Page 69 of The Vagabond

My voice cracks through the room like a gunshot. Sharp. Sudden. Final. Chairs shift. Shoulders tense. Everyone flinches like they’ve been struck—but no one dares to speak. I take a step forward. Then another. I don’t shout. Don’t slam the table like they expect me to. That would be too easy. Instead, I speak low. Cold. Controlled like a wire stretched to the point of snapping.

“You want intel? Send someone trained. Someone who didn’t spend a year in a cell with chains for bracelets. Someone who doesn’t wake up at night gasping for air because she dreamed she was back in that fucking cage.”

I lean in closer, voice almost a whisper now.

“You want someone close to the Aviary? Maxine Andrade is not that someone. You leave her out of this.”

A file slides across the table. Photos spill out. And the second I see the top one, my world tilts.And that’s when I know. They’ve already decided.

Maxine is standing in front of her apartment. Head turned, keys in hand. Her eyes are wide, guarded. Alert. She knew. She felt it in her skin—someone watching her. Hunting her. Maybe someone other than me.

“These were taken during our surveillance of Ms Andrade,” Moffatt says. “You’ve been frequenting her place. We didn’t connect the dots at first, but now we know. You’ve been watching her for months.”

My hand shoots out before I can stop myself, snatching the photo. My fingers tremble. I spread the photos across the table like playing cards. One. Two. Dozens. Black-and-white stills. Grainy. Surveillance angle. Me. Watching her. Outside her apartment. Across the street from her university. Leaning against my car in the rain while her window lights up like home. Every angle. Every hour.

My throat tightens.

Moffatt’s voice is like a scalpel now. Calm. Controlled. Cruel.

“We’ve been watchingyouwatchher, Saxon.”

The room goes silent. I feel every eye on me. Like they’re waiting to see if I’ll implode or detonate.

“You’re compromised,” he continues. “You’ve been making decisions based on personal attachment. You disappeared from protocol the same week she moved out of the compound. You withheld intel. You diverted surveillance.”

“You’re reaching,” I say, voice gravelly.

But they’re not. And I know it.

“She’s a civilian,” Carson pipes in, tone clipped, like he’s reading from a manual. “You’ve turned her into a liability. And now you expect us to believe we shouldn’t use her as a resource?”

I drag my gaze across the table—slow, deliberate, almost bored. The kind of look that makes men forget their own names. One by one, they shift. Shoulders tighten. Throats clear. Averted eyes. Because this isn’t a conversation anymore. It’s an ambush. But they’ve got it backward. They think they’ve got me boxed in. Cornered. What they don’t realize is…I’m the one hunting.

But it’s disarming, I’ll give them that. The fact that they were surveilling Maxine without my knowledge? That tells me everything I need to know.

I’m burned. They’ve known for a while now. Known I’ve gone rogue. That I stepped out of line and never looked back. That I stopped being theirs the moment I let her in. And this? This is how the Bureau plays when they want to break you. They isolate. They box you in.

They aim straight for the softest part of you—and they twist.

They’re not just questioning my judgment. They’reweaponizingthe only person I’d die to protect. And if they think that’s going to scare me into submission? Then they’ve forgotten who the fuck I am.

“She’s part of an ongoing investigation into organized crime,” I say coldly. “One that goes deeper than this whole fucking task force wants to admit. You want me to compromise that for a shortcut?”

“No,” Carson says. “We want you to stop lying to yourself.”

He taps the stack of photos.

“You’re not protecting her. You’reobsessing. And that makes you dangerous.”

I breathe in slow. Controlled. Because the violence isright there. In my bones. In my blood. Sitting just beneath the surface of my skin, begging to be set loose.

“You’re not in control anymore,” Moffatt says, and there’s no smirk now. “And if you can’t prove you’re still useful, we’ll have you pulled off this case and have your clearance suspended.”

I stand slowly. Deliberately. And the air shifts.

“I’m the reason any of you are still sitting upright,” I say. “I’m the one who found the safehouses. Who leaked the auction footage. Who tracked Kadri’s shipments while you were too busy debating protocol.”

Carson shifts, but I don’t let him speak.

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