36. Shelby
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.
The man who should’ve run the second he saw the wreckage of me.
But he’s here.
He’s still here.
And I don’t understand it.
Why would someone like him stay? Why would a man carved from iron and vengeance stand vigil over a woman who’s more ruin than redemption?
What does a man like Mason Ironside want with a shattered thing like me?
And when he finally turns around—when those storm-colored eyes find mine and the air between us thickens like smoke—I think I see the answer.
He doesn’t want me because I’m whole.
He wants me because I survived.
Even if I don’t know how to live anymore.
A dull, gnawing ache blooms somewhere beneath my ribs, radiating outward until even my skin feels sore. Everything hurts in that quiet, thudding way that means you’re alive but barely. My mouth is dry, my throat scratched raw like I’ve been screaming for days and no one answered.
I blink.
The ceiling above me is a sterile white, fractured only by shadow. The hum of machines surrounds me—beeps, whirs, the steady rhythm of something that must be keeping me tethered to this world.
My attention is drawn back to Mason.
He’s pacing by the window, all fury and tension packed into six feet of violence wrapped in black. Mason Ironside. I know that shape even with my eyes half-shut. Broad shoulders pulled tight, jaw clenched like he’s holding the world between his teeth and daring it to snap.
“I don’t give a fuck about your excuses. Find them.”
His voice cracks through the stillness like a whip. Cold. Sharp. Lethal.
I don’t hear the response on the other end of the line. But I don’t need to, because his silence says enough. A different kind of danger lingers in the air now—quieter, but heavier.
“I don’t care what it costs. I want them dead.”
A shiver crawls up my spine.
Not because I’m afraid of him. I’ll never be afraid of him.
But because I know why he’s saying it.
Because I almost died.
Because of me.
I swallow, my throat rasping in protest, and somehow that soft, involuntary sound slices through his anger like a drumbeat.
He goes still.
I watch him lower the phone slowly, his fingers curled around it like he wants to crush it to pieces. His head turns—and when his eyes land on mine, everything in the room shifts. Tilts. Breaks.
Mason stares at me like I’ve been resurrected.
And maybe I have.
His chest rises and falls like he’s struggling to breathe, but he crosses the room with slow, deliberate steps, dragging his shadow with him.
I don’t look away.
Neither does he.
As though he’s too afraid if he looks away, I might be gone.
When he stops beside my bed, I can see everything written in his face—the rage, the guilt, the fear he’ll never admit to.
He drops into the chair beside the bed, rubs his hands down his thighs slowly as he waits.
I part my lips, but the words don’t come easy.
They claw their way up my throat, ragged and raw, scraping past bruised vocal cords and unshed tears. My voice comes out hoarse, splintered—like it forgot how to sound human.
“You…” My chest tightens as I force the rest out. “You came for me.”
It’s not really a question. Not really a statement, either.
It’s a wound.
A quiet confession of disbelief, like I still can’t trust that I’m not bleeding on a concrete floor somewhere, waiting to be found. Waiting to be forgotten.
His expression shifts—just slightly—but it’s enough.
A flicker of pain, barely restrained. His jaw clenches. Something in his eyes fractures.
“Of course I fucking did,” he says, low and rough, like it offends him that I’d even wonder. Like it breaks something in him that I had to ask at all.
It knocks something loose in my chest. Something I thought was long dead.
I shift, the movement sending sparks of pain down my side. I wince, biting back the sound.
He doesn’t move to touch me, but I feel him tense. Like he wants to, like it’s killing him not to.
“I pressed the tracker,” I murmur, voice shaking. “… didn’t think you’d make it in time.”
He leans forward, his forearms braced on his knees, every inch of him brimming with frustration. “I almost didn’t.”
I stare at him. At the man who feels more like a storm than a person. “I almost died.”
I died a thousand quiet deaths under that overpass, waiting for someone—for him—to find me.
I draw in a shaky breath, lungs struggling against the weight pressing down on my ribs. My throat is raw, like I’ve been screaming in my sleep, even if I don’t remember the sound.
“Mason…” I whisper.
He’s sitting at the edge of the chair beside my hospital bed, elbows on his knees, head bowed like he’s praying. At the sound of my voice, he lifts his head—slow, like it takes effort.
His eyes lock on mine.
Dark. Devastated. Desperate.
“Why?” I ask, voice trembling.
His brow creases. “Why what?”
“Why do you care?”
The room goes still.
No beeping machines. No hallway noise. Just that silence —heavy, suffocating, the kind that hums like the air right before a storm breaks.
He stares at me like I just cut him open.
His mouth opens, then closes again. His jaw ticks. He swallows like the truth is caught somewhere between his chest and his throat, refusing to come out clean.
And I see it—all of it.
The war in his head. The panic. The truth he's been shoving down so deep for so long, it’s calcified inside him.
Then finally, with a sharp exhale, he drags a hand through his hair and looks away.
“I don’t know,” he says. Quiet. Hoarse.
The ache in my chest twists into something sharp. Something that feels a hell of a lot like heartbreak.
“You don’t know?” I repeat, and it comes out small. Hurt. Hollow.
He turns back to me, eyes burning. “No. I just know I fucking do.”
His voice fractures on the last word.
And just like that, I fall apart.
The tears come hot and fast, trailing down my cheeks before I can even pretend to stop them. I hate it. God, I hate it.
He leans forward fast, like the sight of me crying physically hurts him.
“Don’t do that,” he says, voice rough.
“Do what?”
“ Cry. ” His hands tremble before he fists them tight in his lap, like he’s afraid they’ll betray him and reach for me. “I can handle getting shot. I can handle being hunted. I can even handle walking into a fucking explosion. But I can’t… I can’t watch you cry, Shelby.”
I laugh, but it’s the worst kind—wet, bitter, and cracked down the middle.
“I don’t even know what’s happening here, Mason.”
“Neither do I.”
He says it like a confession. Like an apology.
The silence grows again, but it’s different now—less threatening, more… exposed. Like we’re standing on opposite cliffs, waiting to see who jumps first.
I should wait. I should let him be the one.
But I’m so tired of silence.
So I leap.
“But I think I love you.”
His breath catches. He actually stops breathing for a second, like the words knocked every ounce of air from his lungs. His eyes are wide, stunned, wild.
And something in the air between us shifts.
Like the storm finally breaks.
Like the ground’s about to give way beneath us.
I don’t take it back.
Not even when the fear creeps in. Not even when he doesn’t say anything right away. Because for the first time since I woke up in this sterile, unfamiliar room, I don’t feel like a prisoner.
I don’t feel like prey.
I feel like a match in the palm of a man made of gasoline.
And I don’t know which one of us is going to burn first?—
But I know I’d let it happen.
If it’s him?
If it’s us ?
I’d burn for that.