31. Shelby
31
SHELBY
I keep my face carefully blank as the van slows, the tires crunching over uneven pavement. Headlights pierce through the darkness, their harsh beams slicing across the grimy glass pane at the back—the only sliver of the outside world I’ve seen in hours.
The van rolls to a stop.
This is it.
A cold weight settles in my stomach. I have seconds. Seconds before the doors swing open, before I’m dragged out and handed off to whoever’s waiting. Before this gets worse.
I brace myself. Whatever happens next, I have to be ready.
I have only seconds to tip the scales.
My pulse kicks hard against my ribs, but my voice stays steady.
“You should kill me.”
The passenger whips around, his face twisted in an ugly grimace, but I don’t let him speak.
“Because if you do”—I lower my voice, pressing the words through the thick air between us—“Mason Ironside will probably make your death quick. But first, he’ll make you watch while he takes apart everyone you love—piece by fucking piece.”
The driver swallows so hard I hear it.
The passenger’s hands twitch.
Doubt.
Fear.
Perfect.
A heavy fist pounds against the van’s back doors, and I hear a muffled voice from outside. The contact.
The moment they step out, I shift, straining against the binds. If I’m to have any chance of escape, it’s now or never.
“Man, you didn’t tell us she belongs to Mason Ironside!”
The driver’s voice cracks with panic as he throws open the van’s back doors, the hinges screaming like something out of a nightmare.
I flinch at the sudden flood of light—harsh, blinding beams from the headlights cutting into the dark like knives. My eyes burn as I squint against the glare, trying to make sense of the shapes beyond the brightness.
The night presses in, hot and suffocating, thick with fear that clings to my skin like sweat.
We’re somewhere forgotten. Lost.
A patch of land swallowed by time, cracked earth and weeds growing wild where pavement should be.
An overpass looms above us, its concrete ribs jutting overhead like a giant, broken skeleton. Steel bars curl from the edges like twisted claws. The rusted steel catches the van’s red taillights and throws long, jagged shadows across the dirt.
This is the kind of place people don’t stumble on. The kind of place no one hears you scream.
There’s no chance of escape after they haul me out of the vehicle—hands bound behind my back, ankles tied together.
I stumble, hobbling, my body screaming from the thrashing they already gave me.
Pain is everywhere.
In my ribs, where I took a hard knock against the van’s wall.
In my temple, where my head hit the floor of the van too many times to count.
In my mouth, where the sharp metallic taste of blood coats my tongue after I bit it out of desperation.
But I stay silent.
I let them argue, my ears straining past the pounding in my skull.
Maybe this is the crack I need.
Maybe this is how I survive.
“What does it matter?”
The new arrival—the contact they’re handing me off to—murmurs, his voice too even, too calm.
It’s the kind of calm that makes my skin crawl.
The kind of calm that means danger.
“You had a job to do. It doesn’t matter who she belongs to.”
The driver lets out a sharp breath, but it’s his partner, the one who was always the jumpier of the two, that really starts to crumble.
“Fuck, man,” he spits, running a shaky hand through his greasy hair. “It does matter. This was supposed to be a clean job. We grab her. We hand her over. No one was supposed to know our faces.”
“No one will.”
The contact steps closer, and I get a good look at him. Dead eyes. Hollow and bottomless.
The kind of man who’s seen too much, done too much, and feels nothing about it anymore.
I’ve seen that look before.
In David.
“That’s not the fucking point.”
The driver takes a step back, shaking his head. “Mason Ironside isn’t a man you mess with, man. He’s going to eviscerate us when he finds us.”
“I wouldn’t be too worried about Ironside,” the contact cuts in, bored.
Something shifts in the air.
The jumpier one looks at the driver, an unspoken tension crackling between them.
Doubt.
They don’t want to do this.
Not anymore.
Mason’s name changed everything.
I bite the inside of my cheek, forcing myself to stay still. My wrists ache, my fingers numb from how tightly the ropes are bound.
Think, Shelby.
I can’t fight.
I can’t run.
But I can wait.
I can listen.
And if they’re fighting, if they’re this fucking nervous, then perhaps there’s still a way out of this.
“We don’t want the money,” the driver blurts out suddenly.
The contact stills.
“What?”
“We’re out,” the driver says, voice tight, final. “This isn’t what we signed up for.”
The jumpy one nods fast. Too fast.
“You can keep her. Take her to whoever the fuck wants her. But we don’t want the money. We want no part in this.”
For the first time, the contact looks… amused.
And that’s the moment I know.
They just made a mistake.
They shouldn’t have backed out.
They shouldn’t have tried to be good men.
Because monsters don’t like loose ends.
The contact sighs, rubbing his jaw, then pulls a gun from his waistband and shoots the driver point-blank in the face.
A sharp crack, a splatter of red across the van’s white paint, and the driver is gone before his body even hits the ground.
The jumpy one screams.
I lurch backward, falling to my knees, my breath stuck somewhere between my lungs and my throat.
The contact barely spares me a glance.
“You should’ve taken the money.”
The second shot is sloppier. The jumpy one tries to run, but the bullet catches him in the back, sending him sprawling into the dirt.
And then it’s just us.
Him. And me.
I look at the dead men, my heart a broken, uneven rhythm in my chest.
Then a shadow moves, and I feel fingers wrap around my hair.
I don’t have time to react, don’t have time to brace, before I’m dragged under the bridge, my knees scraping against the rough concrete.
My pulse is wild, my body raw and weak, but I thrash—I thrash anyway.
Because I know what’s coming.
I know.
And I still can’t stop it.
His knee slams into my spine, pinning me down, and I hear his breath—slow, controlled.
The same way he spoke.
Calm.
Unfeeling.
I squeeze my eyes shut, focusing on the bracelet.
The tracker.
If I can get to it, if I can set off the alert?—
A sharp crack fills the air as my head is yanked back, my vision swimming.
“No one’s coming, baby.”
He laughs—soft, breathy, dark.
Then he starts to break me.
Gravel bites into my skin through the thin fabric of my clothes as my knees scrape against the ground. I don’t cry out.
I refuse to break. I refuse to give him that satisfaction.
Surviving a man like David Eddy didn’t just toughen me—it forged me. It turned pain into armor, fear into fuel. And I’ll be damned if I let this bastard undo what I bled to become.
His grip is iron in my hair, yanking me forward until my face nearly presses into the filth-streaked ground. My wrists burn from the ropes, my shoulders screaming in protest as I struggle, but it doesn’t matter.
He’s stronger.
And he’s already decided how this ends.
I try to retreat into my mind. To somewhere else. Anywhere else.
But I can’t.
Because his voice is there, in my ear, his breath warm, slow, deliberate.
“You’re on your own now, sweet cakes. No-one is coming for you.”
It’s a lie.
And I think he knows it.
Because no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries to take this from me, Mason will still come.
Mason will still kill him for this.
But that doesn’t help me now.
Not as fingers dig into my flesh, bruising, cruel, punishing.
Not as I feel the sharp sting of a slap when I turn my face away.
I won’t beg.
I won’t give him that.
The world narrows to pain, breath, the weight of him.
To the tearing, the unbearable intrusion, the sound of my own breath shuddering in and out.
The utter helplessness of it.
I was supposed to be free.
I was supposed to be done with this kind of suffering.
David is dead.
And yet, here I am.
Bound. Beaten. Used.
Again.
The bridge looms overhead, a silent witness to the crime. There are no cars passing by, no headlights to cut through the dark, no one to hear the muffled noises of my body as it screams for mercy.
He’s brutal. Unforgiving.
His hands move with practiced cruelty, untying my wrists but keeping my ankles bound. It doesn’t make sense—not at first.
Then he leans in, his breath hot and rancid against my ear, and whispers?—
“I want your hands to scratch down my back as you scream for it.”
A violent shudder rips through me, my whole body recoiling at the sick promise in his voice.
I hiss, a sharp, thunderous refusal, my body twisting away, my arms locking like steel at my sides.
I will not touch him.
His face darkens, shadowed by something even worse than rage—understanding.
He knows.
Knows I’d rather die than lay my hands on him.
And he doesn’t like that.
His head rears back, and before I can brace for it, his palm cracks against my face with enough force to snap my head to the side.
White-hot pain explodes behind my eyes.
The taste of blood floods my mouth.
My cheek throbs, skin burning, but I don’t give him the sound he wants.
Not a gasp.
Not a whimper.
Not even a fucking breath.
Anger. There’s so much of it, but it’s not even mine—it’s his.
He grabs my chin, jerking my head up, forcing me to look into his eyes.
I see it then—the frustration, the fury, the need to break me.
But he won’t.
A sharp defiance coils in my chest, and before I can think better of it?—
I spit in his face.
It’s thick, hot, disgusting, and it lands on his chin, drips back down onto me as he looms over me, eyes going wild.
For a split second, everything stills.
Then—
A low, animalistic growl rumbles from his throat, his grip tightening like a vice.
I don’t care.
If my life is to end here today, if I’m to lose the last fragile piece of me, then at least I’ll go down swinging.
His fist slams into my face with the force of a wrecking ball, the impact so violent it sends a sharp, sickening crack reverberating through my skull.
For a moment, there’s nothing.
Just a burst of white, an explosion of light behind my eyes, a strange, suspended weightlessness before the pain rushes in—blinding, searing, absolute.
My head snaps to the side, my neck screaming in protest as my body lurches with the force of the blow.
A wet, crunching sound follows, and I realize it’s coming from inside me.
My nose. My cheek. My jaw. Something is broken.
The metallic tang of blood floods my mouth, thick and warm, spilling over my tongue before I can swallow it down.
My ears ring. My vision swims.
There’s pain and pure, unfiltered defiance.
My breaths are ragged, uneven. My body is on fire. But even as the world tilts, even as my face pulses with agony, I do the only thing I have left.
I spit blood onto the ground.
Even as his shadow looms over me, even as I taste my own ruin on my lips—I will not break.
Instead, I close my eyes.
I don’t want to see his face.
I try to think of something else, someone else—but the only face that comes to mind is Mason’s.
The way he looks when he’s angry.
The way his knuckles go white when he’s tense.
The way his voice drops into something lethal when he makes a promise.
And I know?—
If I survive this, if I make it through this night?—
I’ll have Mason Ironside to thank for that.
I cling to that thought, hold it close like a lifeline, because it’s the only thing keeping me from shattering completely.
When he’s done, when he’s finished taking what he came here to take, he spits on the ground beside me, adjusts his belt, and kicks me onto my side like I’m nothing.
Nothing.
Something wet trickles down my thigh, mixing with the dirt already drying against my skin.
Breathe, Shelby.
Just breathe.
The last thing I hear before everything fades is his boots crunching against the dirt as he walks away, leaving me broken beneath the bridge.
Leaving me for dead.
But I am not dead.
Not yet.
I let my fingers twitch, force myself to move even though my body protests.
The bracelet.
The tracker.
I press it.
A small, blinking light.
A silent scream.
Mason will come.
Mason will kill for this.
And I will never be more grateful for the monster he is than as I watch him annihilating the vermin that did this to me.