Forbidden | KTH

Prologue | Black and Gold |

As I grew up, my parents, particularly my father, would drill into my head that the Kims were bad people. He would remind me every night before I went to bed, telling me stories about what they were like and what they did. 

He recently started to tell them to me again.

He told me that they were evil insects that crawled around Seoul at night, armed with knives, causing harm and hurting people. Even to small children like me. They would run around the streets in black - their family colour - waking everyone up and scaring them all. 

Sometimes they even killed people, but that was, and still is, very rare. 

He said that we were lucky that we lived in the south of the city and them the north because that made it harder for them to get to us as it was a long way away. 

Lucky because their favourite type of people to kill was us.

The Sang family.

The head of the Kim family is Kim Yoonsook and the head of ours is Sang Jihun.

Sang Jihun also happens to be my father.

He raised me to think that black was the evil colour of the Kims and that gold was the colour of wealth, happiness, safety and the Sangs. He would always, and still does, wear our family emblem in the form of a broach, on his breast. A completely golden and metallic cobra, twisting around itself and hissing its' tongue out. The Kims have an emblem too - a black eagle spreading its' wings out and lifting its' beak upwards. 
Apparently they always wear them when they go out to kill too.

It wasn't until I grew up when I realised that we can't be that good either. 

Wrinkling my nose at the hanging smell of weed and splashes of white powder around our estate.
Confused at the worrying amount of money we had coming in.
Grimacing at the number of women going in and out of my father's bedroom.

The only thing that our families do agree on is the age that we go out in our gangs. The day after our twentieth birthday is when we go out in a group for the first time to meet each other.

'Meet' meaning roaming around the city and if we find each other, using the weapons we have on us. 

And the reason why my father has been telling me those stories again is because I'm going out for the first time tomorrow night.

~~

Dressed in black ripped jeans, top and leather jacket, we tread under the orange streetlights. Tonight it was our turn to go out at night, trying to find Sangs. We've been close friends for as long as we can remember, always looking forward to the day that all seven of us could go out together. Jungkook turned twenty a few weeks ago and roaming Seoul together feels so complete, like an gap in painting that has finally been filled with colour.
All this happiness has been enforced by the fact that we haven't met any Sangs yet. We're running around, dancing through the night, owning the city together, not needing to use the knives attached to our belts. 

I'm free. Mum can't stop me from going out anymore. Or being locked up when I pissed her off.

Or getting me to screw one of my cousins for 'experience.' 

She made it hard to me to escape any of it. I was always the most controlled in the whole family, like a puppet attached to her strings, pulling me back to her if I even thought about disobeying her. My twentieth birthday was like a weight being lifted off my shoulders, detaching the chains she had around me.

She is the head of our family, after all. 

Although we love being alone when we go out, we all wander these streets in apprehension of when we'll actually find some Sangs. Jin, Namjoon, Hoseok and Yoongi and gotten into fights before, but never been involved in any killings. Even though deaths are rare, what'll happen if I need to stab someone? 

What will happen the first time I meet a Sang?

I hope you all enjoyed this short intro to Forbidden - I'll try to update this as often as I can, but I have another book, Outbloods, to take care of too aha. I have lots of ideas for this book which I want to share with everyone :)

Izzy xxx