Page 50 of The Vagabond

MAXINE

T he walls hum with change.

Something’s coming. I can feel it in my bones—the kind of pressure that settles in your marrow when a storm’s about to hit. The kind that makes animals flee and people pray. The air is too still, the silence too deliberate, like the world’s holding its breath just for me.

I haven’t stopped hoping. Because I have to make it out of here. Not for vengeance. For life. For me. For everything I’ve never had but still believe I deserve.

And Saxon…God, Saxon.

If I close my eyes, I can see him. Not in a dreamlike way. Not like a ghost or a memory. He’s real to me. Anchor and edge and everything in between.

I’ve loved him since that first moment I saw him at Kadri’s palace—undercover, dressed like he belonged there, standing in that marble hallway like he owned the fucking world.

I didn’t even know who he was then. But I knew what he was.

Danger. Salvation. The calm eye in a storm that could swallow me whole.

I didn’t want to trust him. But I did. And now?

I love him. I love him with the kind of desperation that keeps me alive in the dark.

The kind that says: I want a life with you, even if I don’t know what that looks like yet.

I want to survive for him. But also with him.

I want to go back. Not to who I was—but to who I could be.

The girl who laughs without effort. The girl who watches the sun rise and doesn’t wonder constantly if it will be her last. I want a porch with peeling paint and a stubborn wind chime.

I want a kitchen that smells like burnt toast and second chances.

I want kids. Loud, chaotic, messy love. I want gray hair and soft hands and a garden I can ruin with flowers I never remember to water.

I want peace. Not just escape. Not just survival. Peace.

I want to see the world in color again. Not just shades of fear and blood. I want to look at people and believe they’re good. I want to believe in something that doesn’t come with handcuffs and cages.

I want to stop dreaming of dark places. I want to wake up to light.

And if Saxon is out there—if he’s coming for me—I’ll hold on.

I’ll fight. I’ll tear my skin apart on these chains if I have to.

Because I believe in him. Because I believe in us.

Because maybe, just maybe, a 22-year-old girl who’s seen too much can still dream of something better. Not perfect. Just something real.

A porch. A child. A laugh. A hand in mine.

And Saxon. Always Saxon.

Kadri’s Palace. Albania. Then.

The palace wasn’t really a palace. It was a gilded cage with marble floors and velvet drapes.

It reeked of power and dirty money—and all the things that evil tries to disguise itself as.

I remember the chill of the air conditioning against my bare shoulders.

There was an ache in my spine from heels I was forced to wear, and the weight of a diamond collar pressing against my throat like a sentence.

I was supposed to be seen, not heard. I was supposed to keep my head down and my eyes blank. But I looked up anyway. And that’s when I saw him.

He stood near the double doors—broad-shouldered, calm, too quiet for someone surrounded by wolves. His suit was black. Perfect. Understated in a way that didn’t belong to Kadri’s usual crowd. No flash. No gold. Just lethal elegance and contained power.

He wasn’t trying to impress. He was observing. Measuring. His eyes coasting over everything and everyone in the room, as though cataloguing his surroundings.

I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know his name. But my pulse stopped. Just for a second. A breath. And then it slammed back into rhythm with a vengeance, like my heart realized it had been caught sleeping and wanted to make up for lost time.

He looked at me. Not like the other men did—leering, weighing, hungry.

He looked at me like he saw through the glitter, through the collar, through the number I’d been reduced to.

And that terrified me. Because I didn’t know what was more dangerous—the men who wanted to own me, or the man who looked like he might see me.

He didn’t smile or blink. He just… watched. And in that one, suspended moment, I felt something stir inside me that I thought had died.

Hope. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t safe. But it was alive.

And I think that’s when it started. The knowing. The pull. The impossible thread between us that stretched across that room, through the years, through every inch of pain that came after.

I didn’t know his name that night. But I think I loved him anyway.

The memory fades, but it doesn’t leave me in one piece.

It lingers—like a fingerprint smeared across glass, visible only when the light hits just right. Like the echo of a name I still whisper when I’m half-asleep and bleeding out inside, clinging to the edges of consciousness like it might tether me to something real.

Saxon.

Even now, bruised and broken in ways no one can see, I feel him like a phantom limb.

I don’t know where he is—if he’s halfway across the world or right outside the walls of this hell. But I know him. I know the way his mind works, the way guilt eats him alive in slow, deliberate bites.

If he’s breathing, he’s looking for me. And if he’s looking, he’s coming. Because Saxon North doesn’t lose people.

And if I die here—chained, discarded, a body cooling in the dark—it’ll be with his name on my lips and his face burned behind my eyes.

Like a prayer. Like a curse. The last thing I ever loved.

Maybe that’s supposed to be a comfort. But it’s not.

Because I don’t want to die with him in my mind like a ghost that never let go.

I want to live. I want a life that isn’t written in blood or trauma or regret. I want him in my arms, not just in my memories. I want to wake up to the sound of his voice—not the screams of my past.

I want to grow old with him beside me, silver at his temples and my hand still in his, like we made it out, like the world didn’t get to win.

I want a real fucking life. I want it all. The mundane. The messy. The morning coffee and late-night arguments. The kind of life people write bad poetry about.

Is that too much to ask? Maybe .

But I’m asking anyway. Because hope is the only thing they haven’t yet figured out how to kill in me.