Page 81 of Hidden

I swallowed.

My pulse was pounding now, no longer from anger alone. This had gone too far. I knew it. Every instinct I had spent the last ten years cultivating was screaming at me to stop, to pull away, to close the curtains and pretend none of this had happened.

But something vicious in me held firm.

I dragged my fingertip slowly down the glass, and his breathing hitched. Through the window, through the dark, I mouthed, “What?”

The word was barely a shape, but he read it anyway. His eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in disbelief. Like he couldn’t quite reconcile what he was seeing with the version of me he had forced himself to live with all these years.

My lips curved again, faintly. A challenge this time.

His free hand came up slowly and touched the glass opposite my cheek, as though he were cupping it, and his head tipped to the side.

I stopped breathing.

My hand moved before my mind could catch it, palm flattening over the same space from my side. Not quite touching him. Never touching him. Just a thin sheet of glass and a decade of blood between us.

The look on his face nearly destroyed me.

Because suddenly this didn’t feel like rebellion anymore.

It didn’t feel like punishment or provocation or proof of control.

It felt like missing him.

Missing him in a way that was ancient and painful and impossible to survive.

There had been men touching my body for years, hurting it, using it, claiming it for themselves with violence and force and filth, and not one of them had ever made me feel more naked than Vienna’s hand on the other side of that glass.

His lips moved. “Gabby.”

I saw it rather than heard it, but the effect was the same.

My throat tightened so fast that it hurt.

That was all it took. One look, one touch through glass, one old name in his mouth, and every part of me that had been holding itself rigid all night threatened to come apart.

Because Nico didn’t say my name like that.

No one did.

No one said it like something precious and breakable and infuriatingly beloved.

Only him.

Only Luke.

The anger drained out of me in one brutal rush, leaving nothing but exhaustion and sorrow and the awful ache of wanting what I could not have.

My forehead bowed forward until it rested lightly against the cool glass. I closed my eyes, and for a moment, neither of us moved.

Then I felt it—the faintest slide of his hand against the window, as though if there were no glass between us, he’d be smoothing my hair back, brushing the bruises from my skin, touching me gently enough to make me shatter.

A tear slipped free before I could stop it.

I hated that. Hated myself for it. Hated that he was the one person who could still pull something honest out of me without even stepping into the room.

When I opened my eyes again, he was still there, his forehead pressed against mine. Watching me with that same unbearableintensity, all the sharpness gone from his face now, replaced by something more raw. Something quieter.