Read Forbidden for Free Online

even more surreal than the first. These images were not meant to exist. Not in real life, not in front of any decent man’s eyes, not in his home.
    The guardsman with the blade glanced over his shoulder, saw Rom, and turned to face him.
    “There you are.” He was a thick-faced man with flat lips and dark eyebrows, holding the knife as if it were a natural extension of his arm. “Bring her out!”
    Two other guardsmen, also bearing knives, hauled his mother around the corner, each holding her up by one of her arms. Her dress was red from a trail of blood that flowed from a three-inch gash in her right cheek.
    This was his mother, frozen by terror. Gone was her customary cloak of wisdom or any pretence of surety. She was visibly shaking in their grasp.
    “Rom…” Her lips, stretched thin, were quivering. Her eyes pleaded as though she were a child.
    The door behind Rom opened, and with a quick glance he saw that two more men had entered the house. He was surrounded.
    “Please don’t let them kill me!” She hung between the guards, her words devolving into terrified sobs.
    Rom saw it all in still frames, the inevitability of it all. He was going to die. As was his mother.
    Oddly, for the moment at least, Rom felt no fear. He felt nothing at all.
    “You feel that, boy?” The thick-faced guard lifted his blade and pressed it to his mother’s throat. “You feel the fingers of fear wrapping around your heart?”
    Blood seeped over the blade’s edge where it bit into the skin of her neck.
    “You feel it because you have no doubt that what you see with your own eyes will also happen to you.”
    Fear found Rom like a fist to the throat.
    “I know because we all feel the same,” the thick-faced man said. And indeed, there was the glint of fear in his gaze. “We all have our ways of serving the Order. Mine is to help you do the right thing. Where is the package?”
    Though his mother begged for her life, he knew he could not affect her journey, especially when surrounded by so many guardsmen. So then it was not his concern and she would surely find Bliss.
    His own journey might still lay ahead of him, but he knew these men had no intention of letting him live, box or no box.
    “Tell me,” the man repeated.
    His mother’s eyes pleaded. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Please, please. I don’t want to die. Rom!”
    He was going to die! Panic crowded his mind. He was going to die and the thought of death, so close, rode him like a monster more powerful and vicious than any he’d known to exist. His body began to tremble.
    “You’re flaunting Order, boy! No?” The guard calmly sawed into his mother’s throat, severing her scream along with her arteries and at least part of her spinal cord. Her body went limp like a thing unplugged.
    The other two released her arms.
    Rom lost his mind to fear before she hit the floor, while the man who’d killed her still had his back to him. He threw himself forward, crashing into the back of one man who stood in his way. The guardsman fell into one of those who’d held his mother, putting them both off balance.
    But Rom wasn’t keeping track. He was simply getting out. Over his mother’s body, into the living room, through the front door before any of the guards could collect themselves.
    Only then did he manage to string together enough reason to form logical thought. To realize that the only thing in the world that interested these men now was the box.
    The box was his only leverage.
    Rom ducked to his left, around the house toward the workshop. With any luck they would pursue him out the front while he made for the back of the house.
    Shouts reached him as he sprinted through the workshop door. Then he was inside and across the room, skidding and nearly going down as he grabbed the box from where he’d dropped it.
    He regained his balance and ran out of the workshop. They were coming, rounding on him from the side of the house in the falling darkness. He wheeled left and