Page 68 of Sage Haven
And I came undone.
Something about the way she said it and what that did to me.
It begged to destroy me.
My control, already hanging by a thread, snapped with a single syllable from her lips.
One look from her and every wall I had constructed with painstaking precision collapsed like sand under a rising tide.
And in that moment, I knew.
She was a danger to me in ways she could never comprehend.
She was the flaw in my system.
The variable I hadn’t accounted for.
And I couldn’t let her in.
Not until I had answers.
Not until she was mine.
Once she was under my protection, under my roof, in my bed—I would get them.
Every answer she didn’t even know she carried.
Every truth she’d buried to survive.
I’d uncover all of it.
Because I knew enough about Klay and his family to understand that their involvement with her was no accident.
The bounty made that clear.
A price on her head high enough to tempt the worst kind of men.
And Klay wasn’t just another piece of shit with too much power and not enough conscience.
He had to be obsessed.
Fixated.
And you don’t get that way unless there’s something you’re hiding.
Something you can’t afford to lose.
His loose end.
The key to something he was desperate to bury.
And I was going to extract it from her.
No matter what it cost.
Of course, there was always the small possibility—the shadow of doubt gnawing at the edges of my logic—that she was working with him.
That this was a setup from the beginning.
