This is the description of the Japanese book 告白 by Kanae Minato. In the picture, in red, are two instances of a character I suppose to be a hiragana.
But I have never seen it and can't find it anywhere on the internet.
Through context I think it might be a contracted form of ここ, but is there even such a thing as contracting two hiragana in one? How do we call it so I can find more info of that on the internet?
I will very much appreciate if you guys could enlighten me on the meaning of it.
It's a cursive version of と like the one in the picture, but written more stylistically
This style of と is found in fonts like 築地体初号仮名, an archaic looking font developed by Morisawa. It's a reproduction of a particular set of movable type, and other font makers might have similar looking ones, but Morisawa's particularly looks similar to me.
Here is a sample provided by Morisawa:
So what you have found is not an instance of hiragana contractions and shorthands. If you are looking for them, they are called kana ligatures (合略仮名). ゟ for より is one of them.
It is not a contraction but a design of と. It is supposed to represent the beginning of the stroke written with a brush.
You can see the same style in し in 亡くした on the fourth line. On this, the following contains more information.
The closest I can find is a font named GL-築地五号
For a similar thing in Latin alphabets, you can think about the difference between a and a, or between modern scripts and uncial scripts.
