Page 53 of Hidden

Dante let out a slow breath through his nose, staring at the bottle in his hands. “Doc says she needs rest.”

“Doc says a lot of things,” Rachel replied, and there was no real bite in her voice, only tiredness. “What he means is she’s sedated enough not to scream the place down tonight.”

No one said anything to that. There wasn’t much to say.

Shark had been gone for a while now, but time hadn’t softened the edges of it for Jenna. If anything, it had made them worse. The first few days after his death had been all shock and raw horror, the kind of grief that arrived hot and loud and left devastation in its wake.

But this… this was colder. It was more dangerous because it lingered, infecting every aspect of your life.

It hollowed her out from the inside and left her moving through the days like a ghost in her own life. Or not moving through them at all. Trex had become passed from arm to arm more times than was fair for a child his age, and nobody complained because there was no blame to place where grief was concerned, not really. But that didn’t make the sight of him easier to stomach.

Rachel adjusted him carefully, tucking the little blanket higher over his back before looking up at us both, and when she spoke, her voice was softer than before, but somehow that made it hit harder. “She’s not coping. And it’s time we all addressed that. Or else we risk history repeating itself, and Jenna going the same way as Kitty.”

“She’ll get through it with the support of her family,” Dante answered. “Jenna doesn’t want to speak to a doctor—”

“And neither did Kitty. Look where that got her,” Rachel sighed. “Jenna… She’s… Two of them died that night. But only one of them stopped breathing.”

The words settled over the room and stayed there, too heavy to push away. Dante looked up at her then, really looked, and Isaw the grief in his face too, the old familiar guilt that men like us carried whether it belonged to us or not.

Shark had been one of ours.

And though Dante had painted the streets with the blood of the men responsible, though every Rider involved in that attack had met a violent end, none of it had brought Shark back, and none of it had dragged Jenna out of the hole she’d fallen into after he was gone. Revenge had done what revenge always did—it satisfied the beast for a moment, and then left the silence behind for the living to choke on.

“She’ll come back,” Dante said eventually, though he sounded like a man speaking because silence had gone on too long rather than because he fully believed it.

Rachel’s smile was a sad, fleeting thing. “Maybe,” she said. “But he doesn’t get to stop needing her whilst she figures that out.”

My gaze dropped back to Trex then, to the way his cheek was pressed against Rachel’s chest, to the trust in it, the quiet certainty that whoever held him would keep him safe for the night. He looked too small. Too unaware. Too used to it already. And that was the part that got me.

It was the way he had accepted comfort where he could find it and made no fuss about where it came from.

There was no confusion in his sleeping face, no fear, no tension. Just bone-deep exhaustion and trust. It was that trust that caught me off guard, because I knew it. I knew exactly what it was to be too young to name the disaster unfolding around you, and to cling instead to the nearest source of warmth, softness, and stability.

I knew what it was to find more comfort in the arms of the president’s old lady than in your own home. I knew what it was to adapt before you even realised you were adapting.

Something cold and familiar slithered through me then, not pain exactly, but recognition, and all at once the room around me seemed to tilt slightly, the edges blurring with another memory laid over the top of it.

Rachel in the half-light with Trex in her arms became Kitty in my mind, all soft perfume and worn denim, crouching to my height with kind eyes and a patience my mother never seemed able to find for anything but her next high. Dante, silent and grim and carrying more than he should, blurred with Crash, broad and immovable and somehow always there in the background of every bad memory I’d ever had, like some dark, steady pillar I could orient myself by.

Even Jenna, medicated into sleep down the hall, called to mind my own mother in a way that made my chest pull tight, because there was a sameness to the absence of them. A sameness to the way a woman could still be alive and yet feel irretrievably gone.

I swallowed hard and dragged a hand over my jaw, trying to shake off the image before it rooted itself too deeply, but it was no use. Once the past found a crack in the present, it had a habit of flooding straight through.

I could see my mum in fragments then, the blonde hair, the hollow cheeks, the distant eyes, the false brightness on the good days that was somehow worse than the bad ones because it fooled you into hoping.

I could see the women around her too, the ones who pitied me, the ones who avoided me, and the one who never did.

Kitty.

She had never made me feel like a burden, not once. She had simply opened her arms and let me crawl in when things at home were too loud or too empty or too unpredictable to bear.

She had fed me, soothed me, cleaned me up when I came in dirty, and made space for me beside her children as though Ibelonged there too. Looking at Trex now, folded against Rachel, I could feel that old ache blooming low and slow in my chest—not just grief for my mother, but grief for the boy I had been, and for all the ways he had learnt too young not to ask for the things he needed.

Dante shifted in his seat, drawing me back to the room. “We’ll sort something with Jenna,” he said, though there was a roughness in his voice now that hadn’t been there before. “Whether she likes it or not, we’ll sort it.”

Rachel nodded, but she didn’t look reassured. “I know,” she said quietly. “I just… I don’t want him growing up thinking this is normal.”

My laugh came out before I could stop it, short and humourless, though there was no real amusement in it. “Bit late for that in this world, isn’t it?”