Page 176 of Hidden

“What?” My voice came out wrecked, little more than a rasp. She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, but I needed to hear her say it. I needed to hear Gabriella’s name coming from her lips as she announced to all of us that she was dead.

Natalie looked at me, and for one split second everything in the room narrowed to her face. There was something there. Something wrong. Something panicked and desperate and not at all what I had expected from a woman delivering news of death.

“I can’t do this. I can’t letyoudo this,” she shook her head, as though she was torn between doing what was right and what was needed. “Vienna… she’s—”

Nico moved faster than I would have believed for a man his size. He grabbed her by the arm and jerked her into him so violently that she gasped.

“What did you just say?”

She tried to wrench free. “Let go of me.”

“You’re a filthy, lying little bitch,” he said, backhanding her so hard one of her teeth flew out of her mouth.

She whimpered, clutching her cheek, and then looked at me. And I saw something. There was something there. Something she hadn’t meant to let me see. Something frantic and broken.

“She’s—”

The gunshot exploded through the room.

For a second, no one moved.

Natalie made the smallest sound I had ever heard. Not even a scream. More like confusion. Like her body had stopped understanding what had just happened before her mind could catch up. Then her knees buckled, and Nico let her crumble to the floor as though she was nothing.

She hit the concrete hard, blood blooming beneath her with horrifying speed, her eyes still open and fixed somewhere just left of me as though she couldn’t quite understand why the world had ended there.

Anger ripped through me so fast and so hot that for one dizzy, blinding second I thought my body might split open under the force of it. My hands clenched inside the restraints. My chest expanded against broken ribs. The room sharpened into brutal, perfect focus. Nico. The gun in his hand. The men behind him. Natalie’s blood creeping across the floor.

And the look on her face right before she died.

That look.

That almost-word.

That unfinished fucking sentence.

I didn’t know what she had been trying to say. Didn’t know if it would have changed a single thing. Didn’t know if Gabriella was truly dead or if Natalie had just died trying to tell me something worse.

But I did know I needed to find out.

I lifted my head. Very slowly, I licked the blood from my split lip and tested the restraints at my wrists.

Nico saw it and smiled like he thought he still had control of this. Like he hadn’t just made the single greatest mistake of his life.

I started laughing. It came out rough and wet and wrong enough that a few of the men shifted where they stood.

Nico’s smile faltered. “What the fuck is so funny?”

I looked at him through blood and swelling and something far more dangerous than rage. “You really don’t know, do you?”

My voice scraped the room raw. I laughed again, lower this time, and shook my head.

“All this time… all this fucking time, you’ve all looked at me and seen what you wanted to see.”

Nobody moved. I rolled my shoulders against the restraints, ignoring the fresh burst of pain.

“The drunk. The clown. The one with a bottle in his hand and a joke in his mouth. The one who doesn’t shut up. Doesn’t sit still. Doesn’t look dangerous enough to matter.”

My spit hit the floor, red and bloody.