Page 92 of Mason

Bullshit.

They won’t let her go.

The second they have that hard drive, she’s dead.

I inhale slowly through my nose, forcing the fire inside me into something sharper. Something controlled.

“Where?”

“The old cement factory on Clemens.”

Of course.

Where else would a high-stakes exchange go down but the rotting carcass of an abandoned factory? Once the beating heart of the city’s biggest cement supplier—until the owner himself wound up wearing cement shoes.

Fitting.

A graveyard for industry turned into a playground for criminals.

I don’t have time to process the irony.

My pulse hammers as I press the phone harder against my ear. Every second wasted is a second Shelby is at their mercy.

“Send me the location,” I snap. My voice is razor-sharp, slicing through the tension in my chest. “And stay put. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t do a fucking thing until I say so.”

No heroics. No mistakes. No dead bodies I don’t get to put in the ground myself.

I end the call before I can hear a reply, my fingers already dialing the next number. I need men. I need firepower. I need to be there five minutes ago.

I’ll tear that fucking factory apart brick by brick if I have to.

I call in every favor, pull every string, rip apart every contact I have until the entire underworld knows that Shelby Monroe has been taken—and that I will kill every single person who had a hand in it unless she is returned in one piece.

I pull up the tracker on my phone—the one embedded in the bracelet I gave her.

Offline.

Fuck.

I wouldn’t expect anything less from the kind of bastards willing to take a woman hostage. The first thing they’d do is strip her of anything that could be traced.

28

MASON

I’m a reckless bastard. Always have been.

There was never a time I wasn’t toeing the edge of the abyss, grinning into the void, daring it to swallow me whole. I lived for the rush. The adrenaline. The sheer audacity of flipping off fate and walking away unscathed. I took fights I had no business winning, made bets with my own bones, laughed in the face of consequences like they were a joke only I was in on.

And for the most part, the world never called my bluff.

But being reckless hits different when you’re not just some street punk with a death wish. When you’re Mason Ironside, underboss of the Moreno crime family, second only to Kanyan De Scarzi—the man I’d take a bullet for without hesitation.

My recklessness isn’t just about me anymore. It means something. It carries weight.

It’s what makes men follow me into war, what makes enemies choke on my name like it’s laced with poison.

It’s the reason I matter.

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