Hostage

Chapter 1-Mistake #1

Reading back on this now, it does start off a little iffy. But...it is definitely worth reading. It's my favorite story out of all of them (and the one with the most views) that I've written so give it a chance. I don't think you'll regret it! Enjoy! (:

Dedicated to OnyAnonymous for the awesome cover!

Zayn POV

"EVERYBODY. GET DOWN NOW."

1 Week Earlier

"Stop complaining. There's nothing we can do about it."

Harry was complaining about the craphouse we lived in. Yeah, it was in bad condition, but unless they had £3,500, there's nothing we could do about it. I didn't like our circumstances, but I had the decency to not complain about it.

"Where is Niall?"

"Still at the hospital", I told Harry, "she's not doing well."

"What is wrong with her exactly?"

"The cancer has spread, and they have no way of slowing it down. Well..."

"...Well they do, he just doesn't have the money for it?"

"There you go."

His girlfriend, Emily, had been in the hospital for a while, and she wasn't getting any better. We tried to pool all our money together to get her the operation that she needed, but it wasn't enough. To say that we were at the poverty line would be generous; we were well below it. But, like I said..there was nothing we could do about it.

Harry was shirtless, lifting weights on the other side of our flat. Actually, you couldn't really call it a flat. We lived in a converted garage that I had beat the crap out of this bloke for. Not long after that, Harry moved in with me. Louis used to.

"Guess who?", a familiar voice called.

I turned around to find a brown-haired boy walking in, with a sleeve of tattoos. He threw his bags on the ground and stood in the doorway.

"Louis!"

Harry immediately ran over and wrapped his arms around him. A family reunion was happening right in front of my eyes. Harry and Louis were adoptive brothers. They met 6 years ago in juvy. Harry's mum adopted Louis thinking that she could make him a better person. Mission not accomplished. They just got into double the trouble. Louis got arrested 2 years ago and apparently was now out on parole.

"How was prison?", Harry asked him as they sat down.

"Same old, same old. Got a couple more tattoos."

Harry admired the tattoos while I walked over to our kitchen. They were always competing to see who could get the most. So far, Louis was in the lead. I wasn't far behind, but I didn't necessarily see the joy in having more of my body inked than someone else's, but I digress.

I don't know why I bothered looking to see what we had to eat; there was never anything because we were so...'economically challenged'. That's what Harry liked to call it; I usually just said 'broke'. The paint was peeling off of our walls, and the roof was slowly caving in.

"I see this place has gotten no better", Louis said.

"We didn't become millionaires while you were in prison, so no. No improvement."

I rolled my eyes as his sarcastic comment. They were always complaining and always getting on my nerves.

"We're here!", Liam called out.

He was holding a brown-eyed 2-year-old in his hand, who had a huge smile on his face. His adorable son.

"Hey Aiden!", we all said.