Page 121 of Mason

His jaw ticks. His face is unreadable—too trained, too disciplined—but regret bleeds through in the way his eyes flicker away for just a second too long.

“Mason,” he tries. “You don’t understa?—”

I snap.

My fist cracks into his face so hard it echoes down the hall like a gunshot. His head jerks to the side, a grunt punched from his throat, and I feel the satisfying crunch of cartilage under my knuckles.

One hit.

That’s all I get before Brando and Lucky are on me, hauling me back like they’ve been waiting for this exact second to stop me from doing something I can’t undo. My boots skid against the floor, my chest heaving, every nerve ending screaming for one more shot.

Just one more. Just one.

Clay turns to face me, his hand cupping his jaw, lip split, cheek already darkening. He doesn't speak. Doesn’t lift his hands. Doesn’t run. Because he knows.

He fucking knows.

This is on him.

All of it.

“She’s in there,” I roar, my voice bouncing off the walls, raw and sharp and burning at the edges. “She’s in there bleeding out while you play chess with people’s lives! She’s dying, Clay. Because you couldn’t tell the fucking truth!”

The room is dead silent.

The kind of silence that doesn’t come from peace, but from fear. From pain. From the moment just before the sky collapses.

Clay swallows hard. His fists are clenched at his sides, his stance rigid, like he wants to say something, fight back, scream—but he doesn’t. He just stands there and takes it.

Because deep down, he agrees with me.

He doesn’t deserve to defend himself.

Scar is already talking fast to the hospital administrator, probably offering to slap the Gatti name on a new cardio wing to keep me from getting thrown out.Again. God bless him for it. That’s the price of this life—reparations paid in donations and body bags.

I wrench out of Brando and Lucky’s grip and shove away, pacing like a caged animal, trying to breathe through the fire searing my insides. My knuckles throb. My chest is worse. I stare at the hallway doors, those cold slabs of steel that separate life from death, and I wait.

We all wait.

34

SAXON

Hospitals make my skin crawl.

Not because of the blood or the smell—though there’s plenty of both—but because every inch of these places whispers of suffering barely cleaned off the walls. They bleach the floors and strip the linens, but they can’t scrub away the pain. It's soaked in.

I cut through the corridors with the kind of walk that keeps people from stopping me. Measured. Controlled. Like I belong here. Even though I don’t.

Not in this city.

And definitely not in the middle of this powder keg of a waiting room—where every man parked in a chair or posted against the wall has blood on his hands and enemies in his rearview.

This is enemy territory.

And I just walked into the lion’s den wearing a badge.

My jaw clenches as I spot Lucky Gatti near the vending machines, arms folded, watching me like he’s trying to decide whether to nod in greeting or warn me to turn the hell around. We go way back—long enough that he knows what it costs me towalk in here. Long enough that I know he’s already prepared for this to end in him taking sides if it goes sideways.

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