Page 13 of Gabriel: Duke of Bencalor

Would the duke have no­ticed them, given the stress he was un­der at the time?

She brought up Gabriel’s de­brief­ing with Mikel af­ter he was re­leased by the kid­nap­pers. She chose to read the typed tran­script rather than view the video be­cause it had been so emo­tion­ally ex­haust­ing to watch Gabriel and hear his re­mem­bered fear and pain dur­ing the recorded in­ter­view. She had felt like a voyeur, even though she knew her job de­manded that she un­der­stand as much as pos­si­ble about the ab­duc­tion.

She also wanted to avoid her own flash­backs to the time she had spent trapped in a place she couldn’t es­cape.

She found the sec­tion on the lead-up to the surgery and its af­ter­math. Gabriel had been given a hos­pi­tal gown and rub­ber san­dals. She winced when he said how grate­ful he’d been for the gown and how he’d begged them to let him keep it af­ter the surgery. They had taken it away again, of course.

Once he was dressed in the gown and san­dals, two of his masked cap­tors had put a black cloth bag over his head be­fore lead­ing him out of the tent and into a larger space be­fore en­ter­ing a hall­way. He said he could tell the size of the spa­ces by the move­ment of air around him and how the sound bounced off sur­faces, the lat­ter prob­a­bly due to his mu­si­cal train­ing. Af­ter a few turns, he was led into a larger room and strapped down onto what turned out to be a sur­gi­cal ta­ble be­fore they re­moved the hood.

Which al­lowed him to see the op­er­at­ing room lights and sur­gi­cal im­ple­ments, as well as green-gowned fig­ures with their faces hid­den by gog­gles and masks.

In the video in­ter­view, Gabriel had bro­ken down at this point, sob­bing. Quinn had averted her eyes from the screen while Mikel soothed him and asked him if he wanted to stop the in­ter­view for a while. But Gabriel had pulled him­self to­gether in an act of in­cred­i­ble strength and con­tin­ued with his hor­ri­fy­ing nar­ra­tive.

He’d asked the sur­geon—whom he was cer­tain was a man—to please tell him what he was go­ing to do. The sur­geon had not re­sponded, but the dis­em­bod­ied elec­tronic voice that oc­ca­sion­ally came through the speaker in his tent did.

“We need to prove that we’re se­ri­ous. Don’t worry. We’re tak­ing some­thing that’s easy to re­place. And the sur­geon is skilled, so you won’t suf­fer any pe­riph­eral dam­age.”

Quinn couldn’t imag­ine how Gabriel must have felt. Just read­ing the words sent a chill of hor­ror shiv­er­ing through her.

He’d begged that they not take a fin­ger, but the voice had laughed and said he’d find out when he woke up.

Then they’d put a mask over his face and knocked him out with the anes­the­sia. When he had awak­ened, the sur­geon was gone. So was his ear.

That meant they were deal­ing with a nar­row win­dow of time when Gabriel had been bat­tling the ter­ror of the un­known med­i­cal pro­ce­dure.

Had he seen the sur­geon’s hands? Would he re­mem­ber them if he had?

Quinn sat back in her chair and stared at the ceil­ing as she de­bated what to do.

Mikel had gone to the hos­pi­tal to pick up his daugh­ter and take her home. He ex­pected to be gone all day so he could make sure that Ser­ena was well enough to be out of a doc­tor’s im­me­di­ate care. A fa­mil­iar flick of envy hit Quinn in the chest. She hoped the teenager knew how lucky she was to have a fa­ther who cared so deeply about her, one who made his daugh­ter a pri­or­ity over his work.

She blinked back a sud­den burn of tears and com­posed a short email to the duke, ask­ing him to call her when he had time. Then she set to work track­ing down the best im­ages of the doc­tor’s hands and edit­ing out any­thing that might bias Gabriel’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of them.

She’d barely fin­ished El­lis’s col­lage when Emilia pinged her to say the duke was on the phone.

“Don Gabriel, thank you for call­ing.” She hes­i­tated, sec­ond-guess­ing her de­ci­sion to drag him into this.

“Has Ko­dra made con­tact with some­one you want me to look at?” His voice held that sexy touch of gravel within its vel­vet depths. It seemed to flicker over her skin.

She took a deep breath and pulled her fo­cus back to the doc­tors. “This is a dif­fer­ent an­gle.”

“And that an­gle is?” Wari­ness fil­tered into his tone.

“The sur­geon. I’ve nar­rowed it down to three strong pos­si­bil­i­ties.” She pushed at the nose­piece of her glasses. “I know the med­i­cal staff wore masks and gog­gles. How­ever, I won­der if you might have got­ten a look at the sur­geon’s hands. It could help me pin­point which one to re­ally dig into, if you could iden­tify a dis­tinc­tive shape.”

“His hands,” the duke re­peated. Then there was si­lence.

Quinn scrunched her face into a gri­mace of sym­pa­thy as she waited. Just when she couldn’t stand it any longer, the duke spoke.

“I will try. Send me the pho­to­graphs.” De­ter­mi­na­tion fired his voice.

“It would be bet­ter if you came here,” Quinn said. “I can con­trol the se­quence and tim­ing of how you see the pho­tos and watch your re­ac­tions. Those can tell me things you might not be aware of con­sciously.”

“Are you a psy­chol­o­gist of some kind too?”

“I’ve stud­ied cer­tain as­pects of psy­chol­ogy.” Liv­ing with her fa­ther had trained her bet­ter than any of her cour­ses in crim­i­nol­ogy, though. “I need about an hour to pre­pare.”

“Then I will come in an hour.” He dis­con­nected.

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