Love’s Sacrifice

Georgia Le Carre

This book is specially dedicated to

all those who have loved Lana and Blake.

Smashwords Edition

Editor: http://www.loriheaford.com/

Proofreader: http://nicolarhead.wix.com/proofreadingservices

Copyright © 2014 by Georgia Le Carre

The right of Georgia Le Carre to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-9929969-4-9

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This is your cup—the cup assigned to you from the beginning.

Nay, my child, I know how much of that dark drink is your own brew.

 —Swami Vivekanander

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Epilogue

POV

Synopsis

One

Victoria Jane Montgomery

I wake up in the dark, alone, cold…and restrained: leather belts on my ankles and wrists. My wrist shackles are so tight they are chaffing. I feel groggy and sick and quite frankly scared. I lift my head, look down and see that I am dressed in a hospital gown and robe.

My head throbs relentlessly, but I widen my eyes despite the blinding pain and cast them at the shadows and shapes around me. As my eyes become accustomed to the darkness I see that I am in a room, empty but for me and the bed I am lying in. There are no windows, only a large metal door with a covered peephole.

I listen intently. Not a single sound. Even my own breathing seems noiseless. Then: in the distance I hear the grate of a key in a metal lock. A woman wails down a corridor. The sound echoes eerily. A heavy door slams shut with a clanking sound and the impenetrable silence returns.

I cough. The sound is loud and unnatural in the bare coldness of my surroundings.

They have cut me away, their own daughter, and abandoned me here, in this mad house. Why did I not expect this? Why am I so surprised? Because I’m NOT mad. There is darkness in my head, but my mind is bright and alive. Razor sharp.

‘You’re here for a rest,’ the large, spectacularly ugly nurse said, when two orderlies hauled me into the hospital’s reception area, kicking and screaming. She sounded conciliatory.

As an answer I bit her like a wild animal. Big mistake. She screamed like a banshee, they stuck a needle into my arm, and I lost that argument. My father stood back, staring, disbelief etched on his horrified face.

‘Take me home, please,’ I whispered to him before blackness came to take me. I guess he ignored my plea.

And now, here I am, in this cold functional cell. Angry tears gather in my eyes and flow down my temples and into my hair. The fury rages until it becomes a sickening, powerless sorrow. I wallow in it until a sound inside the room rouses me.

My senses on high alert, I jerk my head towards it. It seems to be coming from the left of me. It is too dark to see anything, but it sounds like the flapping of wings. Bats or birds. Adrenaline pumps through my body. Strapped down, I am easy prey for whatever is in the room with me. For the first time in my life I feel terrified. The temperature in the room drops suddenly and an inexplicable freezing cold descends upon me.

Utterly terrified, I begin to shiver violently.

I scream when my shackles are suddenly and miraculously loosened. Shocked, I pull my shaking limbs out of them and sit up. My heart is pounding so hard I can hear my blood roaring in my ears. For a moment I think my mind is playing tricks on me, but no—light is slowly filtering into the room, diluting the blackness.

My pupils are so widely dilated and my retinas so exposed by the blackness that I have to shield my eyes with my hands. The light is coming from what appears to be another entrance—one I had not noticed before. It is covered by floor length, thick red curtains. I drop my feet to the ground. The floor is ice cold, damp and clammy. I stand slowly. The room reeks of old metal. As if in a trance I walk towards the concealed entrance and draw the curtains back. I stand before antique, etched, leaded and stained glass doors. Through the glass I see a full, blood-red moon glowing in an unrelievedly black sky.

I experience no fear.

I push open the beautiful doors and enter a stone balcony. It is decorated with gothic friezes and gargoyles, and it is totally alien to, totally at odds with the bare, functional room I have been in. It almost feels as if I have stepped back in time or into a different dimension. The stone is freezing cold on my bare feet and the temperature is that of a winter night. My breath frosts in the wintery air, and yet I feel as warm as a sunned cat.

There is a sudden crash of thunder and the black sky splits open. As I watch, bright, shining light pours out of the crack. It turns into the shape of a very large bird that flies down. It lands on the balustrade in front of me and becomes utterly motionless. Its silence and stillness are such that it is deathlike.

I gaze at it, this creature, this presence, with awe. It is the most splendid thing I have ever seen. Brilliantly colored and shimmering, its head is in profile so only one crimson eye is exposed to me. And all of a sudden, with a surge of joy, I understand: I am looking at the all-seeing eye. It is the great one Himself. El! He has taken the form of the phoenix that is on my family’s coat of arms. He has come for me! I have not been deserted.