Page 178 of Hidden

That should not have unnerved me as much as it did. There were plenty of reasons she could have stepped out, and under normal circumstances, I would have assumed exactly that. But nothing about our circumstances was normal, and there was something about the stillness in the room that had my stomach tightening before I had even fully opened my eyes.

I lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, trying to get my bearings through the heavy fog in my head, but the unease only worsened the more awake I became.

I pushed myself upright too quickly, wincing at the weakness in my body and the ache that still hadn’t fully left me, then looked around the room as though she might somehow materialise if I searched hard enough.

“Natalie?” My voice came out rough, thick with sleep and disuse, and it sounded strangely small in the silence. There was no answer. I tried again, louder this time, but the only responsewas the faint hum of the house around me. No footsteps. No voice. No muttered curse under her breath because she had forgotten something important in the rush to get us out. Nothing.

The panic didn’t hit all at once. It crept in, slow and poisonous, curling tighter around my ribs with every second that passed. Natalie was supposed to be here. She was supposed to wake me, help me get dressed, get me out before anyone realised what she had done.

She would not have left me. Not without saying something. Not without making sure I was conscious enough to move. Not without… not without a hundred things Natalie would never have risked.

I forced myself out of bed and crossed to the doorway, then into the hall, my pulse thudding harder the further I went. The house felt wrong. Not loud, not chaotic, not full of the usual threat that had lived in these walls for months, but emptied out in a way that felt somehow worse.

I checked the bathroom first, then her room, then downstairs, my heart pounding harder with every empty space I found. By the time I reached the kitchen, I was breathing too fast and my hands were shaking. The back door was unlocked. There was no note. No explanation. No sign of where she had gone or why. Just absence. Just that awful, yawning absence where she should have been.

I stood there for a long moment, staring at nothing, trying to force my thoughts into some kind of order, but they refused to settle. Every instinct I had was screaming that something had happened. Something bad. Something irreversible. And if that was true, then there was only one place I could go.

To Vienna.

I’d stick to the original plan. I’d get help.

Something had gone wrong, and I couldn’t do this alone.

I’d go to Vienna, and then we’d come back, and save who we could save.

I don’t remember much about the journey there.

I remember the road blurring past the car window and the way my stomach turned harder with every mile.

I remember checking my phone over and over again even though I knew there was nothing on it, no missed call, no text, no last-minute message explaining where she had gone. By the time I reached the clubhouse, my nerves were stretched so thin they felt ready to snap.

The building looked exactly the same as it always had, and for one stupid second, that nearly undid me. It was so painfully familiar. So normal. So solid and safe in a way I had not allowed myself to feel in far too long. But the second I stepped through the door with my suitcases in hand, I knew that whatever fragile sense of safety I had clung to was about to be ripped away.

The room fell quiet.

Not gradually. Not uncertainly. Immediately.

Conversation stopped mid-flow. Laughter died in people’s throats. Chairs scraped against the floor as heads turned, one after another, until every single person in the room was looking at me. I stopped just inside the doorway, my fingers tightening around the suitcase handle as I stared back at them, thrown at once by the expressions on their faces. It wasn’t just surprise. It wasn’t even relief, not fully. It was something stranger than that. Something colder. Like I had walked in carrying something none of them wanted to name.

Rachel stood first.

She rose so quickly her chair knocked back behind her, one hand flattening against the table to steady herself as she stared at me with an expression I couldn’t make sense of. Her face had drained of all colour. “Gabriella?”

I frowned, looking from her to Dante and back again, my confusion only deepening when neither of them moved toward me the way I had expected. “Why are you all looking at me like that? Where’s Vienna?”

Rachel swallowed, but when she spoke, it wasn’t an answer she gave me. “We should be asking you that. Did you not see him?”

The question hit me so strangely that for a second, I simply stared at her. “What?”

Dante was already moving before she could say anything else, his expression hard in a way that made something low in my stomach start to twist. “Gabriella,” he said carefully, and that carefulness scared me more than if he had shouted, “where have you come from?”

I blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Vienna called me,” he said, his jaw tightening.

Everything inside me went still.

“He called me,” Dante repeated, his voice low and controlled, “and he said you were with him.”