"I had all the hopes and dreams of what love was going to be. Here he was, giving me the love and attention I was craving, but then he started hitting me six weeks after I got there. It was not mutual. I did like the aggression in consensual sex situations, but not the hitting."
That Seven says she now loves to be hit, pummeled even, by trusted "playmates" is something she can't really explain.
Paul Rubin
Seven slaves over a hot stove at her Phoenix apartment.
Tony Blei
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She says she and Malmsteen regularly used cocaine and other drugs, and that the violence escalated as time passed.
(Malmsteen's management company did not respond to requests for comment for this story).
In August 1993, according to accounts in the Miami Herald and, later, in Miami New Times, Seven's mother called the Miami Shores police, alleging that Malmsteen was holding her daughter with a shotgun in another part of the house.
A SWAT team surrounded the home and, after a four-hour standoff, Malmsteen surrendered to police in his bathrobe.
Seven declined to press charges, and an aggravated assault complaint was dismissed.
The highly publicized incident didn't spell the end of the tempestuous relationship.
The two were married at a castle in Stockholm later that year, on December 26, 1993.
Wedding photos of the couple are revealing: Seven says Malmsteen wouldn't allow her family members to attend, and her bridesmaids were three women who had won a fan-club contest.
The bride was anything but blushing. In fact, she looked downright sad, which she says she was.
Seven says she went on several world tours with Malmsteen, and that he abused her in front of his bandmates and hangers-on.
As the turbulent six-year relationship wound down, Seven says she found herself fighting back — and hard — against the 6-foot, 3-inch Swede.
"I became an animal — a drugged-up, drunken animal," she says. "I was not well, and he made me even sicker."
Along the way, Seven says she wrote the lyrics to Malmsteen's tune, "Prisoner of Your Love." She's on the album credits but says she never collected royalties.
The chorus goes, "Encaptured by the beauty/I'm a prisoner of your love/Enslaved by the passion/I'm a prisoner of your love."
Seven says Malmsteen changed her original lyrics from what she calls "a song about literal imprisonment to a sappy love song."
Seven says she won a settlement totaling a few hundred thousand dollars when her marriage to Malmsteen officially ended in April 1998.
She remarried that same month, to a well-known DJ she'd met at a Miami rave.
With that relationship, "it was drugs, drugs, drugs and what I thought was love," Seven says.
The new couple plowed through Seven's divorce money, spending it on bad investments and narcotics.
Within a few years after remarrying, Seven says, she had a life-altering experience after being locked up for a misdemeanor in San Diego. She says she "found the Lord" during that stay and resolved to go straight and try to salvage her fading second marriage.
A subsequent long stretch at San Diego's Christian Recovery Center gave her the strength to rejoin her spouse in New Orleans (where they had moved) and to attempt to persuade him to give Jesus a shot in place of their beloved white powder.
They joined a Baptist church there, where she would testify about her previously wayward life, ran an addiction-recovery group, and ingested (she swears) nothing stronger than an aspirin for two years.
"I was really sold-out for God at that point," she says.
Photos during that time are as revealing as the creepy ones of her wedding to Malmsteen.
Several photos show Seven posing with huge ocean fish that she caught herself.
Sans makeup, with a ball cap on backwards and a big, proud smile, she seems genuinely happy.
"I am a serious fisherwoman, and I love it out there on the water, because fishing for me is very, very physical," Seven says. "I was happy in that moment."
She says she's still in touch with God:
"I know some people think that's ridiculous, a dom with my history and my bullshit still believing in God. But when I die, I know it's going to be between me and Him, so I don't give a fuck what people think."
In New Orleans, Seven set up a residential and commercial cleaning business with another woman from her church that thrived for a time. She says loved the hard work, the labor that kept her from ruminating too much about her life.
But her relationship with hubby number two was kaput. "When we sobered up, we realized we didn't know each other at all, and that was that," she says.
Seven says her church abruptly rejected her after she split from her husband.
Within months, she returned to the wild life she had fled.
Soon, she was back to drinking, drugs, wild sex and seemingly obligatory dysfunctional relationships.
About five years ago, short of money and wondering which end was up, Seven (still Amber at that point) returned to Arizona.
Seven has decided to cook a big meal for her roommates, a few pals and a reporter.
