Page 132 of Mason

“She does.”

Mia nods slowly, a soft certainty in her expression.

“Well,” she says, reaching over to squeeze my wrist. “Then I guess we’d better make room for one more person at the dinner table.”

36

SHELBY

I’m broken.

Not in the poetic, romanticized way. No, I’m the kind of broken that leaks. That bleeds shame and fear and memories I can’t scrub clean. The kind that’s been torn in half, hollowed out from the inside, then clumsily stitched back together with scar tissue and silence. My seams hold, but barely. One wrong word, one wrong look, and I’ll unravel.

And yet—he’s here.

Mason Ironside.

A name that sounds like war and thunder. A man carved from violence and vengeance, someone who doesn’t just survive the fire—he is the fire.What the hell does someone like him want with something like me?

That’s the thought circling my skull on a slow, bruising loop as I lie here, still as death, my eyes fixed on the silhouette across the room.

He hasn’t noticed I’m awake.

Good.

Because I don’t think I could speak, even if I wanted to.

He stands by the window like he’s holding the night back with sheer force of will. Shoulders tight as cables, body rigid, coiled. A storm trapped in skin and bone. He’s talking low into his phone, voice edged with fury—quiet, dangerous fury. The kind that doesn’t erupt, it detonates.

Streetlights outside smear gold and gray across his face, catching on the sharp planes of his cheekbones, the tight line of his jaw. He looks like he’s been carved out of vengeance and regret, sculpted by rage. He looks haunted.

I should say something.

Should let him know I’m here, that I woke up, that I’m not just some corpse in a white sheet anymore.

But I don’t.

I just lie there. A dead weight in a too-bright room that smells like antiseptic and blood. My limbs are heavy, filled with sand, and my mind is a cracked mirror reflecting pieces of a life I don’t recognize anymore. I feel like I’ve been scraped off the pavement and stapled back together without anesthesia.

So instead, I stay quiet.

Because in this moment—this thin, breathless pause before he turns and sees me, before whatever truth lives in his eyes burns its way into my soul—I just want to exist.

Unseen.

Unbothered.

A ghost in a borrowed bed.

Because for the first time in what feels like forever, I’m not being hunted.

I’m not being touched without permission, not being called by a name that tastes like ownership. There are no hands closing around my throat, no threats slithering into my ear like poison.

Just him.

Mason.

The man who burns too hot, feels too much, takes too little.

---