All Chapters of He Came Back Running : Chapter 391 - Chapter 400

Maya's POV "Not fussing. I know fussing. The first day it was quiet and thin. By the second evening he was screaming and it didn't stop. I lay awake listening through a wall like paper...." Under the table, my nails found my palm. "So I took over a crumble. It was nearly ten. I'm not proud of why. I wanted to see who was in there." "And?" "A woman. Brown hair to the jaw, a gray cardigan, worn to the bone. She kept the chain on the door. She had him in a sling against her chest, red as a beet. She said he was five days old." Dana's eyes didn't leave mine. "She said his name was Michael." The room went very small. Alex's hand settled on the back of my chair. I felt it more than I saw it.... "She said a cousin was helping, asleep upstairs," Dana said. "That house has no upstairs. I lived in the neighborhood for four years when I was first married." "Why lie about that?" Reeves asked. "Because someone was standing in the dark behind her. Two men. I never

Mason's POV The report reached me at six in the morning, on a phone I'd been told to keep face-up on my father's desk where he could see it. "Alder Street," the voice said. "City police and Voss's private team went in yesterday afternoon. Forensics worked until night. The kitchen was still warm when they walked in." I stood at the window with the curtain held back an inch. A gray dawn lay over the rooftops, and a delivery truck idled at the corner with its engine running. "Direction?" North. A pause. "Every road north ends at one of three crossings. By tonight she's across, or she's caught." I ended the call. My father sat behind the desk in yesterday's shirt. The collar had gone soft, and a gray stubble shadowed his jaw. The glass of water on its coaster was empty. He had not asked for a refill, and I had never known him to let a glass stand empty. "She's slipping the net again," I said. "And she has the child." Michael. The name arrived uninvited. I had never

Mason's POV I watched it reach him. It started in his hands, which had been lax on the steel and now went flat, the fingers spreading as though to hold the table down. Then his shoulders. Then his breath, which stopped, and held, and did not come back for a long time. He believes. Belief is the first crack. The rest is just pressure and time. I had learned that sentence from my father. I had not known it would taste like this. "They are here," I said. "Alive. For now." Reeves stared at the photograph He said nothing at all. I watched a vein stand out in his temple and the pulse beat in it, and I counted eleven of those beats before he lifted his head and looked at me. In his eyes was no pleading, which I had expected. I saw a man memorizing my face. "I have one question," I said. "I'd like a plain answer." The overhead light hummed. "Someone is feeding Maya and her husband detailed material on the Association. Ranks. Structure. Names that never

Reeves POVI'm not sure why. The cold was in my teeth by then, and the hours had worn something thin. A man in a room like that starts talking the way a drowning man starts to pray, to anything, to the dark. "I was sixteen," I said. Mason's eyes narrowed. He didn't stop me. "My mother cleaned offices at night. My father wasn't a subject. He was a rumor. I was behind a Hargrove Meridian loading dock one February, stripping copper off a loading ramp with a pipe wrench, because rent was due and I'd stopped believing in anything else." The words came out slowly, each one set down on the steel. "A man in a good coat came out of the side door and stood watching me. I figured he'd call it in." "Edwin Hargrove." "He asked if I was hungry." I could still hear it, quiet, almost shy, the way a man asks a stray. "I said no. He said he'd buy me a sandwich anyway. We ate on the ramp in the cold. He never once mentioned the wrench." A drip fell in the drain.... "He pai

Maya's POVThe boardroom on the forty-first floor had been my father's favorite room.Glass on three sides, the river a gray ribbon far below, and a walnut table so long that people at the far end had to lean to be heard. His portrait hung at the head, a small oil in a plain frame. Edwin Hargrove at fifty, not smiling, one hand resting on a ledger. The painter had caught his eyes. They looked at you as though you had already said something and he was waiting for the second half of it.I sat directly beneath it.Eleven investors filled the chairs. Two pension funds, a pair of family offices, and the emissary of a sovereign fund in a gray suit who had not touched his coffee. On the wall screen the share price ran in a green line, flat for a week, up four-tenths of a point since the interview. Freight volume was up. No major client had walked. I could have recited the numbers in my sleep.Nobody at the table was looking at them. They looked at the screen the wa