บททั้งหมดของ He Came Back Running : บทที่ 151 - บทที่ 160

Mason's POV Daniel Cole left first. He stood from the sofa, looked at Selina once.... not with triumph, not with apology. Something in between, the look of someone who had made a decision a long time ago and was watching it arrive at its destination. He looked at me "The documentation is in a secure location," he said. "When you're ready to talk about next steps, you know how to reach me." He walked out The door closed behind him. The room was exactly the same room it had been for the past hour The monitor. The afternoon light moving across the floor. I stood in the center of it and felt the floor doing the thing floors did when the information they were holding became too much for the architecture. Selina had not moved from where she was standing. She looked at me with the expression that had been underneath everything for four years.... not the managed version, not the strategic version. Something older. The face of someone who had made a long series of decisions and was

Mason's POVThe flowers started arriving on the second day.I didn't read the cards. Petra collected them at the door and arranged them somewhere in the apartment I didn't track, and they existed at the edges of my awareness the way everything existed at the edges of my awareness in those first days.... present, acknowledged, not fully processed.Friends calledI let most of the calls go to voicemail. The ones I answered, I answered with the minimum required to end the call without being rude about it. People meant wellI understood that. I didn't have anything available to give them in return for the meaning well.I moved through each day on a schedule that had nothing to do with wanting to be anywhere.Selina cried most of the timeI would come into a room and find her at the window, or on the sofa, or standing in the nursery doorway looking at the crib that nobody had moved yet, and she would be crying in the quiet, exhausted way of someone whose body had n

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

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

Mason'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