He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 270

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Chapter 270

Zara’s POV

The lawyer’s number was the third contact in my phone now… Not because I had called three times, because I had reorganised the contacts in order of the frequency I expected to need them, and the lawyer had moved from the fifteenth position to the third across the past two weeks as the calls from the investigators had accumulated and the calls from Mason had stopped and the specific, daily reality of someone who had cooperated and was waiting to understand what the cooperation had cost them had settled into its rhythm.

Not arrested.

Not free.

The evidence I had given them had produced results.

The investigators had used it.

People connected to Mason’s financial operations had been located.

Not all of them though….

But enough to communicate to the investigators that my cooperation was substantive rather than selective.

Which was why I had not been arrested.

Which was also why I received calls approximately every three days and why the lawyer was the third contact in my phone.

I had been going through the documents for two days.

Not the ones I had given to the investigators.

The copies I had kept….

The Insurance folder, now expanded into three separate devices..

I was not reading through them for the investigators.

I was reading through them for myself….

Looking for the thing that told me where I stood.

Looking for the thing that told me what I had actually been part of.

The pattern emerged at eleven on the second night.

Not from a single document…. from the comparison of multiple documents…

Mason’s payments.

I had been organising them by date, by amount, by recipient structure.

The majority were what I understood them to be…. connected to the plan against Maya and Alex, connected to Brenda’s placement, connected to the Hale Group leak, connected to the Friday evening.

Three of them were not.

The three payments were older.

Not by months….

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By years.

Pre-dating the plan against Maya and Alex by three years.

Routed through structures I did not recognise… not the shells that had been built for the recent operations, different structures with different registration jurisdictions and different beneficial ownership configurations.

I ran the recipient names through the search tools had access to.

Two resolved to dormant entities…. companies that had existed for specific periods and had then been wound up in the standard way of entities that had completed their purpose.

The third resolved to something active.

A company I had never heard of.

I looked at the company’s public documentation.

Registration. Directors. Nature of operations….

Corporate restructuring services.

Registered in a jurisdiction that communicated the preference for opacity.

Directors that were registered agents rather than individuals….

I kept looking.

The Hargrove Meridian ownership dispute.

The investment group that had filed the claim….

I sat back.

Looked at the screen.

At the connection.

At the date of Mason’s payment to the structure.

Three years before his plan against Maya and Alex.

Two years before the ownership claim had been filed.

The dates.

I went back to the beginning.

Laid the documentation out in chronological sequence rather than by category…..

The earliest entry in Mason’s financial architecture that connected to what I had been part of was eighteen months before Khad been approached in a café.

The earliest entry in the structure that connected to the Hargrove Meridian ownership dispute was three years before that.

The corporate takeover…. the attempt to claim Edwin Hargrove’s company through a forged document and an investment group with significant resources, had been in preparation before Mason had approached me.

Before Mason had begun his plan against Maya and Alex.

Before Mason had arranged Brenda’s placement.

The calculation ran itself.

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Masun had been pursuing revenge against Maya and Alex.

The corporate takeover had been pursuing the company.

Two separate objectives

Two separate timelines.

One running inside the other…. Mason’s personal operation nested within something larger, something that had been in motion before Mason had even begun.

Someone had been moving pieces.

Not Mason’s pieces…

Pieces around Mason.

“Mason didn’t start this,” I said.

To the screen

To the documents.

He had been angry.

He had been obsessed.

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