He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 98

Chapter 98

Selina’s. POV

The news alert arrived at seven-fifteen.

A photograph… Maya and Alex leaving a restaurant, her hand in his, both of them caught mid-laugh by someone with a long lens. The caption beneath it was the kind that financial press used when they wanted to communicate power without appearing to celebrate it: Hargrove Meridian CEO and Voss Maritime founder. Industry’s most- watched couple.

I looked at it for a long time…

Then I put the phone face down on the cushion.

The baby was asleep. Mason had left early….

From the outside, everything about Maya’s life was settling.

I had been watching it the way you watched something you had decided not to look at but couldn’t stop looking at…. through the industry coverage, through the board updates that came through Mason’s network, through the specific, accumulated evidence of a woman who had been broken and had rebuilt so thoroughly that the breakage was no longer visible.

The company was performing. The governance was stable. The pregnancy was progressing. Alex was present in every photograph, every press mention, every public appearance.

His family is already anticipating and discussing a possible wedding.

Catherine had apparently told someone who had told someone who had told the industry press, and now it existed in the public record: the Voss family confirms plans for a spring ceremony.

Spring…

I pressed my hand flat on the cushion.

Fifteen years….

I had spent fifteen years in Maya Hargrove’s peripheral vision…. close enough to be called her best friend, far enough to watch everything she had and understand that she had it without deserving it. The family name. The trust fund. The arranged marriage that had dropped her into the most eligible social circle in the industry without her having to build anything to get there.

And when Mason had finally chosen me… had finally seen what I had been offering for years, she had simply walked out of the ruins and built something better.

She kept winning…

The thought arrived with the burning of something I had been suppressing so long that it had stopped caring about being suppressed

I picked up the phone.

Put it down.

Picked it up again…

The direct approaches had failed.

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+25 Bonus

The kidnapping had failed. The operative was dead, the thread was gone, and the investigation into it was still running in background…. a slow-moving liability I thought about every time a message from Daniel Cole arrived

on my second phone.

Direct was over…

Which left indirect.

I thought about it with the systematic attention I brought to problems that required solutions rather than reactions. Not emotion….. architecture. The way Mason thought about strategy, which was the quality I had always found most useful to borrow from him and most difficult to sustain when the emotion was this close to the surface

Maya and Alex….

The specific vulnerability of a relationship between two people who were already managing significant trust issues. Maya’s history….. eight years of a man who had concealed everything, who had used her devotion as leverage, who had tricked her into signing documents on a verandah while she was grieving. The architecture of that trauma was precise: she was primed for evidence that a man she loved was not what he appeared.

Alex’s position… a man who had been patient for ten years and was now finally where he wanted to be and would, I suspected, be devastated by any evidence that the woman he had built everything around had given him reason to doubt her.

The trust between them was real.

Real trust had specific, identifiable load-bearing points

If you could identify the point where the load concentrated and apply pressure there…..

I stopped myself.

Not because I had doubts.

Because I needed to think clearly, and thinking clearly required not running ahead of the architecture.

The scandal had to be credible. Not fabricated from nothing…. from something that could be mistaken for real. A photograph, staged correctly.

A witness account that couldn’t be disproved. The specific, deniable quality of something that looked like discovery rather than manufacture.

It had to reach Alex before it reached Maya, so she couldn’t control the narrative.

It had to land in a moment when the trust between them was already under some pressure…. not too obvious, not engineered-looking, the timing of something that arrived naturally.

The calmer I became as I mapped it, the more clearly I could see it…..

This was not cruelty.

This was the specific, necessary logic of a woman protecting everything she had built from the person who kept threatening to dismantle it simply by existing.

Maya would have done worse.

I told myself this….

I believed it.

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+25 Bonus

I picked up my phone….

Not the second phone…. a third line, acquired last week, registered to a name that wasn’t mine, paid for in cash through an intermediary I had used for smaller arrangements over the years. Someone who worked in the specific grey space between legal and not, who took careful money from careful clients and delivered careful work.

He answered on the third ring.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

“I have something that requires discretion,” I said. “And speed”

“Those usually go in opposite directions….”

“Then you’ll need to be efficient.” I looked at the photograph on the news alert…. Maya’s hand in Alex’s, both of them laughing at something outside the frame. “I need you to help me destroy a relationship….”

A pause.

“What kind of destroy?” he asked.

“The kind that looks like it destroyed itself,” I said. “A scandal. Something that makes one of them unable to trust the other. Something that reaches the right person before anyone can manage the narrative.”

“Target?”

“The woman,” I said.

Another pause. Shorter.

“Timeline?”

“As soon as it’s credible,” I said. “I don’t want it rushed. I want it real enough to hold up when it’s questioned”

“I’ll need details.”

“I’ll send them through the channel we used last time.” I looked at the baby monitor on the side table…. the green. light, the steady rhythm. “And I need it clean. Nothing that traces back.”

“It always traces back eventually,” he said.

“Eventually is fine,” I said. “Eventually I can manage. Tomorrow I cannot.”

I hung up.

The apartment was quiet….

The baby monitor continued its steady green.

I put the phone in my bag, crossed to the kitchen, and made myself coffee with the specific, unhurried movements of someone who had made a decision and was done deliberating about it….

Maya kept winning.

She was not going to win this one.

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