Forbidden Forever

Chapter One
Sasha

For a moment, I can’t move. I can’t register what’s actually happening or reconcile it in my head.

I’ve heard gunshots before. Of course, I have. Most of them have terrified me. Some, like the one I heard when Viktor put a bullet through the head of the man who violated me, have made me feel good. Relieved. Happy, even.

There’s nothing good about this sound. 

Part of me thinks I’m hallucinating it. That I’ve finally, completely lost my mind. That it broke when Max walked out of the library, a ring in his pocket for another woman.

Max.

I don’t know how long I sat on the floor, crying, but I know that by now, he’s in the ballroom at the other end of the house. Maybe he’s asked her to marry him already. Adriana, the beautiful brunette who can never be a threat to his vows because he doesn’t want her. He doesn’t love her.

Not like he wants and loves me.

Maybe he hasn’t had a chance yet. But one thing I’m sure of, as I sit there shaking, is that the gunshot came from there.

If I sit very still, if I don’t move, maybe none of this will be real. Maybe it’s all a nightmare, and I’ll wake up.

I’ve thought that many times before. A coping mechanism, my therapist calls it. I’d thought it when rough hands held me down over shipping crates, tearing at my clothes, when flesh that I didn’t want touching mine invaded me anyway. I’d thought it when I felt the bite of leather cracking over my thighs again and again, tearing at my flesh, welting it, making me hurt and burn and bleed.

I’d thought it when I held two crying children in a cold upstairs bedroom, waiting to find out if the men who’d come to save me–us–would succeed in doing so.

Max was one of those men. And even though I know that, if that gunshot was meant for him, there’s probably nothing I can do to save him, even though I know that I’m nothing against the kind of evil men who are after him and me, I find myself struggling to my feet anyway.

I feel wrung out, drained, after crying so hard and for so long. My chest feels empty, as if my heart has dissolved and leaked out of me drops at a time. I feel numb as I walk unsteadily towards the door of the library, unsure of what I’ll find outside of it, like emerging from a bubble back into the world.

When I step out into the hall, I hear screams. Shouts. Cries.

Another gunshot, more screams. I feel myself shrink back, pressing myself against the hard wood of the wall, my heart racing with a fear that I’d almost managed to make myself forget.

Max wouldn’t want you to go that way. He’d want you to run. Escape. Save yourself.

I could go to my right, and flee towards the front door. I don’t know to where, exactly, but I’d be going in the opposite direction of the violence. I know it’s what he’d tell me to do.

But I can’t leave him.

Men in black suits with guns drawn go rushing down the hall toward the ballroom. They don’t see or notice me, pale and thin in the shadows, shuddering back away from the sounds that I know all too well.

One foot in front of the other, I follow them. 

The first thing I smell, at the doorway to the ballroom, is blood.

I know the scent, sharp and metallic, the way it sticks to the back of your throat and never completely leaves. Once you smell it, hot and freshly spilled, you know the scent of it forever. Once you’ve seen it, you can never completely get the sight out of your head.

When I think of spilled blood, I think of Max’s hands reaching for me, and the knowledge that I was safe. That he had stepped between me and what was coming for me and ensured that it would never, never touch me again.

I’d thought I was safe after that. I’d thought Alexei was the last terror I’d have to face. 

I’d been so very, very wrong.

I see him first, as I hover there.

He’s standing in the middle of the dance floor, a ring of people around him, some collapsed, others holding each other, others standing there in shock. The room itself is in shambles–buffet tables overturned, broken glass and china everywhere, tables and chairs scattered and broken. And in the center of it all, in front of Max, is a body.

A red dress. Brunette hair. A hand outflung, blood leaking out from beneath, only slightly darker than the dress, as if it’s not blood at all, just the fabric melting outwards over the wood. And there, glittering on the dark wood next to her fingers, a blood-spattered diamond ring.

As if he feels me there, as if there’s no way for us to be in the same room without one knowing the other is there, Max looks up and sees me standing in the doorway, pale-faced and trembling.

I see his mouth make the shape of my name, but no sound comes out.

Security is rushing towards him. He gestures towards the back of the room. It’s then that I see that the glass doors leading from the ballroom to the outside aren’t open, but shattered. Glass is everywhere, sparkling over the wood from the lights inside and out, but the black-garbed men don’t notice. They run over it, the crunching filling the air as they pursue the source of the gunshot, the source of the blood.

The source of everything that has changed in the space of a moment. 

Max crouches down near the body, and I see a hand shoot out, grabbing his shoulder and dragging him to his feet. A barrel-chested man that I don’t recognize steps out of the gathered sea of gowns and suits, with iron-grey hair and a violent expression on his face. 

They’re too far away for me to hear, with the sound of my heart roaring in my ears, the crying of the guests blocking it out, but I can see that they’re arguing. I can see Max waving his hands, gesturing to the body, but it seems to be doing nothing at all to calm the man down.

I catch a glint of silver as a gun appears in his hand from under his jacket. The barrel suddenly pressed against Max’s stomach as the hand on Max’s shoulder yanks him closer to the grey-haired man.

My feet move without my telling them to, the world slowing down around me as I fling myself into the room, running towards Max. It is a nightmare now, the kind where you have to get somewhere but your feet are weighed down, where you can’t run, where the world moves so slowly that there’s no getting there in time.

Max wore a cream-colored shirt tonight, under a charcoal grey suit, one of the few times I’ve seen him in something other than black. I watch the blood blossom across it as the gunshot fills the room, the crowd screaming and shrinking back as Max falls to his knees next to the body in the red dress, his face shocked and pale.

I make it to his side just as he crumples to the floor, flinging myself down next to him, my hands on his cheeks. I see her now, the face attached to the body, the woman in the red dress. 

Adriana Casciani. The woman he was meant to get engaged to tonight. 

“No,” I whisper, my heartbeat pounding in my head, drowning out everything else. “No, Max! No, do you hear me? You can’t die next to her.” I press myself against the front of him, stroking his hair, his face, as I feel him reach feebly for me and fail. “You’re supposed to die next to me, fifty years from now when we’re both old and gray. Do you understand me? That’s how this is supposed to go. I don’t care what you said earlier, that’s how it’s meant to be. That’s how we’re meant to be.”

I’d thought I didn’t have any tears left in me, but they’re streaming down my face now, dripping onto Max’s face. His lips part, his hazel eyes wide with shock and pain, but he can’t seem to make a sound.

“Please,” I whisper, the word coming out strangled by my tears. “The last thing you ever say to me can’t be goodbye. Please. Please, Max, please–”

I feel hands on my shoulders, dragging me backward, and I scream. It’s an animal sound, desperate and terrified, my hands clinging to Max, but I’m not strong enough. I can’t see if he’s still breathing as I’m pulled back, if his wide-open eyes have any sight left in them. I can’t even see who’s pulling me away, as I thrash in their grip, desperate to get back to the man I love, to make sure that the last thing he sees is me, and not the woman who almost stole him away from me.

I shouldn’t hate someone who’s dead, but I do. I hate her for being the reason this party happened at all, for being the last person to hear Max’s voice, for being the reason he’s bleeding out on the floor now–because I feel absolutely certain that the grey-haired man who shot Max has something to do with her, that it’s all connected somehow.

“No!” I scream it over and over again, my heels catching on the wood, one shoe tearing off as I’m slung over a shoulder, fists beating against a back I don’t recognize, muscled arms I’ve never felt before holding me down. I see the crowd close in around Max and Adriana, and my throat feels raw with screaming already, my head aching as if it might burst, but I can’t stop.

“Shut her up,” I hear a growling voice say from behind me, the words cutting through my fear and panic, and I start to thrash harder, trying to get away.

Not again, not again, not again! The words tear through my head, pushing away any logic, any rational thought. All I can feel is terror, reminding me of what it feels like to be captured, held, caged, and I don’t think I can stand it again. 

Especially not in a world where Max is gone. 

Footsteps circle around the man holding me over his shoulder. I see black leather shoes and dark, crisply ironed pants. A hand closes over the back of my neck as I try to raise my head to see who it is, long-fingered and strong, and then I see another hand with a syringe in it. The needle glints in the light, a droplet of liquid shimmering at the end, and the scream that comes from me is like nothing I’ve ever heard. It tears from my throat, bringing pain and the taste of blood, and I wrench in the grasp of the arm clutching me, kicking hard.

“Fuck this shit.” The man holding me swings me suddenly, throwing me down onto the floor. The back of my head cracks against the wood, the room swimming above me, a sickening swirl of color and light as I see the now-blurred shape of the man with the needle kneeling down next to me. The hard sole of a boot presses against my throat, and I moan with pain.

“You shouldn’t have fought so hard, mia bella,” a smooth voice says, a voice that I think I recognize. But I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything anymore. It’s all happened so fast, minutes that have stretched out into what feels like an eternity. As the needle slides into my throat, I find myself hoping that it’s poison, that it’s something meant to kill me, to end all of this.

I can’t bear any more pain or fear. I can’t live in a world without Max. And I feel, with a crushing certainty as the darkness swoops up to claim me, that he’s gone.

I’ll never see the man I love again.