Page 1 of Mason

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PROLOGUE - MASON IRONSIDE

Family is brutal.

It builds you, breaks you, then dares you to thank it for the lesson. It teaches you love with one hand and abandonment with the other. It’s the blood in your veins when you need strength, and the weight on your back when you're trying to breathe. Family carves its name into you like it owns the right—shapes your jaw, your rage, your silence. It makes you scream until your throat is raw and no one’s listening, and then it tells you to be grateful. Because family doesn't always come in warm arms and good intentions. Sometimes, it shows up as hunger. As fists. As the sound of someone walking away and never looking back. And sometimes—if you're lucky—it comes in the form of two strangers who become your anchor in a world that’s been trying to drown you since the day you learned how to beg.

That’s the first lesson the streets ever taught me.

Not survival. Not hunger. Not how cold a concrete alley gets when your ribs are touching your spine.

No—family. Because family breaks you first. And if you’re lucky, they build you back into something meaner. Something harder. Something useful.

I was twelve when I stopped believing someone was coming for me. No parents. No plan. Just a kid with blood on his lip and frost in his lungs. But I wasn’t alone for long. Tommy Corsica found me first—skinny, cocky, and mean as a snake, already halfway to being a legend.

We didn’t talk about where we came from. Just started running together. Boosting wallets, running packages, living off whatever we could steal or scrape.

And then there was Lizzie.

She was fire in the snow. Barefoot, bruised, mouth full of curses when we found her half-starved under a rusted fire escape, her hair a tangled halo and her eyes full of thunder. I gave her my coat. Tommy gave her a place between us.

We were stupid kids who thought love could keep us warm. And maybe it did for a while.

I fell first. Quietly. Completely. In that way you only do once, before life teaches you better. I loved her like a promise. Like salvation. Like maybe, if I could just keep her warm, she’d never have to run again.

But she looked at Tommy like he was the sky. Like he’d hung every star just for her.

She loved me, too—but differently. Not less. Just... not the way I wanted her to. Not the way that breaks you and builds you back into someone new. With me, she was soft. Safe. Steady.

With him, she washome.

And so I became the second heartbeat in a three-part rhythm.

Not the husband. Not the soulmate. Just the constant. The keeper of their secrets. The arms she fell into when Tommy was working a job. The one who steadied her when the pain cametoo close and the world got too loud. A gatekeeper. A protector. A witness to a love story that wasn’t mine—but still asked me to carry part of it.

There was no jealousy. No resentment. How could there be?

Tommy was my brother. Lizzie was my heart. I loved them both. Enough to live in the shadows of what they had.

Enough to stay. Even when it tore me in two.

And then she gave me Mia.

We all knew but we never said it out loud. She never wrote my name on the birth certificate. But we all knew. Mia had my eyes. My stubbornness. My fire. And I let her call me Uncle Mason. I held her like she was my own and kept the truth buried in my chest like a live wire.

Because Lizzie was right. The world wouldn’t understand.

And the world didn’t deserve to hear our story, anyway.

Now they're both gone—Tommy to bullets, Lizzie to sickness—and I still find myself reaching for a shadow. For a warmth that lived in three bodies and died in two.

I wasn’t her forever.

But I was heralways.

And that’s the kind of ache you never walk away from.

In Tommy and Lizzie, I found my first family.

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