Prohibited (Tulsa City Sinners #1)

6. Evie

Chapter six

Evie

She was dreaming. She knew she was dreaming because she was trying to explain to her neighbor, Mrs. Watson, why her front lawn was purple. It wasn’t a bad dream, just a bizarre one. At least it wasn’t one of those awful ones, one of those–

And then, like every night, it came. The sound of the bombs falling, whistling toward them. The men screaming. That man, the beautiful man with his leg blown open. Walter laughing. Hattie dying in her arms, bleeding out through the hole in her gut big enough to tuck a helmet into.

Then, she was opening a box, looking for medical supplies. Morphine. Syringes. Bandages. Blades and needles. If she could just find what she needed. She could save them both. She could save them all. But she opened another box, the lid squeaking, and found a hand bomb that someone had pulled the clip out of.

It detonated .

Evie sat up with a shriek, clutching at her face and her hair. Certain they had been blown away. Everything, blown away.

She was alone. In the dark.

Quiet.

Something had woken her. The squeaking. Was that from the dream? Or was that something in her bedroom?

The hair on the back of her neck stood up and she squinted hard, trying to see into the darkness. Someone had turned the lamps off.

She shoved the coverlet off of her and dropped her feet to the floor.

The notion that she wasn’t alone stayed with her, terror creeping through her slowly like an icy chill.

“Linus?” she said, though she was afraid to even speak, for fear of drawing attention from… whatever was in the room with her.

She held her breath, eyes wide with her effort to see as much as possible. The moon was bright outside, bringing a little light through the gauzy silk curtains, but not enough to see into the dark corners. She wrapped her arms around herself, facing toward the door of the bedroom.

It was ajar. Linus had closed it when he left. Someone had come in to turn down the lamps, one of the staff most likely. But the maid would have closed the door behind her, wouldn’t she?

“Hello?” Evie called, trying to sound more brave than she felt. Her heart was starting to wake up, starting to hit heavily against the inside of her ribcage. “Linus?” No answer from the darkness. Then, she whispered, “Etian?”

No, not yet Etian. The other man. The ghost of the fair haired man, who had approached her with a smile at the ambush Walter had set up. Real warmth in his face. Warmth that had vanished in the horrifying blaze of a shotgun.

A superstitious terror seized her, so intense that her breaths started to come rapid and shallow.

No, she was being stupid. Ghosts weren’t real. Not in the literal sense, though she knew what it was to be haunted.

She stayed just where she was for what felt like an eternity. That prickle still went up and down her neck, but she heard nothing else except for the rattle of her own heart. Even swallowing the spit that was starting to pool in her mouth sounded deafening in the quiet of the room.

Well, maybe she was just being paranoid. The dreams that tormented her, burrowing into her like vicious insects she couldn’t rid herself of, often woke her in a state of terror. The paranoia was just another layer of it.

Slowly, she unwound her arms from around her body and began to walk across the room toward the washroom. The weight of her bladder was pressing down, down, down until she couldn’t wait any longer to empty it. Keeping one eye toward that crack in her bedroom door, she stepped forward quickly to shut it, causing it to squeak as it swung closed. Somehow, even this small silly gesture made her feel just a little bit better. She was going to have to get someone up here first thing in the morning to oil those hinges.

She picked her way carefully the rest of the way across the floor, mindful of the glass she’d shattered last night.

While she was attending to her business in the washroom, she froze. Was that another squeak she had just heard?

Surely not. She pressed a hand to her chest and almost laughed at herself.

Who in God’s name would be creeping around her bedroom this hour of the night, trying to frighten her? Linus didn’t have a sense of humor, not even a dark one. And he certainly wasn’t creative. She was surprised he’d even thought of putting her in the sanitarium.

The conversation with him last night flashed through her mind, barreling straight at her like a speeding train. It smashed into her, jolting her even further awake than she had been.

He had her by the hair. The revolver. The look of satisfaction on his face. Your dried up old womb.

She covered her face and sighed, wishing she could cry again, but nothing came except for a desolate emptiness that imbued her entire being with cold. She splashed some water on her face, trying to avoid looking at herself in the mirror, and opened the door to the washroom, ready to have another few hours of sleep at the mercy of her nightmares .

But the sight of the door, once again ajar, stopped her in her tracks. Her heart slammed into her chest, as if it had trouble catching up.

“Wha–” she started to say.

A hand came over her mouth with a damp cloth, eclipsing all further rational thought. It brought with it a smell that was familiar but so out of place here that it took her a moment to place it. From the battlefields. A scent meant to quiet screaming men. She had used it on herself more than once in France to silence the shrieking that echoed through the valleys in her skull.

A heavy forearm looped around her throat, crushing her back against a hard body. She yanked at the arm, threw elbows behind her. She stomped at the feet. Did her best to scream. She had only a few minutes at most to break free before the chloroform rendered her unconscious.

But even as she struggled, she could feel the lovely, seductive tendrils of the chloroform unfurling and reaching through her skull, caressing her wild, conscious mind and soothing it. Stroking the fight out of it. Massaging it into complacency as the fog of unconsciousness descended closer and closer. Her efforts to fight the man holding onto her with a bruising grip became more and more feeble until she was sagging in his arms, feeling slightly, if absurdly, euphoric in light of the circumstances.

The room around her disappeared into the swirl of darkness brought on by the sweet odor of the chloroform stripping away her consciousness and everything else along with it.