The flight was quiet. Niall seemed deep in thought most of the time. He barely ate any of the food, claiming that he wasn’t hungry. I was a bit distraught by his sudden mood change, but I figured it couldn’t be too important. I was just as nervous as he seemed to be. Niether of us had a clue just how this attempted conversation would go.

When we reached Oklahoma, I was beyond tired. I hadn’t managed to get a single wink of sleep within the nine hour flight. Niall on the other hand had passed out off and on for the remainder of the flight, meaning he was well rested.

The airport was crowded with people, children running around, parents pushing past us to grab them. The air became musty and closed in with every step I took. I was pushed forward by the crowd of people behind me, all itching to get to the customs area. My hands began to shake from the pressure, the antsy bodies willing to pin me down to get where they needed to be. My chest tightened and the warm air closed in on me, a stinging pain rushing through my chest.

“Are you okay?” Niall asked from beside me, reaching down to grab my hand we walked through the airport.

“Fine.” I coughed, covering up my lack of oxygen. Niall must have noticed the absence of breath in my voice because he turned to look at me.

“Babe, you’re pale.” he notified, quickly pulling me to the side where the bathrooms were. He sat me down on a bench and knelt down in front of me, setting his hands on my shoulders. “Take deep breaths.”

I did as he told, trying my hardest to inhale and exhale thoroughly. I started to see her everywhere. Dark brown hair and blue eyes covered the crowds of people. I shook uncontrollably, trying to breath properly. A voice in the back of head head screamed and yelled, begging to leave the airport.

“Something bad is going to happen,” I gasped. “Something bad is going to happen.”

I repeated the words without noticing, my eyes darting everywhere but at Niall.

“You need to calm down, Aria.” Niall spoke calmly, using my full name to get my attention. “Come on, deep breaths now, deep breaths…”

His words seemed to finally point me in the right direction, and oxygen slowly returned to my aching lungs. I inhaled slowly, exhaling a bit quickly to take more air in. A few people were staring, and I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was having a panic attack, or because “the” Niall and Aria Horan were in the same airport as they were in.

Niall took my hands, still looking up at me. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” I shook my head. “I just panicked and I couldn’t breath.”

Niall’s eyebrows furrowed as he tried to analyze what I had just told him. “Have you been getting them often?”

“No, not really. Sometimes and just freak out and lost my breath, but not this badly.”

Niall nodded and grabbed my hand, again leading me through the people. We took a separate route through customs and grabbed our luggage. The parking lot of the airport was extremely full as well, the smell of gas burning my nose as we walked through it, trying to find our rental car. Niall pressed of the lock key that a car dealer had given us, both our eyes falling to a car whose lights had ignited from the press of the key button.

We put our luggage into the trunk of the car and got inside, the air conditioning blasting as the engine revved. It was only then that I realized how much I was sweating. Oklahoma was such a humid state, and suddenly I wished I had packed more tank tops and shorts rather than shirts and jeans.

Niall didn’t speak as he drove, but kept his fingers interlaced with mine.

---

After carrying our bags to our hotel room, Niall and I collapsed on the bed, fed up for the day. I truly just wanted to sink into a warm jacuzzi with a chocolate milkshake in hand.

“Did you sleep well on the plane?” I asked Niall, turning to face him. He smiled and adjusted himself so that he rested on top of me, then rolled us over so I was on top of him, our chests pressed together.

“I wanna see how long it’ll take for you to realize it.” Niall whispered, his necklace hanging off his chest for me to hook my finger on.

“Realize what?” I frowned, my heart beating a little faster when Niall’s eyes began to tear up.

“That I’m not good enough for you.”

“You’re kidding.” I sat up, forcing Niall to pull himself up as well. “God, why the hell do you think you’re not good enough for me? You’re the only one who can deal with me, you’re the only one who is willing to put up with all the bullshit that I carry.”

“I can’t help you.” Niall’s voice cracked, “I have to watch you hurt, watch you dissolve in pain and I can’t do anything about it. I’m a completely hopeless excuse of a husband. I’m supposed to protect you. I’m supposed to keep you safe from all of this.”

“You are such a nuisance.” I growled, moving to sit firmly on his lap. Niall sighed and grabbed my hands gently. “You think we’ll get anything out of this?”

“I hope,” his grip tightened. “We really need this, Aria.”

“I know.” I tried to project my voice, but the fear that rested in my chest caused the reply to come as a whisper.

Millions of thoughts ran through our heads, so many rushing through my mind to the point in which my head ached. It was incredibly difficult to keep a smile on my lips and keep my heart beating a steady pace when I thought about all the possible results of this trip. A voice, deep in the back of my head seemed to taunt me, telling me that Scarlett planned this; that Scarlett wanted us to get away from London. Away from the kids.

“What do you think we will do if we can’t get any information out of this Alan guy?” Niall’s voice brought me back, causing slight chills to run down my spine when his breath fanned over my neck.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. But whatever happens, we need to stop this. And we need to stop it quick.”

My breath quickened and I was overcome with a dizzy feeling, similar to the one I had felt in the airport only hours earlier. My heart beat which already seemed slightly too fast only increased as I tried to calm myself. But with every inhale I took, flashes of knives digging into my children’s backs filled my mind.

Soon, I was gasping for air.



Niall’s P.O.V.

Aria shot up in bed, sitting in between my legs as she gasped for air. Quickly I got out of bed and went around to stand in front of her, gripping her shoulders to look her in the eye.

“Deep breaths, babe.”

It worried me that she had experienced a panic attack for the second time in one day. It had only happened once or twice before this, but years ago. Those panic attacks weren’t at all as severe as this. In fact, Aria seemed to get over it much quickly than now. Aria inhaled and exhaled at an unsteady rate, her face becoming red from the blood rushing to her head. I spoke to her carefully, telling her to breath in and out. But soon it was as if she couldn’t even hear me.

Her hands began to shake and her teeth chattered, almost a wheeze escaping her throat as she tried to take air into her lungs.

“Aria, look at me.” I told her sternly when she started to squeal, wincing as if something was harming her. She squeezed her eyes shut and muffled a scream into my shirt, muttering things I could barely make out. Something along the lines of "We’ve been set up."

“Love, you’re speaking nonsense.” I said, gripping her wrists gently. “Look at me, Look at my eyes.”

But Aria refused, her body shaking rapidly. I was beyond terrified of what was happening to my wife. I’d never seen her experience a panic attack so bad. Then again, she’d never had such a reason to.

“No, no, no!” She yelled, covering her eyes as she pushed herself away from me. “Set up, we’ve been set up.”

“Aria, listen to me.” I pulled her hands away from her eyes and she screamed louder. What the hell would the people in the room next to us think? “Aria, we are in a hotel. You’re disrupting people.”

Aria stopped moving, her yells simmering down to complete silence. She stared at me as if I were a monster, as if I were the one acting up. Her blue eyes were bloodshot, and slowly her mouth curved into a dry smile. Laughing, she was laughing. But it wasn’t the kind of laugh that made me smile, instead, sent shivers down my spine.

“We’re so stupid.” She chuckled, laughing at an irregularly pace as if she wasn’t controlling herself. “We are so, so stupid. So naïve. So stupid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is a trap. She wants this. She wants this.”

“Who, Scarlett?"

“Both of them.”

“What?”

“She said ‘there’s two of us.’”

“What the hell?”

“Niall, I’m going to hurt our family until they die.”

And then she passed out.




Aria’s P.O.V.

The light struck my eyes in a blinding form from the second I opened them. I shielded myself from the early morning sun and quickly realized I wasn’t in my bedroom.
Flashbacks of my panic attack flew back to me, nothing too important though. As far as I remembered, I had managed to get ahold of my breathing before it got too out of hand.
It was only then that I noticed the bedside was empty. Niall was missing. On cue, my husband stepped out of the restroom with only a towel hanging loosely around his toned torso. He gave me a look and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. It ranged between relieved and confused.


Niall came towards me, the bed dipping when he sat down at my side. He pressed the back of his hand to my forehead and offered to me a small smile.

“You had a rough night.”

I assumed he was talking about my panic attack, but there was something else lingering in his blue eyes, something fearful. There was something he wasn’t telling me, I was positive. Niall looked especially uneasy, picking at a loose string on his towel.

“Niall?” I touched his arm and he winced. The slight action broke my heart. What the hell happened last night?

“Excuse me,” Niall stood up. “I just- I need t-to go.”

I didn’t stop him as he pulled a shirt over his head, followed by boxers and khaki shorts. He left the hotel room in such a hurry that he left his phone and wallet on the table. I stared at the door, as if to hope he would walk right back through them and give me a hug. But that wouldn’t happen.

One hour, two hours, passed, and Niall was still gone. I had managed to get a shower and change into shorts and one of his shirts, but couldn’t suppress the need to bite my fingernails as I worried for where he had gone. Another two hours passed and I was restless. He didn’t even take his damn phone with him.

Niall walked back into the hotel room with a breakfast plate in his hands, and eyes bloodshot from tears. Tearstains covered his beautiful face and my chest sunk from the sight of him.

“Breakfast.” He said quietly, handing me the plate of eggs, toast and bacon.

“Where were you?” I asked, sitting up in bed to take the plate of food from his trembling hands.

“Not important.” He retorted. “Just got some fresh air.”

He grabbed his phone off the table and plugged his ear buds into the small jack, letting his music take over him. I watched as he stepped outside of the hotel room and onto the balcony, closing the French doors behind him.

I felt like a destructive piece of shit.





Niall’s P.O.V

Was it terrible of me to say that I was afraid of my own wife? But of course it was. It seemed as if someone else was talking for her last night. And that scared me. That wasn’t just some normal panic attack Aria had last night. I didn’t know how to react to it. Perhaps I had been a bit harsh. I hadn’t even spoke a proper sentence towards her. Better yet, I should have known to be gentle with her. She was really sensitive at a time like this.

She said “there are two of us.”

Did she mean Scarlett? Were there two Scarlett’s out there? Or generally two people who were teamed together to tear our family apart? The distressed look on Aria’s face as she screamed flashed through my mind, making me shudder at the memory. I turned to face the French door so I could see Aria sitting in the middle of the bed, staring blankly at the food I had brought her. From the way her lips trembled, I could tell she was trying not to cry. She pushed her hair back and dragged her finger lightly under her eyes to flick tears away.

I turned around. Aria told me we had been set up. Last night, I had classified it as one of her panicked assumptions, but what if it were true? What if Scarlett wanted Ari and I to separate from our children so they would be easier to target? None of my thoughts had an answer. Suddenly the sound of glass breaking interrupted my thoughts. I turned to the French door to see Aria standing in the middle of broken glass. Quickly, I opened the door and stepped inside. Remains of the orange juice I had brought up for her were spilled on the floor.

“I-I’m sorry,” Aria shivered, staring at the glass on the ground. “I didn’t mean to. I-I was getting up and I w-was shaking and-“

“Aria.” She looked up at the sound of her name, tears present at the rims of her big blue eyes. “It’s okay.”

She continued to stare at me as I reached out to take her hand. I dropped my hand when she refused to take it.

“Niall?”

“Yes?”

“What happened last night?”

The question struck me hard. I was more confused than she was, truly. I had no idea what anything she said actually meant. Whatever did happen really did scare me. But I knew what would help me clear up last nights occurances quite easily.

“Before I tell you, I really need you to tell me what happened the day Scarlett broke in.”

Aria’s eyes widened and she began to shake her head rapidly.

“I can’t,” she cried. “I still have nightmares. It’ll get worse. I just can’t.”

I didn’t wait for her to take my hand, this time, instead pulled her to me. One arm secured around her waist, I tilted her head up so she was forced to look me in the eye.

“For the sake of our family’s existence, you need to tell me what happened.”

My words held some importance, because Aria seemed to snap out of her fear zone and look at me. Her eyes glazed over with the coming of tears as she began to speak.




Aria’s P.O.V.

-Flashback-

I had managed to rip almost every picture out of the scrapbook that used to be my one prized possession. Now, nothing mattered to me other than the safety of my family. It didn’t even bother me that I was tearing out something my own sister and I had created together before she mysteriously “died”. I wanted nothing to do with her. Nothing at all.

All she had brought me was pain, tears and blood. I couldn’t think of one happy thing. And so I was getting rid of her. I had finished tearing up the last bit of the scrapbook pages when I heard a small sound coming from the window. I stopped moving and listened closely. Just as I thought, a small beeping sound came from the corner of the window. I rose from the bed and slowly as possible and set my foot on my floor.

The window cracked.

Glass shattered onto the floor. I waited for the security alarms to start blaring as I stood frozen at the side of my bed. But nothing happened. No security alarms to save the day. My breathing rate increased within a second when a person in full black attire stepped over the glass, into my bedroom.

“Hello, Ri.”

That voice. I knew that voice. And those menacing blue eyes. And the nickname, that awful loathsome nickname that started it all.

“Scarlett.”

The name left my mouth with so much fear and distraught. Each step she took towards me, I flinched. Just as I opened my mouth to scream, Scarlett slapped a piece of duck-tape over my mouth. I tried to scream louder, but Scarlett slammed a fist just about my gut, silencing me as I tried to endure the pain.

She pushed me to the floor and locked the bedroom door, pushing a chair in front of the doorknob for extra defense.

“It’s been a while,” she smirked, circling me like a piece of meat. “But I’ve always been around, haven’t I? You know that, don’t you?”

“Sick freak.” I managed to cough out.

She kicked my stomach shamelessly, causing me to double over in pain. I screamed for the pain I felt, and also for the pain of my baby. I watched as she took her mask off to reveal her face.

She was beautiful. Still the same dark brown hair that fell just below her shoulders, the perfect jawbones that surely made her one hundred percent photogenic, glittering blue eyes that made mine look like blue shit, and of course her perfect lips set in a tiny smirk. She was so pretty, with the perfect body and all. Everything about her personality ruined her image.

“Your stomach’s a bit hard,” she laughed smugly, running her fingers lightly over the large birthmark on her neck. “Baby girl, right?”

“How the hell did you-“ I was going to ask how she knew the gender of my child, but I realized there was no point. She practically knew everything. Plus, my words weren’t exactly clear with tape stuck on my mouth.

“You’re sure a disgrace.” Scarlett spat, kicking my shin. “What a slut. If only dad were here to do this shit for me.” She rubbed her chin for a second then glared down at me. “Oh wait, your lover boy killed him. It Mr. Popstar going to save you now?”

I stared at her wide-eyed as she spat in my face.

“You’ve ruined my life, Ri.” She hissed, digging the heel of her shoe into my arm. I tried to scream, but the distressed sound was taken over by streams of tears. “I don’t even understand why you even try to keep your family safe. We’ve got everything. You have nothing.”

“You’re just going to hurt them.” She whispered, dragging me across the floor to the white body mirror in the corner of the room. I watched in horror as she pulled some metal rope from her small backpack, tying my weak body to the corners of the body mirror.

“You don’t deserve to live.” Her words struck me hard. A knife was slipped from her pocket to trace along my skin. With a sharp jerk, the knife slid into my skin, slicing small cuts as I screamed. When she kneed me in the guts again, I knew it would be a matter of seconds before I passed out.

She continued to kick and punch me until cuts and bruises covered each and every inch of my body.

“Gotta dash.” She giggled menacingly, her blue eyes wild with an evil fire. “There are two of us, Ri. If that helps at all for your naïve little brain.”

As she lifted her legs over the broken window and slid out, the light around me disappeared.

---

-Present day-

Recalling that day was hell for me. My knees gave in at the thought of Scarlett’s face. Everything about her disgusted me. She was such a horrible person, a horrible person that was completely focused on ruining my family.

Life couldn’t get any worse.

Niall slipped his arms under my armpits as I gave out, setting me down on the bed like a child. I felt weaker than I had in a long time and it wasn’t a great feeling at all. All I wanted was to feel normal for once in my life. My childhood was anything but ordinary, constantly fearing the assaulting touches and profanities from my own father. My teen years were worse, even after meeting Niall. Being kidnapped itself was the most
terrifying thing I had ever experienced. And now the threatening of my entire family.

I just never got a break.

Notes

Woah. I haven't updated in forever. Partly because I went on vacation like literally the day after school ended and they didn't have decent wifi BUT I did get to write more.

Also, I started this new story called Apartment #191. It's a sorta kinda horror fanfic with Harry as the love interest. Go check it out or nah?

And I also noticed I got two more votes over the past twenty days that I didn't update at all... so thank you to all you silent readers!! :)

P.S. Doing a double update :)