Pacifier

💔Isabelle🥀

I couldn't breath. My voice tailed and disintegrated from my tongue to the floor like dust. It landed silently, swept away in the moment he snatched my wrist from by my side and dragged me along with him heading for the door.

It took me a moment to realise what we were doing. Took me a moment for my feet to find the floor, to remember how to walk, and even when they did i couldnt keep up with Van.

He was a storm. A thunderstorm in pale black and white on a silent movie screen, and I could do nothing but try to ignore the screaming fear which burned icy in my veins and radiated from the place on my wrist where his fist squeezed.

He was hurting me.

His touch cold like his eyes. Tight like his jaw. Like his breathing.

He was ragged, a man who had lost his mind. Stained in blood as he dragged me down the street with him. My feet tripping, shoes scuffing. He wasn't even really giving me the chance to try and walk. To try and scurry behind him.

His steps were much wider, much more powerful than mine and as we shot down those streets I gave in. Let him drag me in silence. His only acknowledgment that I was even by his side the occasional grunt of frustration. The squeezing, iron fisted grip on my wrist.

And I knew I was in deep.

I knew that when he got me home I was going to wish it had been the Reids waiting for me and not him.

And the fear I felt now, it was worse than any fear I'd felt before.

It was worse than the itching skin sensation of feeling as though I was being watched. It was worse than the nausea which rotted away at my insides, churned them, shook them, whenever I heard mention of a Reid.

This silence, this stiffness, the pale faced burning rage I could see in him, feel from him now.

This was the Van I'd heard horror stories about from the older kids. Kids who had made the mistake of crossing him, breaking the rules when we were younger.

Kids in school who had older brothers who had picked fights they shouldn't have.

This was the Van id been petrified of my whole life. The Van Id seen through keyholes when I was a little girl who, like watching a car crash, had been fascinated by the nightmare, unable to look away. Drawn in.

And worst of all, was the shame.

The shame that came creeping up on me. Hands over my eyes. Shame that wasn't just hot tears and hot cheeks, but a sickness and a suffocation. A grip on my neck which set my heart straining to beat.

It was the kind of shame that sent you sinking. Made you feel like the whole world was collapsing before your very eyes and it was your fault.

"V..." we stopped at some crossroads for a double decker bus. I looked up at him in the glow of the headlights but his face was sharp and I shut up before I had even started to speak. His cheeks white as a sheet. Stained with rain and a sneer of blood the weather couldn't wash away.

I wanted to say sorry, I wanted to drop to my knees in a flood of tears. I wanted to show him how scared I was, beg him not to hurt me. Say it over and over again until he knew how sorry I really was but I couldn't.

I couldn't speak and I could tell from the look of him, from his silence, the way he wouldn't even look at me, that he didn't want me to speak.

That he'd probably rather he never had to see me again after this.

I was beginning to wonder why, if he was so full of hate for me in that moment, he had even bothered to save me at all.

He'd obviously known all along, when hed given me that warning earlier that evening. When he'd told me to be good.