Page 69 of Hidden

“Dumb kid,” I muttered, and the relief settled warm and heavy in my chest.

Reaching forward, I flicked the bike’s headlight twice before starting the engine, the familiar roar cutting through the quiet street.

Just in case she was watching.

I didn’t look back again.

But I knew she would have seen it.

And that was enough.

Chapter 21

Vienna

Now

The woods were quieter at night than most people realised. During the day, the place looked ordinary enough—a stretch of overgrown land skirting the edge of Rider territory, broken up by bramble patches, winding trails, and enough trees to make it easy for a man to disappear if he knew where he was going.

But at night, every sound seemed to carry further. The crunch of leaves beneath our boots. The low clink of metal as Hacksaw set his toolkit down beside a tree. The distant rumble of bikes somewhere far off, too muffled to make out clearly, but there all the same, like the land itself never truly slept.

I adjusted the strap of the bag over my shoulder and looked down the line of trees, measuring distances automatically, noting gaps in the undergrowth and the places where a man on foot might move without being seen. It was all instinct at this point. Years of living this life had trained my body to spot danger before my mind had even caught up. But tonight, more than usual, every route, every shadow, every hidden track felt loaded with meaning.

Hacksaw crouched at the base of a thick oak tree and began unpacking one of the trail cameras, his movements efficient and methodical, as though he’d done this a hundred times before.

Maybe he had.

He was one of those men who always seemed to know how things worked, how systems fit together, how to build structures where other people only saw chaos. It was why he made such a good secretary and why I trusted him more than most, even when there had been a time—not all that long ago really—where I hadn’t been sure whether he wanted to punch me in the throat every time I walked into a room.

“This one should catch the main trail,” he said, glancing up at me briefly before returning his attention to the tree. “If the Riders are moving product through here, they’ll either cut across this route or swing wider to the left, where the brush is thinner. Either way, we’ll see something.”

I grunted in agreement and set the second bag down, unzipping it to check the rest of the equipment. We had three trail cams, two smaller motion sensors, and a directional audio recorder that Hacksaw had somehow got his hands on through channels I wasn’t especially interested in questioning.

The less I knew about where he sourced half our gear, the better. I understood enough to know the thing would be useful if set near the right route, and that was all that mattered.

The chapter of my life where I cared about rules and nice, clean methods had been and gone.

“You’re quiet,” Hacksaw observed after a moment, tightening the strap around the tree trunk. “That usually means one of two things. Either you’re thinking too much, or you’re planning something stupid.”

“I’m hungover and in a forest with you,” I replied, crouching beside the bag and checking the batteries. “Call it personal growth.”

He snorted. “That’d be a first.”

The corner of my mouth twitched despite myself, and for a moment the tension in my shoulders eased. That was the thing with blokes like Hacksaw. You could go months without discussing anything real, survive enough shit together to write your own gospel, and still somehow know where you stood by the tone of one stupid, throwaway remark. Or at least, most of the time.

I handed him a second battery pack, and he took it without looking up.

“Dante want coverage on all main approaches?” I asked, partly because it mattered, partly because work was easier than letting my head drift where it had been trying to drift all day.

“Main approaches, side routes, anywhere the little bastards might try to get clever,” he replied. “If that shipment is really coming in at the end of the month, we need to know where it’s entering, where it’s being split, and what roads they’re planning on using to move it. There’s too much money in it for them to be sloppy.”

“They’re always sloppy.”

“Aye,” he said, standing and dusting off his hands before reaching for the next camera. “But lately they’re sloppy with confidence. That’s the dangerous kind.”

He wasn’t wrong.

There was a difference between men making mistakes and men deciding the consequences no longer applied to them.