Page 4 of The Vagabond

SAXON - TWO YEARS AGO

T here’s a photograph buried beneath the weight of my case files.

Old. Warped. Fading at the corners like it’s trying to disappear the way she did. The ink has started to smudge, the paper curling inward like it's too tired to hold the memory anymore.

But her smile? It’s still intact. Bright. The way I will always remember her. Still fucking haunting.

Sienna North. Sixteen years old. Cheekbones like our mother. Eyes like mine. And a laugh that used to echo through the house like music we didn’t know we’d miss until it was gone.

She didn’t run away. She didn’t overdose. She didn’t vanish because she wanted to start over. She was taken. No note. No last call. No “be safe” or “I love you.” Just absence. Sharp. Clean. Merciless.

I spent months chasing shadows—through alleys, across borders, into backrooms that smelled of fury.

I broke down doors with a badge in one hand and vengeance in the other.

I threatened. I bribed. I begged. And when the answers came?

They didn’t come wrapped in justice. They came soaked in something so dark, I was throwing up for days.

Human trafficking.

That’s what they call it on the reports.

In the briefings. In the interviews I’ve been trained to deliver without flinching.

But what I found wasn’t trafficking. It was farming.

Girls—children—ripped from sidewalks and bedrooms and bus stops, processed like livestock.

Tagged. Catalogued. Auctioned off to the highest bidder.

If they were lucky, they were used. If they weren’t, they were stripped of organs. Of their dignity and existence.

They didn’t even get graves.

And when I finally clawed my way through the bureaucratic maze, dug deep enough, bled long enough, cracked enough encrypted files and eviscerated enough syndicates to reach the source?

One name sat at the top of that pyramid of suffering.

Polished. Untouched. Protected by layers of wealth and blood and silence.

Altin Kadri.

A man with a reputation so clean, the media called him a philanthropist. A man whose charities received government grants and whose hands orchestrated the loss of my sister—and thousands more.

He didn’t just take Sienna. He processed her. Filed her. Sold her. Fed her into a machine that ran on pain and profit. And I knew the second his name crossed my desk, smooth and glowing like the tip of a knife, that the system would never touch him.

So I stopped being part of the system. I offered myself up to something darker. A deep-cover infiltration into the very organization that fed men like Kadri. The Aviary. A network of criminals, traffickers, terrorists, and billionaires in tailored suits pretending they give a damn about the world.

The Bureau labeled them a domestic threat that needed neutralizing. And I volunteered. Said the right things. Signed the right forms. Lied when I had to.

They think I’m a rising star—sharp, focused, clean-cut enough for press interviews and polite enough to shake hands on Capitol Hill.

But I’m not here for medals. I’m here for the burn.

And as I walk deeper into the Aviary, pretending to align with monsters so I can slit their throats from the inside, only one thought keeps me sane:

When I find Altin Kadri? I won’t arrest him. I won’t bring him in for questioning. I will end him. Not just for Sienna. But for every girl who never came back.

They still called me a rising star back then. Agent Saxon North. Specialist in high-risk, deep-infiltration ops. Fluent in five languages. Decorated twice. On track for a desk at Quantico and a golden handshake into a leadership role before thirty-five.

That’s what the Bureau saw, when I only let them see what they wanted to see.

What they didn’t see—or didn’t want to admit—was the way I bled underneath the badge.

The way I stopped flinching when a body dropped.

The way I could look a trafficker in the eye, shake his hand, and walk away without blinking.

Because somewhere along the line, I stopped being a man pretending to be a monster.

And started being a monster pretending to be a man.

By the time they let me go dark for the Aviary, I was already halfway there. No handler. No partner. Just a burner phone, a black credit card, and orders to stay alive.

I moved through cities like a shadow, switching aliases the way most people changed clothes. One week I was a mid-level smuggler with a European passport. The next, I was brokering arms for a cell that didn’t technically exist .

Sometimes I wore a wire. Sometimes a knife. Most of the time, I wore nothing but rage under my skin and Sienna’s photo imprinted on my brain.

I lived in hotel rooms and slept with one eye open and a gun in the nightstand. Ate only when I had to. Trusted no one. Not even myself. And the thing is? I was good at it.

But you can’t fake that kind of darkness—not for long. You either become it, or it devours you.

The Bureau praised my efficiency. My cold precision. They liked that I didn’t get attached. That I could sit across from a man who sold children like cattle and smile while planning how best to erase him. But none of them knew the real reason I was so damn good at this.

I didn’t see them as people. The traffickers. The buyers. The ones running the logistics, laundering the money, greasing the political wheels. They were walking corpses. They just didn’t know it yet.

The lines blurred so fast I barely kept track of which lie I was wearing that week.

That’s when I first heard the Aviary’s name whispered in the quiet corners of a quiet room.

Not just a network. A system. With branches that stretched across countries, into boardrooms and embassies. Politicians. Philanthropists. Clergy.

It made the other cartels look like petty criminals. And it made the Bureau terrified.

They reclassified the Aviary as a terror-linked syndicate. Started shuffling files into restricted tiers. Slapped “do not pursue without authorization” across half my leads. Told me to “stay in my lane.”

So I did what I always do when they tell me to back off. I went deeper. Started following the money. The girls. The auction trails. Started making “friends” I hoped I’d one day bury .

I met a man named Timur in Prague who laughed while telling me how long a child could survive inside a shipping container without water. He said it like it was trivia.

I smiled back. Bought him a drink. Two weeks later, they found his body floating in the Vltava. Eyes gouged out. Teeth missing.

No one linked it to me. Untraceable. That’s the thing about ghosts. You can’t pin them down. But you always feel them coming. That’s who I was becoming. A ghost with a grudge. A weapon off the chain. And then… the first whisper of a girl.

Young. Pretty. American. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Sold at an underground auction then shipped off to her new owner; a man known only by a codename: The Architect. Aka Altin Kadri.

But then she vanished. No trail. No resale. No body. She was just gone. At the time, I didn’t know her name. But it wouldn’t be long before I found it scrawled on a purchase manifest in ink.

Maxine Andrade.

And I wouldn’t realize until it was too late that I’d already seen those eyes before. In my sister.

There’s this thing they tell you at Quantico—early, like week one.

“You’re not God. You don’t get to play executioner.”

It’s meant to keep you grounded. Keep your badge from turning into a crosshair.

It’s supposed to draw a line. A clear, bright line between justice and vengeance.

And for a while, I clung to that line like it meant something.

But lines blur in the field. Especially when the screams you’re chasing start sounding like your sister’s.

The first time I crossed it, I told myself it didn’t count.

The man was a trafficker. A recruiter. He had a girl in the trunk— barely breathing, wrists bound with zip ties that had carved through her skin.

He pulled a weapon, but I got a shot in first. The Bureau called it “clean.” Textbook.

Heroic, even. But there was nothing clean about it.

After that, the line got harder to see. Each op bled into the next. One body. Then three. Then five. All of them tied to the Aviary. All of them ghosts like me, only I was hunting my way back toward the light. Or that’s what I told myself.

I started choosing the assignments no one else wanted—the ones that came with too many unknowns and too much paperwork. Missions that didn’t guarantee a clean exit or a clear conscience.

In Mexico, I helped stage a cartel infighting massacre just to smoke out a buyer linked to the Aviary. Seventeen men died. When I only needed one.

In Poland, I held a man over a rooftop by his tie and asked him how much he paid for redheads, because he had a penchant for such girls. I only let him go when he gave me his answer.

They called it a suicide. I called it balance.

I kept telling myself I was still doing good. Still working for the Bureau. Still answering to something higher than hurt. But then came the night in Paris.

The girl’s name was Ava. Thirteen years old.

No parents. No papers. Sold three times before anyone even noticed she was missing.

When I found her, she was barely alive. When I found him—the man who’d bought her—I didn’t bring him in.

I didn’t read him his rights. I just tied him to a chair and left him in a room with the father of another girl who hadn’t survived. Then I walked out.

That was the night that I stopped pretending.

That was the night I realized I wasn’t wearing the badge anymore.

I was wearing vengeance. And the thing about revenge is.

.. it’s addictive. It doesn’t whisper. It roars.

It promises closure, but all it delivers is fire.

And I let it consume me. Because the more I killed, the quieter the screaming got. Not the girls. Not the monsters.

Sienna.

Her voice faded a little more each time I took another one of them off the board.

I told myself I was doing it for the girls I couldn’t save.

For the ones still out there. For the ones whose names I never learned.

But the truth? It wasn’t about them. It was about me.

About the hole inside me that only filled up with violence.

About the fact that I didn’t feel guilty after that rooftop in Poland.

I felt peaceful. And that’s when I knew that there was no coming back from this.

The line between justice and revenge wasn’t blurry anymore. It was gone. And I was never going to wear that badge the same way again.