Page 215 of Sage Haven
And for the first time, the world felt quiet.
Like maybe peace wasn’t a place.
Maybe it was a person.
And somehow, I had found him.
Maybe—just maybe—that’s where love begins.
In the wreckage. In the uncertainty.
In the hope that this time... it’s real.
48
REICH
My heart waged waragainst my head. A ceaseless, merciless battle that tore me apart from the inside out.
Every breath I took was another skirmish, every second another wound, my soul stripped away piece by piece in an endless, unwinnable struggle.
My mind clung to logic.
To reason. To duty. To the ENA. To the cold, ruthless practicality that had governed my life for as long as I could remember.
The work. The mission. The cause.
All of it had been my tether. My reason for existing. My justification for every fucked up thing I’d done along the way.
But my heart?
My heart only wanted to fight for her.
I couldn’t let Sage become an obstacle.
I told myself that over and over, as if repetition alone would make it true.
As if I could rewire myself to believe that the right choice was the one, I wasn’t used to making.
But it wasn’t working.
Not anymore.
Because before her, I had made mistakes—small, fatal errors that still haunted me in the quiet moments when I couldn’t run fast enough from the ghosts.
And now?
Now, every breath I took without her close felt like a mistake in itself.
Every decision that didn’t end with her safe, with her breathing, with her here, felt like another weight dragging me further under.
I couldn’t silence the part of me that saw her not as a distraction—but as a necessity.
Because that’s what she was.
Essential. The only thing that made sense anymore.
For so long, I had carried hollowness inside me, convinced that emptiness was my natural state.
