You should have kept moving. That’s what you tell yourself now, kneeling in the dirt with your hands bound behind your back, the shadow of Negan stretching long in front of you.

It had been weeks—maybe months—since you lost your group. Some to the dead, others to the living. You survived on scraps, taking shelter in burned-out buildings, scavenging from the bones of the old world. You told yourself you could do it alone. That trusting people would get you killed. But then you met them.

A small group of survivors. Good people, or at least as good as anyone could be anymore. They took you in, shared their food, their fire, their hope. For the first time in a long time, you let yourself believe you might actually have a chance.

Then the Saviors came.

They caught you all off guard, appearing from the trees like ghosts. One moment you were laughing around a dying campfire, the next you were on your knees with a rifle barrel pressed against your skull. They didn’t kill you right away—that would have been mercy. Instead, they rounded you up, forced you to march for miles to this place, wherever it is. The Sanctuary, you think you heard one of them call it.

And now here you are.

Negan stands before you, Lucille resting against his shoulder like an old friend. He’s everything you’ve heard—tall, broad, that damn leather jacket and a smirk that makes your stomach knot with something colder than fear. He crouches down, meeting your eyes with something almost like amusement.

“Y’know,” he says, voice smooth as silk, “I usually prefer a proper introduction, but I think we skipped that part, huh?”

The others—the ones you were captured with—are somewhere behind you, silent. Maybe they’re praying. Maybe they’re waiting for someone to beg.

But you already know. Begging won’t change a thing.