Page 27 of Maddening Fixation

No bars. No guards counting my every breath.

I should have felt free.

Instead...

My thoughts returned to a broken window. To blood spreading across ancient stone.

To a seventeen-year-old girl who had trusted me to protect her.

The ache never faded.

It simply learned to wait.

The silence broke when Keegan cleared his throat.

“Boss...”

His voice carried an unfamiliar hesitation. “We’ve received another report.”

My gaze shifted toward the rear-view mirror.

“Speak.”

The single word came out like a growl.

Keegan met my eyes through the mirror. “Yarina’s at Flynn Manor.”

Everything inside me stopped.

The rage. The memories.

Even my breathing.

“...What?”

My voice became dangerously quiet.

“Our people confirmed it two minutes ago.”

Keegan swallowed. “Your brother personally invited her to tonight’s family dinner.”

Blood trickled between my fingers.

I hadn’t even realized how tightly I was clenching my fists.

Yarina.

Her name alone reached into the deepest part of me and tore open a wound I had spent ten years trying to bury.

She had been mine long before the prison walls swallowed me.

The fierce Russian woman who had stormed into my life like wildfire, refusing to fear my name, my family, or the violence that surrounded us.

She had loved me when I was nothing more than a troubled nineteen-year-old desperate to escape the life I’d been born into.

And when the Flynn family buried me alive inside Ravencliff...

She hadn’t walked away.