Page 175 of Hidden

“For hell,” I said with a grin, though there was nothing to be smiling about. But it didn’t matter. Because I was planning on following Gabriella to wherever it was she had ended up after leaving this shitty place.

Nico’s expression hardened. He stood, then nodded once to the men behind me. “Tie him up.”

They hauled me out of the building and across the yard, into one of the outbuildings. The room they dragged me into smelled of damp concrete, old blood, petrol, and rot. A single bulbbuzzed overhead, flickering just enough to make everything feel unreal.

My wrists were lashed high to a hook fixed into a support beam, my shoulders wrenching with the strain. My boots barely touched the floor. Every breath dragged through my chest was sharper now, not because I was afraid, but because this was it.

This was how it ended. I wasn’t going out in fire, or in a blaze of glory. It was just me, in a dirty yard, at the hands of my enemies. The worst way for a respected biker to go, but when the world had already been emptied of colour, I couldn’t find it in me to care.

Nico took his time, circling me slowly, speaking to his men more than to me, making sure they were watching. Making sure I knew this was theatre to him.

“This is the boy she risked everything for?” he sneered. “This the great fucking love story?”

I kept my mouth shut.

“This is the pathetic piece of shit she was willing to throw her entire life away over?”

He didn’t let me answer that time. His fist came swinging, splitting my lip with one punch. The second fist knocked my head sideways.

By the fifth, I tasted blood thick and metallic on my tongue, and someone behind Nico laughed when my knees buckled under the force of it. He hit me with the kind of methodical cruelty only cowards enjoyed, never enough to end it, always enough to keep it going.

His fists hit anywhere they could reach—my face, my ribs, my chest. At one point, he pulled out a blade and traced it over my skin, drawing blood, deep enough to make me wince, but not enough to cause any lasting damage.

Still, I didn’t fight. And that seemed to bother all of them more than if I had come in here with an entire army.

“Nothing to say?” Nico asked after a while, breath barely altered.

I spat blood onto the floor near his boot. “Not to you.”

He hit me again for that, open-handed this time, hard enough to snap my head back, making my vision blur at the edges.

It would have been easy to drift. Easier, maybe, to let go completely and follow the pain down into the dark where her face was waiting for me. I thought of her more clearly in that yard than I had in years gone by when she’d been right there in front of me.

Gabriella at eleven, with fire in her eyes and dirt on her shoes, calling me an idiot like it was a term of endearment. Gabriella at eighteen, with her fingers tangled in my shirt as if she already knew I’d spend the rest of my life trying to hold on to her. Gabriella laughing. Gabriella crying. Gabriella flicking that bedroom light on and off in the dark, telling me without words that she was still there, still alive, still mine in all the ways the world didn’t allow.

Gabriella dead.

The thought landed like a blade between my ribs, deeper than all the rest.

Good, I thought dimly.Let it finish me.

Nico brought the knife to my throat, looking at me with hatred and malice, and I finally thought he was going to send me back to the woman I belonged to. Until a voice rang out, making us all look in the direction it came.

Natalie stood there, chest heaving, rainwater clinging to her coat, eyes wide with something that looked too close to panic. “Stop.”

Nico frowned. “What the fuck are you doing?”

She ignored him, looking straight at me first, and something in her face shifted. Horror. Guilt. Maybe both. I didn’t care. Not until I saw the wetness in her eyes and realised, she looked likesomeone who had run headfirst into a nightmare she hadn’t thought through.

“Nico,” she said again, more urgently now. “Stop.”

His expression darkened. “You don’t come in here and tell me what to do.”

Her hands were shaking. “She’s dead, alright? You’ve both fucking lost. Now call them off.”

A heavy silence settled over the crowd.

I lifted my head slowly, the blood dripping from my mouth onto my shirt.