Page 77 of Mason

But the difference between us?

He plays by his own rules.

I still have to pretend I believe in a system that’s broken.

That’s what makes Ironside dangerous. Not just because he acts—but because he’s willing to burn everything in his path to protect what’s his.

And right now, Shelby appears to be his.

So if she’s tangled in this mess—if there’s a chance she knows more than she’s saying?—

Then she’s sitting at the edge of a minefield, and Mason’s the one daring anyone to step forward.

I grab my jacket, the leather creaking as I shrug it on.

There’s only one way this ends.

And it’s not with paperwork.

It ends with answers.

It ends with fire.

It ends where the dark can’t breathe.

24

MASON

For years, I watched them fall.

One by one, my friends, my colleagues—the men I fought beside, bled beside—fellto the pull of a woman.

It was almost comical. The way each one of them swore up and down that it would never happen, that they were different, that they were built for this world—not for love, not for softness, not for the kind of devotion that puts a man on his knees.

And every time one of them went down, I shook my head, smug in my certainty that I would never be that guy.

The perennial bachelor.

That’s how I liked to think of myself. Untouchable. Unshackled. Free.

But now?

Now, I know the truth.

Because here I am, shooting myself in my own goddamn foot, staring at a woman who has me by the throat in the best way possible, and I know—I know—I’ll never walk away from this.

From her.

I can already hear the laughter, the shit-eating grins from the guys when they find out. The smug I-told-you-so’s, the knowing looks. Because they’ve all been here before.

They knew.

They knew that it wasn’t about weakness.

That it was never about giving up some imagined freedom.

It was about having something beyond yourself to fight for.

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