Page 82 of Hidden

I shook my head once.

I wasn’t even sure what I meant by it. Don’t come in. Don’t leave. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t make me remember.

Maybe all of it.

His jaw flexed, and for a second I thought he was going to ignore me. That he was going to do something reckless and irreversible and climb through that balcony door and blow both our lives apart in one final, selfish act of wanting.

So I pulled away first.

I had to.

Another second and I might have opened the door. Another second and I might have begged him for everything that was impossible.

He didn’t move at once. His eyes searched my face one final time, as if committing every crack in it to memory, and then slowly, reluctantly, he stepped back.

The loss of his nearness was instant.

I wrapped my arms around myself and stood there as he retreated across the balcony, one backward step at a time, never fully turning his back on me. At the railing, he paused, held my gaze, and for one reckless heartbeat I saw it all there—the boy I had once met in secret, the man he had become, the fury, the love, the obsession, the grief.

Then he was gone.

Vanishing back into the dark the way only Vienna could. Like a threat. Like a promise. Like something that would always come back, no matter how many times the world tried to bury it.

I stood at the window for a long time after that, staring at my own faint reflection in the glass.

My hand drifted back to the place where his had been, and then I crossed back to the bed and sat on the edge of it, my body protesting the movement as I did so.

I had wanted to provoke him. That was what I told myself. I had wanted to feel powerful for five minutes. Wanted to remind myself that there was still one person in this world I could affect without permission. Wanted to spit some of my own poison back into the night and see what it did.

Instead, all I had managed to do was remind myself what his attention used to feel like when it wasn’t stolen through glass windows.

I wanted to feel chosen. Wanted. Cherished, even.

Because there had been a time, hadn’t there? A real time. Not this hollowed-out thing we had become, not the blood and betrayal and shadows of it.

A time when being with Luke had been easy.

When a whole day stretched ahead of us and the biggest problem we faced was how to spend it before someone noticed we were gone.

Before everything turned to war and ruin, there had been days when loving him had felt as simple as breathing.

And despite everything that had happened since, despite the bruises on my skin and the years between us and the life I had been forced to live, that was the memory that came for me now.

Not the break-up.

Not the blood.

Not the loss.

Just him.

Young and bright and impossible.

Luke, grinning at me beneath an open sky, with an entire day to waste and nowhere in the world he would rather be.

Chapter 24

Gabriella