dario, pulled from Marcus in under forty seconds, the letting agent search, the building she’d been viewing, in a voice that required no elaboration.

I remember calling Marcus. “She’s been taken. I need every camera within ten blocks of that address running right

now”

“Already pulling them,” he said. Already. Before I called. Because he was already ahead of me, which meant he understood the severity before I’d fully landed in it myself.

I remember the phone still open in my hand. Her line still live. The silence on it.

I had spent five days respecting that silence because she needed space and I had promised myself I would not be the kind of man who pushed past what she needed.

This silence was different.

Underneath it, barely there…movement. Distance. The sound of Maya being taken further from me with every second that passed.

The thought arrived without drama or strategy or any of the professional architecture I usually applied to

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decisions.

They had to pay.

Simple. Absolute. The way things become simple when they stop being professional and become the only thing

that matters.

Whoever had given the order. Whoever had made the call from a kitchen on the morning their child was born.

They were going to pay for touching her.

“Dario.” Completely level. “Faster!”

Marcus’s trace activated on my secondary screen.

A blue dot.

Moving.

Still moving, which meant she was alive, which meant she was in transit, which meant the next ten minutes were everything.

I watched the dot move through the city grid and I pressed my hand flat against the cold window glass and I thought, with a clarity that had nothing professional in it:

Hold on.

I’m coming.

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