41. Mason
41
MASON
I saiah Sloane’s place is the kind of backwoods hell you see in documentaries about serial killers who vanish people off highways.
Tin roof. Rotting barn. The smell of gasoline and burnt rubber bleeding from the walls. An oil-stained couch sits outside the front door, weather-worn and covered in cigarette burns.
It’s quiet.
But the kind of quiet that feels like something’s hiding underneath it.
We don’t knock.
Brando moves first—boot to the door, splinters fly—and I follow, pistol raised, adrenaline already lighting up my blood.
Sloane’s at a workbench, hunched over a gun he’s cleaning like it’s a Sunday afternoon and not the eve of his reckoning. He turns slow when we enter, not surprised.
Just annoyed.
“Well,” he says, brushing his hands on a rag. “If it isn’t the boys from the city.”
Brando doesn’t answer. He moves forward and hits Sloane so hard with the butt of his shotgun that the man drops like a sack of potatoes.
We don’t say a word.
Just drag his dead weight to the center of the garage and shove him into the rusted-out chair sitting there like it’s been waiting for him. It creaks under his weight, metal groaning like it knows what’s coming.
Bolted to the concrete.
Steady.
Unforgiving.
Less a chair, more an altar.
The kind you bleed on.
The kind you confess from—right before you meet whatever hell you’ve earned.
The cockiness is gone and he’s still half-dazed when I slap him across the face to wake him up.
Isaiah groans. Blood’s already running from his mouth. One of his teeth’s cracked in half.
“Wakey, wakey,” I say coldly. “Time to answer for your sins.”
Brando pulls a length of rope from his bag and binds Sloane’s legs so tight it cuts off circulation. There’ll be no more running and no more hiding for this man.
It’s just him and us.
And pain.
He laughs.
Actually laughs.
“You really think this changes anything?” he slurs. “People like me don’t die. We just get replaced.”
“Good,” I murmur, crouching in front of him. “Then I won’t feel bad making an example out of you.”
His eyes flicker with something then—doubt, maybe. Regret? Too late.
I stand, roll up my sleeves, and scan the tools Brando’s laid out like a fucking dinner spread. Crowbar. Hammer. Electrical cables. Zip ties. A welding torch. A bucket.
Salt. Of course.
“Shelby Monroe,” I say, choosing a pair of pliers, “wasn’t just someone you grabbed for leverage.”
His mouth tightens.
“She wasn’t just a girl you left bleeding under a bridge like garbage.”
Still, no response.
So I pull the trigger—the trigger.
“She’s mine. ”
Brando walks behind him, slips on a pair of gloves before he grabs a cordless drill and drives a nail through Sloane’s palm into the armrest.
The scream that tears from his throat echoes off the barn walls.
The sound satisfies something inside me.
Something black. Something cold, dark, and sinister.
“You know what’s funny?” Brando says casually, picking up the crowbar. “You shot those two men. Tied off your loose ends. Thought you were cleaning house.”
He rests the metal against Sloane’s knee.
“But you left one loose.”
With a sudden crunch, Brando brings the crowbar down. His kneecap snaps like porcelain. Sloane convulses in the chair, howling, spittle flying from his mouth.
I stand there, calm. Quiet. Watching.
“You left Shelby for dead,” I say, pacing slowly around him. “But she didn’t die.”
I grab the jumper cables and clip them to his ankles.
“You thought you’d disappear back into your little swamp, bury the bodies, collect your paycheck.”
I pick up the car battery, already wired. Flip the switch.
Sloane screams again, whole body jerking. Smoke curls from his boots.
“But instead,” I whisper, kneeling beside him, “you woke me up.”
We let him rest between rounds. Let him feel the weight of what’s coming.
Brando hums softly as he sharpens a blade on a whetstone. He’s not in a rush. Neither of us are.
This is ritual. A cleansing.
“You touched her,” I say suddenly, crouching again.
Sloane is breathing like a dying dog, eyes half-lidded with pain. “She was begging for it.”
Wrong answer.
I stab the blade into the meat of his thigh.
Slow.
Twist.
Salt follows. He chokes on his own breath.
We cut pieces from him. Carve truth from flesh. Etch the word THIEF into his chest, because that’s what he is—he tried to steal something from me. Something precious.
And now he’ll wear that brand into the afterlife.
Eventually, he’s whimpering.
Begging.
Crying like a child.
Good.
Because Shelby cried, too. And no one came for her.
Except me.
Brando leans in. “You know why you’re still alive?”
Sloane doesn’t answer.
Brando smiles. “Because death for someone like you is a mercy.”
I pull my Glock from my holster and press it under Sloane’s jaw.
He starts to sob. “Please… please?—”
“I told you,” I growl. “You messed with the wrong woman.”
Bang.
Blood sprays up the wall. His head snaps back, body sagging against the restraints.
Done.
Silence settles like dust.
Brando exhales. “You good?”
I stare at the wreckage. The monster in the chair.
“No.”
Then I grab the staple gun.
We pin a note to his chest, through skin and bone:
She lived.
Let the mayor choke on that message.
Because this is the beginning of the end.
And I still have a few more bullets left in my chamber.
The drive home is quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that soothes. The kind that clings . That lets you hear everything you don’t want to think about—blood still drying under your fingernails, the ringing silence after a gunshot, the way Sloane’s head snapped back like a puppet with its strings cut.
I should feel something.
I should feel satisfied.
But satisfaction doesn’t live in me anymore.
Only hunger and heat. The need to see her again.
To touch her skin and know it’s not made of bruises anymore.
To hold her face in my hands and remind myself that she’s still here. Still breathing. Still mine .
Because every time I close my eyes, I see her on that hospital bed. Pale. Small. Quiet in a way that doesn’t suit her. And it makes something ancient inside me howl.
Sloane got the easy death. Brando was right— that was mercy.
If I'd listened to the part of me that broke the second I saw her blood, he would’ve screamed for days.
My jaw tightens as I take the turn onto the main road. My house isn’t far now. The tires hum against the pavement, steady and low, like a heartbeat.
And maybe that’s why mine won’t calm down.
Because I’m almost there.
Almost home.
I don’t know what I’m going to say to her. But I need to see her, need to make sure we’re still okay, the both of us. Because there is no me without her .
The glow from the foyer spills out across the stone path and floods the front of the house as I pull into the circular driveway. There’s a flurry at my front door.
Voices. Movement. Light.
Something feels off.
I kill the engine and step out. My hoodie’s damp, my boots scuffed and dark at the soles. I know what’s on them without looking down to confirm.
My muscles are still strung tight from what Brando and I just did. That... wasn’t a job. That was vengeance —cold, brutal, and ugly.
But I don’t even get a breath to process it before I hear his voice.
Saxon fucking North. He’s been sniffing around more than usual lately. And even though Lucky has told me we have nothing to worry about, I don’t like the special interest he’s taken in Shelby.
It carries down the front steps, calm and clipped in that way of his. Controlled. Like everything out of his mouth has already been cross-examined and filed.
I round the corner and see them—Mia, Maxine, and Shelby—standing just inside the threshold, framed in the warm light like a scene out of someone else’s life. And Saxon?
He’s right there in my doorway like he owns the damn place.
He spots me, and his expression shifts just a hair. His gaze drops to my boots. Lingers on the dried blood near the toe. Then trails upward—hoodie, knuckles, jaw.
He doesn't speak right away.
He just catalogs.
Mia’s arms are crossed. Maxine’s got that look like she’s two seconds from swinging. And Shelby… she looks like she’s barely holding herself together.
I close the distance in slow, even strides. My pulse is a war drum behind my ribs as I step into the doorway, obstructing his view of the women. My women. My responsibility.
Douche has no business coming here when I’m not home.
“Agent North,” I say, my voice like gravel.
“Ironside.” He nods once, casual as ever. But his eyes are anything but. He glances past me to the women. “Didn’t realize you were out.”
“Now you do.” I let the words hang between us, but don’t give him a chance to respond. “What do you want?” I ask, keeping my voice level, low.
“I came to talk to Shelby.”
The hell you did.
“You came to question her?”
He shrugs. “Talk. That’s all.”
“About David Eddy?” I ask. “Because if that’s why you’re here, you’ll need her lawyer to be present. And paperwork.”
“She’s not under arrest.”
“She doesn’t need to be.”
The words hang heavy in the air. The kind of tension you could cut your teeth on.
He studies me again—like I’m a crime scene he hasn’t finished piecing together. And then, like clockwork, the smirk creeps in.
“You look like hell,” he says.
“Been a long night.”
“Doing what?”
I meet his eyes dead-on. “Taking out the trash.” I’m not afraid to let him know there’s a special place in hell for those that cross us.
He doesn’t respond. But I can see him registering it. The implication. The truth hiding in plain sight.
Maxine murmurs, “Oh boy,” behind me. Mia hums something that sounds like a prayer. Shelby says nothing, but I feel the weight of her watching me.
Saxon finally says, “You sure you want to go down this road?”
“You sure you want to keep standing on my fucking porch?”
A pause.
A slow exhale.
Then I say what we both know is the real question here: “Still want to talk to her?”
He holds my gaze. Doesn’t blink.
Then shakes his head. “Not tonight. But it’s coming. You know that.”
“And when it does, I’ll be ready.”
He starts to turn, but I’m not done.
“Saxon.”
He stops on the second step.
“Next time you want to see Shelby, don’t show up on my doorstep. Send paperwork.”
His jaw tightens. But he doesn’t argue.
He walks off into the dark without another word.
Good.
Because tonight?
I’m not in the mood for mercy.
And the last thing I need is a Fed sniffing around my doorstep while my knuckles are still stained with my own brand of justice.