Page 179 of Hidden

I stared at him, and for a second, the words didn’t make sense. They floated there between us, impossible and disconnected from anything I understood. “I haven’t seen him since I left this clubhouse the other night…”

Dante didn’t answer.

The room had gone so quiet I could hear my own breathing. My grip loosened on the suitcase handle. Then tightened again.

“No,” I said, shaking my head now, because that was ridiculous. Impossible. I hadn’t seen Vienna. I hadn’t spoken to Vienna. I would know if he had been there. I would know if—

A strange sensation moved through me then, not quite memory, not quite thought. Just… something. Warmth against my skin. A hand in my hair. Fingers brushing my face with impossible gentleness. A voice, low and rough and familiar enough to make something in my chest clench painfully around it.

I swayed.

Rachel made a small movement as though to catch me, but I held up a hand before she could get too close.

No.

“How did the blood get on you?”

It was Dante who said it.

I looked up sharply to see him staring at my face.

At first, I didn’t understand what he meant. Then, slowly, I lifted my hand and touched my cheek. My fingertips came away dry and rough. Dark red.

The room tilted.

I stared down at the blood on my fingers, and all at once that strange sensation inside me sharpened. Not into a full memory—nothing that clear, nothing that kind—but enough.

Enough to make my stomach drop out from under me.

Enough to leave me with the sudden, sickening certainty that I had not imagined the warmth or the voice or the feeling of being touched so carefully I had almost thought I was dreaming.

“He was there,” I whispered.

No one answered. They didn’t need to. I looked up at Dante then, and whatever I saw in his face was enough to rip the rest of the truth into place.

Vienna had been there. He had come for me, and he had seen me. He had touched my face. He was bloody, and he was in enemy territory. Not just on the balcony. Not locked away in my room. He was in their clubhouse. In Natalie’s room.

And he had left believing I was dead.

The breath that left me after that did not sound human.

It tore out of me raw and broken, too jagged to be called a sob, and I felt my knees threaten to give way beneath me as the full horror of it crashed through me. “No,” I whispered, shaking my head once, then again, harder this time, as though I could physically throw the truth back out of my body. “No, no, no…”

Rachel was crying.

Someone else in the room swore.

I couldn’t look at any of them. Couldn’t see anything beyond the image my mind was now constructing in cruel, unbearable detail. Vienna standing beside my bed. Vienna speaking to me while I lay there helpless and unaware. Vienna believing—truly believing—that he had been too late.

And then the next thought hit me.

If he had called Dante…

If he had said I was with him…

If he had believed I was dead…

Then where had he gone?