He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 288

Chapter 288

Alex’s POV

I stayed close to Maya through the first hour.

Not obviously… My hand at the small of her back when the crowd shifted. My attention divided between whatever conversation was directly in front of us and the wider room, cataloguing exits, cataloguing faces, the particular vigilance that had become second nature.

The room was full of people who mattered.

I was watching for the one who mattered differently.

I noticed him near the balcony doors.

Older.

He wore his suit the way men wore suits when the suit itself had long ago stopped being a statement and had simply become how they dressed. A drink in his hand that he was not drinking from.

He was watching Maya….

Not the ordinary attention a man in a room might pay to an attractive woman, not the professional curiosity of someone assessing a business contact.

Something more specific.

I felt it before I could have articulated why.

I excused myself from the conversation Maya was engaged in.

Moved through the room toward the balcony doors…. in the unhurried pace of someone who did not want to communicate urgency, who understood that closing distance too quickly would only confirm to the man that he had been noticed.

He noticed anyway….

The immediate shift in his posture…. not alarm, something calmer and more practiced, the particular composure of someone who had anticipated being watched and had already planned his response to it.

He set down the drink.

Turned.

Walked toward a private hallway at the far side of the room, moving with the unhurried quality of a man who was leaving rather than fleeing, who understood that fleeing would draw more attention than a calm departure ever could.

I followed slowly but immediately….

The hallway was empty by the time I reached it.

Not simply absent of him… genuinely empty…… a corridor with no immediate exits I could identify, no doors standing open, nothing to suggest which direction he had gone or how he had managed to disappear

Chapter 206

+15 Bonus

so entirely in the brief interval it had taken me to cross the room.

I checked the nearest doors..

Locked, or leading into rooms too small to have offered any meaningful concealment.

I stood in the hallway for a long moment.

Frustration written all over my face… “Did he disappear?”

I returned to Maya.

She looked at my face and understood, before I had said anything, that something had happened.

“What is it,” she said.

I told her.

The man near the balcony. The way he had been watching her. My approach, his calm departure, the empty hallway that had offered no trace of where he had gone.

“Describe him,” Maya said.

I did… The suit. The drink he had not been drinking. The particular composure of his departure.

Maya’s expression changed as I spoke.

Before I could say anything further, a waiter approached,

Young, professional….. with a practiced discretion of catering staff at an event like this one, trained to move through the room without drawing attention, to deliver whatever needed delivering with the minimum possible disruption.

He held out a small envelope.

“For you, Mrs. Voss,” he said.

Maya looked at him.

“From whom?” she said.

“I was simply asked to deliver it,” he said.

He walked away before Maya could ask anything further.

She looked at the envelope.

No name on the front.

No indication of who had sent it, no crest, no formal marking that might have connected it to anyone in the

room.

She opened it carefully.

A single card inside.

す

+15 Bonus

Short.

“Your father knew exactly who they were.”

Maya read it.

Read it again.

Looked at me.

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