Forbidden Read Online Free PDF

even down to the half-finished cup of coffee on the workbench.
    He glanced at the tattered chair in the corner, the one with the permanent dent in the seat cushion. It was where Avra sat when she came to visit after she was done for the day in her father’s laundry shop.
    Avra. Again, he tried to picture what she would say if she knew what he had done. Because of their association, she would soon fear for herself even more than she already did, which was saying much.
    But right now he had his own fears to contend with.
    He walked to the worktable, set the box down. One thing he knew: He couldn’t run from the Order forever. They would find him and kill him because of a mysterious vial, the importance of which he couldn’t begin to grasp.
    He wet a rag and wiped blindly at the dried blood on his face, then threw the rag into the trash. He paused, grabbed the rag back out of the trash, bundled the box in it, and pushed it to the bottom of the bin.
    After exchanging his dirtied jacket for another one lying across the back of the chair, he headed out of the workshop to the house.
    Inside, the glow of a lone electric light illuminated the kitchen. Another lit the small living room toward the front of the house. These were the two small extravagances they afforded themselves, those two lights that would be replaced by candles as soon as dinner was over.
    In the kitchen, Anna retrieved two glasses from the cabinet. A secondary school teacher, she had always been considered wise and was often sought out by her students for advice. “If Bliss truly exists in the hereafter,” Rom’s father had once said, “your mother will be the first to receive it.”
    And then he had gone on to investigate for himself. That was five years ago.
    “How was your day?” Anna said to Rom over her shoulder.
    Stew steamed from a bowl at the center of the small kitchen table. But rather than soothe, the smell of it only turned his stomach.
    “And take off that old jacket before you sit down. Didn’t you at least wear your good one to basilica?”
    When he didn’t respond, she glanced up, struck by his frozen silence. “Rom? What’s the matter with you?” She set down the glasses and came to him. “Are you ill?”
    “Something…” He cleared his throat. “Something happened today.”
    “What do you mean, something ? And what happened to your head?” She pushed back his bangs and leaned in to examine him.
    “I was coming home from basilica and there was an old man waiting for me on the way home. He said he knew Father.”
    Her brow arched, but she remained her stoic self. It took a lot to awaken Mother’s fear, a trait she’d passed on to him. “Many people knew your father,” she said, as if to say, So what?
    The place settings on the table were as clean and vacant as fresh faces. What he wouldn’t give for it to be any normal dinner on any normal day.
    “I thought he was crazy, but then the Citadel Guard came. They must have been following him—”
    “The Citadel Guard?”
    “He said Father didn’t die of fever, but that he was killed.”
    “But that’s not true.”
    “He gave me a box—the same one he said Father was killed for. He made me take it. And then the Citadel Guard…”
    Her gaze held steady, and she said nothing.
    “Mother, they had a knife.” A tremor had come into Rom’s voice. “I watched them cut his throat, there in the alley. They killed him.”
    Now she paled, showing the first signs of a fear not even she could suppress.
    “You must be mistaken.”
    “I watched it! I saw his blood spill out.”
    She hesitated, then said quickly, “His path was his to follow. As was your father’s. Neither is any of your concern. None of it. Remember that and this will all pass.” She turned back toward the table and then hesitated. “I trust you discussed these things with the guard.”
    So then, here it was. The mistake that would surely earn him his death.
    “No.”
    Anna froze.
    “I ran.”
    She turned