Page 1

THE PRESENT
In the end, we are not saved.
We are not healed.
We are simply here —
Scarred and unrepentant,
Holding on to each other
With trembling hands,
And whispering into the night:
“If the dark comes for us again,
It will have to tear us apart,
Piece by piece.”
1
MAXINE
The key sticks in the lock.
Figures. First day of freedom, and the damn door won’t even let me in. I jiggle it, harder this time, until it finally gives with a loud click. The sound echoes down the empty hallway like a gunshot, sharp and final. I step inside. Alone.
No guards. No drivers. No Brando. No one watching every breath I take like I might shatter if I exhale too hard.
The apartment is small. Clean. Impersonal. Pale walls and pale light. A secondhand couch. It's small. It's plain. But it's mine. And for now, that's enough.
I drop the last of my bags by the door, heart pounding like I just ran here instead of riding in silence for thirty-two minutes with my brother-in-law Brando glowering in the driver’s seat like he was escorting me to my own execution.
He didn’t say much. His disappointment crackled between us like static, burning into my skin. But I meant what I said.
“If you don’t let me have this,” I’d whispered to him, voice trembling, “I’ll hate you forever.”
His jaw clenched. “Don’t say that.”
“I will. I swear to God, I will. I’ll never forgive you if you take this from me.”
His silence said it all. Because Brando loves me like I’m cracked porcelain. Like if he doesn’t protect me, I’ll slip through his fingers again, back into the kind of darkness we don’t say out loud. And maybe he’s not wrong. But I can’t live under lock and key anymore—not even golden ones. I need to know who I am when no one’s watching.
I toe off my shoes and pad barefoot into the center of the room. The air smells like sunlight and new beginnings. Raw and unshaped.
I’ve spent the last year in trauma therapy. I’ve screamed. Cried. Sat in silence for hours trying to remember how to breathe in a world where men like my jailer Altin Kadri exist. I’ve talked about what it was like to be owned. What it was like to be handed to someone like a toy and told to smile.
I’ve talked abouthim, too. The Fed. The one who broke my heart. The one who whispered I’ll get you out even as he undid his belt, even as Kadri leaned back on his throne of sin and watched.
Saxon North, aka Devon Walsh. My ghost. My shame. My lifeline. I hated him. I worshipped him. And I never forgot him.
He vanished before my heart could heal. And when I saw him again—months later, in a prison waiting room when I was visiting my uncle Mason, my knees buckled. Not out of fear, but from betrayal. Because I’d spent nights dreaming of his face while I lay in chains, believing that he would come back for me, save me from the nightmare I was living in. But he never came back. And still, I never forgot him.
I’ve seen him a few times now; he has a nasty habit of turning up at the most inopportune times. On my uncle’s doorstep, at the hospital after my uncle’s girlfriend was snatched and assaulted. He’s just everywhere. And yet, he’s no-where.
I shake the thought away. It’s not today’s problem. He’s a ghost from my ugly past, and the past has no place in the present.