He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 286

Chapter 286

MASON’S POV

The message arrived as soon as I opened my phone.

“Stop looking for the truth.”

I stared at it.

Not from fear…

This was something else. The sender knew.

Knew I was looking into my father’s past.

I had told no one.

Not the associate who had once helped me manage the operation against Maya and Alex… he was in custody, had been since the estate search, was presumably telling investigators everything he knew in exchange for whatever consideration his cooperation could purchase.-

Not the two men who had handled Brenda.

I had been doing this alone.

Which meant whoever had sent the message either had access to my devices… a possibility I had already begun treating as more likely than not, given the unauthorised access to my archive weeks ago, or had eyes on me directly.

Both were unsettling.

Neither was going to stop me.

The message had also contained something else.

Not just the warning…

An address.

I understood, reading it a second time, that the warning was not meant to stop me.

It was meant to be ignored.

Whoever had sent this wanted me at that address.

I went anyway

Better to go on iny own terms, prepared, than to be manoeuvred into it later without warning.

The building was one I recognised.

Barely…

One of my father’s holding companies, decades dormant…

+15 Bonus

Flet inyself in through a side entrance that had clearly been left unlocked for exactly this purpose.

The office inside was thick with dust.

Files scattered across a desk that had not been used in years…. drawers left open, papers left where they had last been touched, the particular quality of a workspace someone had walked away from without the ceremony of packing it up/

I started going through them.

Carefully at first.

Meeting records.

My father’s name…

Edwin Hargrove’s name.

Dates spanning years….. not a single encounter, not a passing professional acquaintance, but a sustained pattern of meetings that stretched across what appeared to be a decade or more, all of them documented with the s formal precision of a man who kept careful records of everything.

I had never heard of any of this.

A financial record caught my attention near the bottom of the stack.

A payment.

Routed through one of the holding company’s dormant accounts, the transaction processed through infrastructure that should have had no reason to be active.

I looked at the date.

Read it once.

Read it again, certain I had misread the year.

I had not misread it.

The payment was dated three years after my father’s death.

I stared at it.

“That can’t be possible,” I said.

To the empty room.

I checked the record’s authorisation signature.

My father’s.

The specific, careful formation of letters I had grown up watching him produce on documents throughout my childhood, the signature I would have recognised instantly in any context, on any page.

Three years after he was dead.

+15 Bonus

I searched through the rest of the files.

Methodically now….

It was not an anomaly.

A second document.

A third.

Each one dated after his death, each one bearing his signature, each one connected in some capacity to a transaction, a meeting record, a piece of correspondence that should not have existed if the man who signed it had genuinely been buried in the formal ceremony I remembered attending.

Someone had been using his name.

For years.

After his death…

Who would dare do such a thing? I thought I was in control but this clearly shows…

I sat back in the dusty chair, the weight of what I was looking at settling into my chest with a slow, cold

pressure.

Two possibilities.

Someone had forged his signature repeatedly, across multiple documents, over an extended period, maintaining an active presence under his name for reasons I could not yet understand.

Or he had never died at all.

I looked at the documents spread across the desk.

At the signature that matched everything I remembered.

At the dates that made no sense unless the fundamental premise of my entire adult life…. the loss I had carried, the grief I had structured my identity around, the inheritance I had assumed was mine because the man who built it was gone, was itself a lie.

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