Page 55 of Prohibited

Chapter nineteen

Evie

Evie was dreaming again.

Sweeping purple skies over dark, troubling waters that churned violently from within. The sky broke apart as she watched and smoke began to seep out, streaming over the water and choking her as it filled the world, horizon to cloud.

The caustic bitterness of it settled into her throat and caused her to cough, burned her nostrils and set the small fluttering of panic starting in her throat.

She was in France. The forest was on fire before her. She stood staring at it, mouth open. Her hair fluttered across her eyes and swarmed into her mouth while she tried to untangle herself from it.

“Go, go!” A soldier caught her up by the shoulders and shoved her hard toward the tide of soldiers and Red Cross volunteers fleeing the ambush. “Don’t just stand there, you’re going to get yourself killed!”

Another bomb fell and the explosion rocked her from the inside out, woke up the hypnotized animal inside her and she ran, ran like a rabbit with a wolf at its heels.

There was the water again, the purple waves boiled before her and she shifted back and forth, prepared to feel their agitated movements but found herself on startlingly solid ground. The burning trees. The falling soldiers. The drone of airplanes.

She stumbled to her knees and looked down, her belly growing more and more distended by the second. Something hot and wet began to gush between her thighs. She reached between her legs and brought her hand up, black with blood.

Not the baby, too.

She tried to scream, but nothing came out. She tried again and again, but all sound was bleached from her terror. She was helpless. Helpless.

Another cough came and began to stir the dream until it fragmented and began to fall away.

With a surge of adrenaline that was almost painful, Evelyn sat up, panting, hands on her abdomen.

The baby was gone.

The blood was gone.

The dream was gone, but the smoke was still there. God, was she back in France? She listened for the murmur of soldiers and the clink of canteens, the subtle crackle of rifles shifting. Boots stepping.

Nothing.

She blinked hard. The smoke was burning her eyes in the dim light of the single oil lantern in the corner of the room. The little dark room, the closet where she was hunched over on the floor with Lindsay’s jacket falling off of her.

The abduction. The men. Vivid, wicked lust and terror all mingled together.

She was locked in a closet and there was a fire.

She blinked at the smoke furiously, fear trilling through her. The image of the fire raging through the room beyond and suffocating her in this tiny godless place clawed her and choked her along with the smell of smoke that kept creeping into her lungs. She shoved Lindsay’s coat the rest of the way off and stumbled to her feet.

“Hello?” she called through the dorm, banging her hand on it. “Hello!” She waited, holding her breath. “Ryan! Lindsay! Alex!”

Terror was coiling in her belly like a tangled spool of thread. They left her at night. They always left her at night. She didn’t know where they went or how long they stayed away, but what if they were all gone now? What if she was stuck like an animal in this cage, with no escape?

No longer a slow gathering, terror raged through her like a thunderclap. “Hello!” she screamed. “Help me!”

Those fucking idiots had trapped her in this closet and she was going to die here, the stupidest death imaginable.

No. No fucking way. She didn’t make it through the war just to die trapped in a hole somewhere because of Walter Stanley.

She beat her fists against the door until they were bruised and bloodied, teeth bared like a wild animal. She kicked at it until she was sure she broke one of her toes. The pain was something distant, muted. Something to be noted and dealt with later.

“FUCK!” she screamed.

Then, as if in answer, the door to the room opened.

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