Page 173 of Hidden

And that was the cruellest part of all, because if he had hated me, this would have been easier. If he had threatened me, if he had sworn revenge, if he had become every terrible thing the clubs always said men would become when they were crossed, then I could have tucked this grief away beneath anger and called it survival.

But he had been good to me.

Better than good.

He had been Luke.

And I knew, with the cold certainty that only misery can bring, that was exactly why I could never go to him.

Because if I did, my father would never stop. Because if I did, the clubs would tear each other apart. Because if I did, Vienna would bleed for me until there was nothing left of him but loyaltyand bones. He believed he could work through it. He believed love made us bigger than this world.

He was wrong.

This world was bigger and more cruel than either of us could have expected.

It was hungrier, taking and taking, until there was nothing left to give. It took what it was owed, and then some.

I sat up slowly, wiping at my face with trembling fingers before reading the note once more from beginning to end, even though I knew it would only make the hurt worse. This time I traced the last line with my thumb.

All you have to do is come to me.

It sounded so easy when he wrote it like that.

As though I could simply open my bedroom door, walk out into the night, and choose him. As though there weren’t a thousand chains wrapped around my throat and wrists and heart.

I looked at the charm in my hand again, at the tiny pram and its useless sweetness, and let out a laugh that turned ugly halfway through. Very carefully, because I could not bear to damage it, I fastened it onto my bracelet with shaking fingers. It sat there between the others, bright and new and innocent, as though it had every right in the world to be there. Then I picked up the scan picture, smoothed it flat, and held it against my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the empty room, though I didn’t know whether I was speaking to him, the baby, or myself. “I’m so sorry.”

But sorry had never once been enough to save anyone in our world. And as I sat there crying with his letter in my lap and his future hanging from my wrist, I knew with a certainty that would haunt me for the rest of my life that I was not going to him.

Chapter 46

Vienna

Now

I had always thought grief would feel louder.

I had imagined screaming, maybe. Rage. The kind of agony that split the sky open and brought the world down around your ears. I had imagined it as something wild and uncontainable, something that would have me tearing through walls and snapping necks and putting bullets in every bastard stupid enough to still be breathing while she wasn’t.

Instead, it was quiet.

It hollowed me out so completely that by the time I found myself standing outside the Rough Riders’ Church, helmet dangling from my hand, blood already dried beneath my nails from men who had tried and failed to stop me getting there, I felt almost calm. Not peaceful, exactly.

There was nothing peaceful about the ache lodged behind my ribs, or the way every breath scraped like broken glass through my chest. But there was a stillness to me that hadn’t existed in years. A dead sort of stillness. The kind a man got when the one thing anchoring him to the earth had been ripped away, leavingnothing behind but an empty shell and a body too stubborn to lie down.

The guard at the gate looked at me, then at the cuts across my knuckles, the bruise blooming along my jaw, the gun strapped openly at my side, and sneered as though he thought I’d come to posture.

I almost laughed.

“Tell Nico I’m here,” I said.

He frowned. “You alone?”

I lifted my gaze to his and let him see it. Let him see there was nothing in me worth bargaining with anymore. “Does it look like I brought an army?”

He hesitated. I watched the moment he realised something was off. Men like him were used to fury. Used to threats and chest-beating and stupid bravado. They knew how to handle men who still had something to lose.