Page 54 of Hidden

Both of them looked at me then, and I instantly regretted speaking. Not because I was wrong, but because I had heard the bitterness in my own voice and knew exactly where it had come from.

Rachel’s expression softened first. “That’s not what I mean.”

“I know,” I said, and I did. She meant she didn’t want Trex learning to accept absence as routine. Didn’t want him measuring love by how much pain came with it. Didn’t want him finding comfort in borrowed arms because his own mother had sunk too deep in grief to reach for him.

But that was exactly what I had done, wasn’t it?

Not with grief, perhaps, not entirely, but with loss all the same. My mother had been slipping away from me long before she died. By the time the overdose finally took her, there had already been a part of me prepared for it, which was its own kind of horror. Maybe that was what I saw when I looked at Trex. Not just a child in need of comfort, but a child standing at the beginning of a road I knew too well.

The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was full. Heavy with the kind of things none of us were particularly good at saying aloud.

Rachel kept stroking Trex’s hair. Dante twisted the bottle slowly between his hands. And once I started thinking about my mum, there was no stopping where my head went next.

Not to the chaos of her final days. Not to the overdose itself. No, my mind went to the funeral, because of course it did.

To black clothes that didn’t sit right on my skin and the smell of damp earth and lilies and stale cigarette smoke clinging to men who did not know how to mourn without looking angry.

To Kitty’s hand resting warm on the back of my neck, guiding me, steadying me.

To Crash standing like a monument in the distance.

And to the one person who had looked at me that day and seen not the clown, not the club stray, not the boy trying too hard to make everyone laugh, but something broken and bleeding quietly beneath the surface.

Gabriella.

I closed my eyes briefly, and in the darkness behind them I could already feel the memory turning toward me, slow and inevitable. It came not as the woman in the window, not as Nico’s old lady, not as the girl who had broken me by letting me go, but as something softer and far more dangerous.

The girl who had stayed. The girl who had seen me at my lowest and reached for me anyway.

When I opened my eyes again, Rachel was still there with Trex tucked close, Dante was still staring into the neck of his bottle like it might offer answers, and the room around me remained exactly as it had been. But I was no longer fully in it. Some part of me had already slipped backwards, pulled under by the quiet, by the grief, by the familiarity of it all. And as the weight of the present loosened just enough to let the past in, Iknew with sudden, aching certainty that I wasn’t thinking about funerals at all.

I was thinking about her.

Chapter 18

Vienna

Before

15 Years Old

Fifteen years. That’s all we were given.

Fifteen summers.

Fifteen Christmases.

Fifteen birthdays.

And then… nothing.

Nothing but the memory of her. Her skin mottled. Her lips blue. The needle still in her arm.

“Ahh, lad… shit,” Warrior said, slapping his hand on my shoulder and squeezing tight. “You’ll be alright. You’ve got us.”

“Thanks, Warrior,” I replied, still staring at the mound of dirt that covered my mum’s coffin.

I hadn’t expected forever. We all want our parents to be invincible, but biker children know better than most how easily death can find you. And my mother wasn’t hiding from death. Every time she injected something, every time she snorted something else, she was issuing death a challenge.