Forbidden by Ted Dekker

swallow the flame whole and darkness would smother him.
    He followed the dying glow toward a stack of chairs and the wall, to the ebbing ring of light on the floor…
    And the form curled in the corner.
    There lay Avra, sleeping on her side. Her tiny body peaceful, rising and falling with each breath. Her head rested on her arm, turned toward him with eyes closed, oblivious to his crazed behavior.
    Avra.
    He couldn’t move. The sight of her lying there overwhelmed him.
    She was an angel. An angel in his poison-induced dream. His heart filled with strange sensation. He longed for her. For her to be with him.
    Rom moved toward her, stilling his breath, daring not to make a sound. He stood over her, stunned. She was beautiful. He spoke her name softly, afraid to disturb her.
    “Avra.”
    The name brought a quiver to his lips. This was Avra, but not Avra. The poison had stolen the former Avra away and replaced her with another woman.
    He sank to one knee and touched a strand of her hair. The two women looked identical, but this one was far more beautiful. No, magical. An angel, a goddess, the wildest figment of his soaring imagination.
    Desire lapped at his heart. Not a simple wish to have her, but a craving to envelop her, to absorb her completely. A yearning to serve her, if she would only allow him, because such a creature deserved nothing less. She was magnificent.
    He wanted to hold her and to kiss her, but he dared not! His fingers trembled, and the strand of her hair with them. And yet this was no angel, but a woman fashioned of flesh and blood.
    Avra.
    Something stirred in his mind, rousing itself from a gust into a full-blown gale. A door within him blew wide to a new reality. One in which he adored Avra. It was a worship beyond the currency of loyalty he had once called love —the same love he had claimed to have for his mother.
    The memory of his mother lying in a pool of her own blood crashed into his mind and he dropped the strand of hair. The force of the sensation that struck him shoved him back on his heels.
    His mother was dead?
    Rom leaped to his feet, spun toward the door, and tore out of the storage room. One thought alone pushed him up the stairs, three at a time. One fear, one concern, one horrible, debilitating thought.
    His mother was dead.
    Not until he reached the street did he pull up, and then only because he realized that he’d left Avra.
    Avra, whom he worshipped.
    He stood under the dim streetlights, lost, torn, but then he reasoned that Avra was asleep and at peace. And he…he had to find out if his mother was truly dead or if there was even the slightest possibility of saving her. He would go and return to Avra before she awoke.
    Rom bent over and sprinted into the gray drizzle.
     
    It took him less than thirty minutes to reach his house by way of the underground and a direct route through night-emptied streets. He knew that he ran the risk of being caught, especially if they had posted a guard at his house. But the new emotions churning inside him pushed aside all reason and demanded he throw his own safety to the gutter. He had to see his mother. He had to be sure that there was no way he could save her. Nothing else mattered.
    He could not understand the overpowering impulse and the pain that had captured him, but it didn’t matter. He was its slave. It was all he could do to hide his tears from the few late-night passengers riding on the underground.
    When he arrived, his heart stuttered. The back door to his house gaped ajar in the moonlight.
    But that was good, right? If the authorities had completed their work here, they would have buttoned down the house. Sealed it off.
    On the other hand, if his mother were alive and able to move around, she would have closed the door. But he already knew the notion of her survival to be the desperate fantasy of a despairing son.
    He’d known it as he stood on the train, watching the banks of lights blink by. He’d known with every step that his