บททั้งหมดของ He Came Back Running : บทที่ 161 - บทที่ 170

Selina's POV The car had been parked for two hours. I knew because I had watched the clock on the dashboard change, not continuously but in the way you watched a clock when you kept looking away and looking back and finding more time had passed than felt possible. I had driven here without a destination. Had pulled over when I ran out of direction. Now I sat. Every time I closed my eyes, Mason's face. Not the angry version.... I could have worked with anger. Anger had heat in it, which meant it had movement, which meant it could shift into something else. What I kept seeing was the other version. The one from this morning. The face of a man who had made every decision he intended to make and was simply communicating the outcome. The suitcases on the driveway. Four of them Packed in the dark while I cried on the sofa below. I had spent fifteen..... years building toward a specific life. Not this life exactly, this life had required adjustments along the way, decision

Daniel's POVThe engine was off. The street outside was the kind of quiet that existed in the warehouse district after ten.... not silence, just the absence of people, the sounds of the city displaced to a distance where they couldn't identify themselves.I sat with my hands in my lap and let my heart rate return to something manageable.The gun had been realI had known it would come eventually.... had built for the eventuality, had run the scenario forward so many times across so many versions that seeing it in her hand tonight had felt less like a surprise and more like a confirmation. The thing I had prepared for had arrived. The preparation had workedBut the gun had been real.I sat with that for a momentHer face when she pulled it out.I had seen Selina in many registers across many years. The warmth she performed for rooms she needed to win. The cold efficiency when warmth had run out of usefulness. The desperation, recently.... the stripped-

Maya's POV The morning had been quiet ..... the nurses doing their rounds, the monitors communicating the same steady language, Alex's face still and restful in a way that had stopped frightening me. The phone vibrated at seven-forty. I ignored it. It vibrated again at seven-forty-two. Then at seven-forty-three, and seven-forty-four, and then with the escalating, insistent rhythm of a device that had run out of patience I looked at the screen. Not one person.... twelve. Lila. Rivaldi. Marcus. Carter. Three board members. Two journalists whose numbers existed in my contacts because they had covered the governance transition and had been given access I later managed more carefully. Two private numbers I didn't immediately recognise. All of them, within the past twenty minutes I looked at Alex's face. Then I excused myself.... quietly, as though he could hear me leaving, and went into the corridor. The links were all I needed to see Everyone had sent links. Diffe

Maya's POV The drive took twenty minutes. I spent them looking out the passenger window at a city.... A woman at a bus stop scrolling her phone with the absorbed intensity that meant she had found something. Two men outside a coffee shop, one showing the other something on his screen, the other leaning in. The story was moving. I sat in the back of the car and let it move and tried to organise what I had read into something I could bring into a room with clear eyes By the time we arrived, I had not fully managed it. Reeves was already in the conference room. The table had been cleared of everything except folders.... "Thank you for coming," Reeves said. I sat down across from him. "Show me," I said. He opened the first folder The documents inside were a mixture of types... official forms, handwritten notes, printed correspondence from an era when printed correspondence was still the primary format. All of it connected to an investigation I knew had existed because I had b

Zara's POV I had been managing the fear for days. Not eliminating it.... management was all I had available, and I had become competent at it through repetition. When the anxiety arrived, I returned to the facts. The shooter was gone. The police had released me. Caldwell had been clear: suspicion without evidence was a position, not a case. Reeves could carry his certainty around the station all he wanted. Certainty didn't produce a warrant.I returned to those facts every time the anxiety found me. In the shower. In the cab to the office. At my desk, looking at documents I was supposed to be reviewing... The facts held. I held onto them. The first cracks appeared before nine. A contact who worked adjacent to the financial press messaged to ask whether I had seen the files circulating about Selina. I had seen them.... I had seen them at six in the morning when someone in a group thread had shared the first link, and I had read enough to understand that whateve