Page 118 of The Vagabond

I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know his name. But my pulse stopped. Just for a second. A breath. And then it slammed back into rhythm with a vengeance, like my heart realized it had been caught sleeping and wanted to make up for lost time.

He looked at me. Not like the other men did—leering, weighing, hungry. He looked at me like he saw through the glitter, through the collar, through the number I’d been reduced to. And that terrified me. Because I didn’t know what was more dangerous—the men who wanted to own me, or the man who looked like he might see me.

He didn’t smile or blink. He just… watched. And in that one, suspended moment, I felt something stir inside me that I thought had died.

Hope.It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t safe. But it was alive.

And I think that’s when it started. The knowing. The pull. The impossible thread between us that stretched across that room, through the years, through every inch of pain that came after.

I didn’t know his name that night. But I think I loved him anyway.

The memory fades,but it doesn’t leave me in one piece.

It lingers—like a fingerprint smeared across glass, visible only when the light hits just right. Like the echo of a name I still whisper when I’m half-asleep and bleeding out inside, clinging to the edges of consciousness like it might tether me to something real.

Saxon.

Even now, bruised and broken in ways no one can see, I feel him like a phantom limb.

I don’t know where he is—if he’s halfway across the world or right outside the walls of this hell. But I know him. I know the way his mind works, the way guilt eats him alive in slow, deliberate bites.

If he’s breathing, he’s looking for me. And if he’s looking, he’s coming. Because Saxon North doesn’tlosepeople.

And if I die here—chained, discarded, a body cooling in the dark—it’ll be with his name on my lips and his face burned behind my eyes. Like a prayer. Like a curse. The last thing I ever loved. Maybe that’s supposed to be a comfort. But it’s not. Because I don’t want to die with him in my mind like a ghost that never let go.

I want to live. I want a life that isn’t written in blood or trauma or regret. I want him in my arms, not just in my memories. I want to wake up to the sound of his voice—not the screams of my past.

I want to grow old with him beside me, silver at his temples and my hand still in his, like we made it out, like the world didn’t get to win.

I want a real fucking life. I want it all. The mundane. The messy. The morning coffee and late-night arguments. The kind of life people write bad poetry about.

Is that too much to ask? Maybe.

But I’m asking anyway. Because hope is the only thing they haven’t yet figured out how to kill in me.

48

SAXON

We gear up in silence. There’s no fear, but there’s clear focus knowing what’s at stake.

Every man here knows the cost. Every man has paid it in blood before. But tonight? Tonight it’s personal in a way few things ever are.

We don our tactical black and secure the Kevlar plates. Every man carries a silencer and smoke grenades with extra ammunition. We have to be prepared for anything.

Scar moves with the efficiency of someone who’s already waged the war in his mind and just needs his hands to catch up. He double-checks the ammo cases, eyes scanning each row to make sure he’s missed nothing.

Lucky moves in quiet loops across the room, checking gear, comms, emergency medicals. He doesn’t speak. His savagery hums just beneath the surface, electric and waiting.

Kanyan tightens the straps on his vest, jaw locked, his massive hands surprisingly gentle as he checks the modified breaching charge tucked against his hip.

Mason finishes loading rounds into a mag, each click echoing like a death toll.

I pull on my vest. My hands are steady. But my blood? My blood is a fucking inferno. It pumps like war drums behind my ribs, loud and fast and unforgiving. It’s not adrenaline; it’s wrath and it’s purpose and it’s loud.

The moment I realized she was gone, something inside me cracked wide open. The fact that someone—some arrogant, dead-man-walking bastard—thought it was okay to lay a hand on her makes the blood thunder in my ears like war drums.

She’s no one’s to touch. No one’s but mine.

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