He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 280

Chapter 280

Mason’s POV

The second apartment was worse than the first.

Smaller. A single window that faced an interior courtyard rather than the street, which had seemed like an advantage when I chose it…. less visibility and had turned out to be its own kind of liability, because a window that faced inward gave me no way to see anyone approaching from the front.

I had been here four days….

I still felt watched.

Not the identifiable watching of a tail I could locate and assess.

The other kind.

The kind that existed in the body rather than in any confirmable external evidence….

I stood at the window.

The curtain open a few centimetres.

The courtyard below, empty in the way courtyards were empty at this hour, and I watched it anyway, because watching was the only instrument I had left.

I had survived the raid.

The tunnel had worked exactly as designed, the boathouse had held, the car had carried me to the marina and the boat had carried me across the channel and the two documents I now carried… neither of them bearing my actual name, had carried me through the crossing without incident.

Survival had been the easy part.

Staying hidden was proving to be the harder discipline.

The face on every billboard did not disappear simply because I had left the country it had been posted in.

I had been packing when the phone received the message.

I looked at the screen.

Unknown number.

I opened it.

“You are looking for answers that belong to your father.”

I read it once.

Read it again.

My expression changed before I had decided to allow it to change…..

My father had been dead for years.

Three years after Edwin Hargrove.

I had buried him.

I had stood at the graveside in the formal posture of a son receiving condolences, had managed the estate, had inherited the

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businesses and the connections and the complicated architecture of a life I had spent the years since trying to live up to and

occasionally trying to escape.

Dead.

For years.

According to everything I had ever known.

“You are looking for answers that belong to your father.”

I stared at the sentence.

I tried calling the number.

Disconnected.

Immediately.

I threw the phone onto the table.

Paced.

The small room offering little distance to pace in, the contained frustration of a person whose available space had shrunk to match the available options.

Someone knew something about my father.

Or someone was manipulating me… deploying his memory as an instrument, understanding that the mention of a dead parent produced a disorienting response that made a person vulnerable in ways that ordinary threats did not.

I considered the possibilities.

The police.

I had been thinking about this since the warrant….

Or Alex.

I considered this with less confidence.

Alex Voss did not operate this way… not from any moral limitation, from tactical difference in method. Everything Alex had done across the past months had been direct. Documented. Built for courtrooms rather than for psychological pressure. This message did not have the texture of something Alex would send.

Which left the third possibility.

The one I did not want to examine closely, because examining it required questioning something I had never questioned in my entire adult life.

I sat down.

My father’s death.

I ran the memory…. not casually, the way you revisited an old grief, but forensically, the way I had learned across the past months to examine everything I had once accepted without scrutiny

A private medical episode, communicated to me through his personal physician and confirmed by a death certificate I had never had reason to question. A closed casket, which I had understood at the time as his own instruction, communicated through his final wishes, a preference for privacy that had matched the man I remembered, someone who had spent his entire life avoiding visibility, who had built his influence specifically through the absence of a public profile.

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I had not questioned the closed casket.

I had not questioned the private physician.

I had not questioned any of it, because there had been nothing, at the time, to suggest questioning was necessary.

I was questioning it now.

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