Page 35 of The Vagabond

SAXON

I know something’s off the second I step into the office.

The silence is too practiced, too polite. Everyone suddenly forgets how to look me in the eye.

I find Dorsey in his usual spot—corner office, blinds half-closed, a coffee that’s probably on its third reheat. He doesn’t look up when I walk in.

As Special Agent in Charge, he runs the field office with an iron fist and a steel spine, the kind of man who doesn’t blink at death threats or department scandals.

But he keeps his agents on a short leash—and mine’s always been the tightest. Probably because I’m the one most likely to chew through it.

“You wanted to see me.”

“Close the door, North.”

Fuck.

I sit, and it feels like a funeral. He doesn’t acknowledge me right away.

Instead, he sits behind his desk, pretending to focus on whatever’s glowing on his monitor.

Fingers tapping the keys in a slow, deliberate rhythm—like he wants me to feel every second tick by.

Letting the silence stretch. An obvious power play .

I don’t move or speak. Nor do I give him the satisfaction of looking uncomfortable. But inside? There’s a familiar pull low in my gut. That heavy, circling dread you get right before the knife lands. And when he finally looks up, slow and measured, his eyes meet mine—and that’s when I know.

I don’t need him to say it. Because his face tells me everything I already feared. This isn’t a conversation. It’s an execution.

My pulse doesn’t spike. My breath doesn’t catch. I’ve been trained too well for that. Still, something punches low in my gut.

“Saxon,” Dorsey says carefully, like he’s choosing every word with tweezers. “We’re running out of time. Kadri’s empire is cracking, and if we don’t move fast, we lose the whole window.”

He pauses—lets it hang like that somehow makes it sound like a strategy instead of a betrayal.

“This isn’t personal,” he adds, which is exactly what people say right before they make things very personal.

“What are you saying?”

“I’ve been told,” Dorsey says, tone flat, “that you’re resisting the advice to use the Andrade girl as our access point into the Aviary.”

He doesn’t even flinch when he says it— the Andrade girl —like she’s just another asset. Not a survivor. Not a human being. Just a means to an end. Like she’s not the reason I still show up to this hellhole every day instead of burning it down. I’m not okay with feeding her back to the wolves.

“She is not an option,” I snarl. “She is not a fucking bargaining chip.”

“She was part of his inner circle?—”

“She was a hostage!” I thunder. “She was raped. Drugged. Passed around like property. And now you want her to relive it for your damn task force?!”

“She survived. She knows things. She’s seen faces. She can give us vital intel. ”

“That’s not the song you were singing when you pulled me out of Albania more than a year ago!” I remind him.

“You know why I did that.”

“She survived and she got out - without our help, ” I remind him . “And now you’re pissing on that!”

There’s another silence.

“You’re too close to this, Saxon.”

My voice drops low enough to be a threatening promise.

“I spent six months buried in Albania for this task force,” I snap. “Watched kids in cages get sold and had to turn a blind eye. I watched girls overdose in brothels while we waited for ‘legal leverage.’ You know what I got for it? A half-burned alias and a bullet scar in my goddamn side.”

Dorsey leans back, calm as can be.

“You volunteered.”

“No,” I growl, “I believed. I thought this was bigger than me. That we were doing something good. And now what? I’m tainted because I showed basic fucking humanity to one girl?”

“Because you got too close to one girl.”

I clench my jaw.

“I’m not the one who signed off on sending agents to her door without my knowledge. I’m not the one pulling strings behind my back. And you’ve got the balls to question my loyalty?”

“You made yourself a liability.”

“I made myself useful.”

“You made yourself disposable,” he snaps, and the way he says it—so casual, so sure—it settles into my bones like frostbite. I don’t even flinch. Because in that moment, it’s clear. Crystal fucking clear. We’re never going to see eye to eye on this. Ever.

He looks at me and sees recklessness. A liability.

A man who went rogue because of emotion, because of her .

But me? I see every scar I earned crawling through the Bureau’s dirtiest corridors.

I see years of silence and sleepless nights, of selling off little pieces of myself just to keep wearing that badge.

Of bleeding for a country that never bled for me.

I gave them everything. My time. My conscience.

My soul. And now? Now I’ve become disposable.

Cast aside like the mission never mattered.

Like all I ever was… was a tool they used until the edge dulled, until the blade slipped and cut too deep.

Now they’re tossing me out, not because I failed—but because I cared .

Because I gave a damn about a girl the Bureau labeled a “complication” instead of a victim .

Because I burned down the wrong empire without asking for permission.

Because I made noise in a system that only rewards silence.

He thinks I made myself disposable? No. Our goals were just never aligned.

“I won’t let you use her as your in to the Aviary.”

“You’re officially on restricted duty. No field work. No clearance.”

A sharp laugh slips out before I can stop it—bitter, jagged, laced with disbelief. It scrapes up my throat like something half-dead finally trying to claw its way free. Cold. Joyless.

“You really think I’m going to stop this war because you clipped my wings?”

Now I don’t have to pretend to give a fuck about your rules.

“I think you’re going to do what you’ve always done, Saxon.”

“And what’s that?”

“Break the rules. Then act surprised when you bleed for it.”

He pushes a folder across the desk. My official reassignment. Office work. Paper trails. Nothing that creates waves. I don’t touch it. I just stand. Slow. Controlled. One last look around the office I used to consider safe ground.

“Tell them whatever you want,” I say, already turning to the door. “But if anyone touches her—if anyone so much as looks at her the wrong way—there’s not a piece of protocol in the world that’ll protect them. ”

And then I leave. Because I’ve already made my choice. The Bureau made me a weapon. Now they get to live with what happens when they lose control of it.

I never should’ve touched her again. But I did. And one taste? Was never going to be enough. Not when it was her. Not when every broken piece of me recognized every broken piece of her and still wanted more.

Because now that I’ve had her— really had her—with no lies between us, no threats pressing in from all sides, no deals keeping me leashed… now that I’ve tasted her skin and watched her come undone beneath me, whispering my name like it was the only truth left in the world? Now I’m ruined.

I’ve felt her fall apart in my hands like a secret finally set free. I’ve heard her gasps, her cries— that sound she makes when she lets go and thinks, for just one breathless second, that the world might not hurt her anymore. And that sound? That sound fucking branded me.

Now I know, with horrifying, bone-deep certainty, that she’s mine.

Until the end of the goddamn world. And that makes this a problem.

A very dangerous one. Because loving Maxine Andrade isn’t soft.

It isn’t gentle. It’s not something you do and then forget about like it didn’t rearrange your molecular structure.

It’s the kind of love that redefines gravity.

That warps reality. That takes a man like me—already unhinged—and snaps the last bolt loose.

It’s the kind of love that costs blood. That causes you to lose sleep.

The kind that costs entire identities. And I don’t care.

I should. I really should. But all I’m doing is planning how to kill the next man who looks at her like she’s anything other than untouchable. My Maxine. Not in the romantic sense. Not in the poetic, sunrise and poetry bullshit sense.

In the feral, possessive, tear-out-your-throat-and-burn-your-life-to-the-ground sense.

She’s the itch I’ll never be able to scratch out. The fire I walked straight into knowing it would eat me alive. And still, I want more.

So yeah. I touched her. I claimed her. And now?

There’s no going back. Because obsession this deep doesn’t dissolve.

It calcifies. And when the next threat comes—because it will —I won’t be thinking like an agent.

I’ll be thinking like a man with nothing left to lose except her.

And that’s a fucking problem. For everyone else.

I don’t know when the shift happened. When the job stopped being the point and she started being the only goddamn thing anchoring me to this life.

Maybe it was back in that visitor’s room at the prison where her uncle was holed up—when she looked at me like I was both her ghost and her executioner.

Or maybe it was even earlier. In that gilded hellhole where she first saw through me, beneath the cover story, beneath the lies.

Her silence that first night I met her didn’t scream. It scarred .

But it doesn’t matter when it happened. What matters is that it’s here. It’s now. And it’s carved into my fucking bones.

She’s in my bloodstream. In my breath. Wired into every trigger-pull and heartbeat like a memory I didn’t ask for—but can’t live without.

I’ve tried to walk away. Christ, I’ve tried. Tried to let her go. To let her build something soft, something safe, with the people who’ve taken her in like family. But every time I shut my eyes, she’s there.