BOUND: Zayn's Obsession

Happy Birthday, Love.

LOVE's POV...

{Flashback}

•+•

I was almost asleep when the noise pulled me back.
Daddy had tucked me in just minutes ago, so recently that I could still smell his cologne on my pillow... that warm cedar smell that meant safety and home for every single one of my three years of living. My eyes were so heavy from the birthday celebrations that I had barely finished my prayers before sleep started dragging me under.

Then the noise came from downstairs and dragged me right back out.

I grabbed Mr. Buttons and held him against my chest.
It was probably nothing, I told myself, squeezing him tighter as another sound floated up through the floorboards.

Mama and Daddy had small arguments sometimes where voices got a little raised and then settled back down again, and by morning everything was settled like nothing had ever been wrong. And besides, it was my birthday, so maybe the neighbors came back with more cake. Maybe there was more celebrating happening downstairs that nobody told me about yet.

I waited for the noise to settle.

But it didn't settle. Instead, it grew louder and rougher, layered with voices that didn't sound like Mama or Daddy. Low, flat voices. Something about the sound of them sent a feeling crawling up my spine that I didn't have a name for yet.

"Anytime you hear anything strange downstairs," Mama's voice said inside my head, as clear as if she were standing right beside me, "you do not leave your room. You do not go and investigate. You hide yourself, and you stay quiet, and you wait for me or Daddy to come to you."

I looked at my bedroom door for a long moment, holding Mr. Buttons so tight his stuffing was probably suffering. Then I thought about the way Daddy had crouched down to my level tonight before he turned off my light, holding up the little silver necklace between his fingers like it was something that mattered enormously.

"Promise Daddy you'll wear it everyday."

"I promise," I had told him, very seriously, because I was three years old and I understood that some promises needed to be taken seriously.

That was the last thing he said to me before he closed my door.

I slid out of bed. My bare feet hit the cold floor, and I moved toward the door quietly. I slipped out into the dark hallway and crept toward the top of the stairs, crouching down when I reached the railing and pressing my face between the wooden bars to look down into the lit-up living room below.

The first thing I saw was the man in Daddy's chair.
He was sitting so proudly with a cane resting across his knees, both hands folded over the top of it. The left side of his face, which was the side I could see clearly from where I was crouched, had a scar that started just below his eye and traveled all the way down toward the corner of his mouth. It was long and deep and terrible-looking. It looked like someone had once tried to tear half his face away from the other half and came very close to succeeding.

I looked away from the scar and found my mother, and my stomach turned.

Mama was kneeling on the living room floor. My mother was not a kneeling woman. She was a standing woman, a stirring and laughing and arms-crossed-in-the-doorway woman. Seeing her on her knees with her hands folded in her lap and her head slightly bowed sent a cold, crawling feeling all through me that I didn't know how to make sense of.

What was going on?

Around the edges of the room there were men, all of them dressed in black suits with dark glasses, standing with their arms loose at their sides. I counted five of them before I stopped counting, because five was already too many and I was already too scared. My legs were telling me to get up and run back to my room and hide under my covers exactly the way Mama had always told me to.