LOGINMason's POVI heard her car pull away from the crib.The engine sound diminishing, then gone, the silence after it arriving in the house like something that had been waiting outside for an invitation.I leaned against the closed doorLet it hold me upright for a moment.The quiet was complete....No footsteps. No voice from another room. No small sounds of a second person moving through a shared space, the bathroom tap, the kitchen cupboard, the particular creak of the third step from the top that I had meant to fix for two years and never had.Nothing...I had spent the past four days telling myself I wanted this. The absence of her. The space where the lies had been. I had packed her suitcases in the dark last night with the focused efficiency of a man executing a decision, and every drawer I'd emptied had felt like taking something back.Standing against the door now, in the quiet I had manufactured, I felt nothing I had expected to feel.I slid down.Sat on the f
Selina's POV I woke up on the sofa. My neck ached from the angle I'd fallen asleep in, my eyes felt swollen and tight, and for approximately three seconds.... the gap between sleep and full consciousness, I didn't remember why. Then it came back All of it. At once.... The apartment was very quiet. I sat up slowly and looked at the room. The family photographs on the wall. The blanket I'd pulled over myself at some point in the night.... Mason's, one he kept on the armchair, dark grey, the kind he reached for when he was reading late. It still smelled like him. I sat with it folded in my hands for a moment Told myself the quiet didn't mean anything yet. Told myself that grief and anger were different things, and that anger burned itself out, and that Mason was the kind of man who processed in private and came back to the table eventually, because that was what he had always done. Told myself all of that Believed none of it. The doorbell rang at eight-forty.
Zara's POVI could breathe again.That was the first thing I noticed when I woke up this morning.... not relief exactly, not yet, just the absence of the tightness that had been sitting behind my ribs since the moment the handcuffs closed around my wrists. I lay in bed for a full minute just registering it. Air going in. Air going out. No knot stopping it halfway.I hadn't slept properly in daysEvery phone call had made me flinch. Every knock at the door had sent my pulse into somewhere uncomfortable. I had spent the time since the station rehearsing versions of an arrest that hadn't happened yet, certain it was only a matter of when.Enjoy your freedom while it lastsReeves's voice had been living in my head since he said it. I hated how much room he'd taken up there.The call came at nineI was sitting by the window with coffee I hadn't touched, when my phone rang. A name I trusted... one of the few left.I answered.I listenedAnd somewhere in the first thirty
Alex's POV I didn't know how long I had been here. Time didn't move the way it used to. There was no morning, no evening, no measurable distance between one moment and the next.... just a long, undifferentiated stretch of dark that occasionally produced something close to awareness before folding back into itself. I couldn't see anything I could hear, sometimes. Voices, distant and unclear, the way sound traveled through water. A machine, somewhere, with a rhythm I couldn't place. Footsteps that came and went without staying long enough to mean anything. And then, cutting through all of it, clear in a way nothing else was: Maya. The first time I heard her, I thought I was imagining itThat seemed like the more reasonable explanation.... that wherever I was, my mind had decided to manufacture the thing it wanted most, the way a person dying of thirst imagined water. I had spent ten years imagining her in one form or another. It would not have surprised me if this
Maya's POV They moved Alex at nine in the morning. A new wing... smaller, quieter, with a single corridor leading to four rooms instead of the open arrangement of the previous floor. Marcus's team had been through it twice before they allowed the transfer, and Crane had posted himself at the corridor entrance.... I walked beside the bed the entire way. Nobody suggested I do otherwise this time. "You should go home and sleep," a nurse said, around eleven, with the gentle persistence of someone who had said it to family members before and expected to keep saying it.... "I'm fine here," I said. She looked at the chair I had not left in four hours. "At least let me bring you a proper pillow," she said. I let her bring the pillow I did not move from the chair. Catherine arrived at noon with a bag that seemed designed to address every possible discomfort I might encounter over the following six hours. Food in containers that would keep. A thermos of coff
Maya's POVThe questions started at six in the morning and had not stopped by noon.Hospital administrators first... Then security personnel, going over the same ground with a different emphasis. Then a second detective I hadn't met before, working alongside Reeves, asking me to describe the intruder's build, his clothing, anything about his voice.I gave the same maccount each timeBy the fourth repetition, the words had worn smooth, the way anything did when you said it enough times... I kept my eyes on whoever was asking.I kept answeringI expected, somewhere in all of it, to be told who he was.A name. A photograph. Some confirmation that the system designed to catch people who did this kind of thing had caught him, that the footage had produced a clear image, that the staff access cards were logged with names attached and one of those names didn't belong.Instead, at eleven, Reeves came back with something else."The access," he said. "We've confirmed how
Alex's POV The call from Marcus lasted four minutes. I had stepped into the building's side corridor while Maya was still in the boardroom, the controlled noise of the media gathering outside already audible through the lobby glass. Four minutes o
Maya's POVWe arrived at Hargrove headquarters at eleven.The building looked exactly the same as the last time I had walked out of it, glass and steel, the harbor visible from the upper floors, the Mason Empire name still on the facade in the same typeface my father had approve
Maya’s POVThe air in Mason’s office thickened the second I turned back toward the door. Selina moved first quick, theatrical reaching out as if to grab my arm in some mockery of concern.“Maya, wait……”Her fingers brushed my sleeve.I reacted on instinct. A small, sharp push just enough to create
Maya's POV I lifted my chin, Selina is there beside Mason, in a romantic posture. “How do you sleep at night, Selina, with all that evil sitting on your chest like a stone?”She laughed soft, delighted. “Easily. Because I finally stopped pretending to be the good girl who waits for her turn”I lo







