Page 40 of Hidden

Still Leif holds onto my wrist as I stare at him, letting the seconds tick by. One by one. Slow and steady.

And for the first time. I feel… not quite fear.

Not exactly.

It’s more confusion. As though the entire bedrock of what I know just exploded.

“What are you?” I whisper, the question hangs between us like a fragile thing. Except I do know. They’ve been showing me what they are this entire time.

I dismissed them.

I didn’t believe them.

Thought they were crazy, psychotic, deluded.

Leif’s eyes do the thing again. The fangs don’t retract. They sit where canine teeth used to be, and the difference is small enough that anyone not looking would miss it. I am looking and it’s causing my reality to blur. The hallway behind him has gone thin at the edges, like it might give if I leaned on it.

“I think you already know,” he says, his voice dropping to a register that makes my skin prickle.

Enzo’s arm tightens across my body. Davi shifts closer, his breath warm against my neck. The three of them form a triangle around me, and I’m the center point where all their lines converge.

Or they’re trapping me. Hard to tell. Either way I’m naked, so really, where would I even go. Also I have this problem when it comes to curiosity.

“You can’t be,” I say, but my voice lacks conviction. “Vampires don’t exist.”

Davi laughs, the sound rich and musical. “And yet here they are.”

“They,” I parrot back to Davi.

“Just them,” he says, winking. “I’m what’s for dinner. Also, I can tell you they’re vampires, they cannot.”

Leif makes a strangled noise that tells me exactly what he thinks about the worddinner.

I pull my wrist from Leif’s grasp, but only to touch his face again, to feel the impossible reality beneath my fingertips. “How?”

“I cannot tell you that,” he says softly.

“Right, Davi just said that.” I need to know why.

I pull my hand back and slowly rise from Enzo to sit on the side of the sleeping bag. “I don’t know I believe you. Any of you.”I frown, looking at Leif. “You’re in the sun all the time,” I point out. “And you are the one driving him,” I tell Enzo.

Enzo’s dark eyes meet mine, steady and unblinking. “The sun doesn’t kill us. It weakens us.”

“Like how?” I ask, wrapping my arms around myself, suddenly aware of my nakedness.

“We cannot…”

“Say,” I finish for him. “What can you tell me?”

Two years of files open in my head all at once. The business dinners where Leif never eats but drinks wine. Red wine. The way Enzo moves through a room without making a single sound. The way Davi has been reading me since the door.

Quirks of powerful men.

I have been so fucking stupid.

“You are a very special woman, Hadley.”

“I told you not to say that word.”