Page 42 of Gabriel: Duke of Bencalor

Panic and ter­ror ripped through him. He lay on his cot, his hands clenched into fists and pressed into his belly, his body curled around them like a shield, while the voice called him a long string of ugly, ob­scene names in Span­ish.

But the curses weren’t quite right, not quite what you’d hear on the streets of San Ig­na­cio or even Madrid.

He re­played them in his mind now, pars­ing the vo­cab­u­lary and gram­mat­i­cal struc­tures. Def­i­nitely not a na­tive Span­ish speaker.

He opened the eyes he hadn’t re­al­ized he’d shut and blew out a long breath. He’d dis­cov­ered some­thing.

Sud­denly, he felt the warmth of Quinn’s hand cov­er­ing the fist he had un­con­sciously made on the car seat. He turned to meet her eyes.

“Just re­turn­ing the fa­vor from the plane ride,” she said, giv­ing his hand a gen­tle squeeze so he could feel the im­print of her fin­gers on his skin.

“Gra­cias.”

“I know this is hard.” She kept her hand cupped over his, the warmth of her palm meant as a com­fort but caus­ing a dif­fer­ent re­ac­tion in his body. “Let me know if you want to talk any­thing through.”

What he wanted was to pull her onto his lap and touch her un­til they both for­got the rea­son they were there. Open­ing his hand, he spread his fin­gers so they were in­ter­laced with hers, a faint im­i­ta­tion of the way he wanted to in­ter­twine their bod­ies.

“I’m try­ing to re­mem­ber voices,” he said. “That’s my best chance of rec­og­niz­ing any­one.”

She nod­ded, her pony­tail shift­ing with the mo­tion. “I un­der­stand.”

She knew ev­ery­thing he’d told Mikel, so she un­der­stood far more than he might want her to. But it was a re­lief not to need to ex­plain.

Look­ing at the ear­piece in Quinn’s ear, he won­dered if Mikel had de­lib­er­ately en­sured he was the only per­son in the car with­out the abil­ity to hear what was go­ing on. That way, he would be al­most forced to think about the ab­duc­tion. The man was an arch ma­nip­u­la­tor. Thank God he was on Gabriel’s side.

“Is any­thing hap­pen­ing?” he asked.

“We’re all driv­ing around in cir­cles un­til the plane lands.” Quinn glanced at her phone. “Which should be in ten min­utes or so.”

“I fig­ured some­thing out,” he said. “The loud­speaker voice wasn’t a na­tive Span­ish speaker.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I re­mem­bered the way the voice cursed me af­ter they found out that I wasn’t Raul. The ob­scen­i­ties were slightly off. It’s hard to ex­plain.” He waved his free hand in frus­tra­tion.

“You don’t have to. I be­lieve you. I’ll tell Mikel.” Quinn spoke softly into her ra­dio be­fore she smiled. “He says, ‘Good job.’”

“All I did was elim­i­nate a few hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple out of bil­lions. Does that re­ally help?” Gabriel gri­maced.

“You elim­i­nated about half our list of po­ten­tial sus­pects, so yeah, that was pretty darned sig­nif­i­cant.”

So he would crawl back into the ter­ror to see what more he could ex­ca­vate. He curled his fin­gers in­ward to lock Quinn’s hand into his grasp.

Af­ter the voice had cursed at him, he’d been left alone and in si­lence. He’d never been that iso­lated be­fore in his life. Liv­ing in the palace or on his par­ents’ es­tate, there was al­ways some­one nearby, whether fam­ily or staff. The only time he be­came obliv­i­ous to any hu­man pres­ence was when he prac­ticed the gui­tar, the mu­sic wrap­ping him in a co­coon of sound and con­cen­tra­tion.

In the tent, all sound was gone, and he found it hard to bear, so he hummed the mu­sic he loved. When the pain meds wore off, his wound be­gan to throb with such agony that he couldn’t think about any­thing else.

He guessed they had pun­ished him for about a day. There must have been win­dows in the room where his tent was pitched be­cause he could track cy­cles of brighter and dim­mer light, de­spite the con­stant ar­ti­fi­cial il­lu­mi­na­tion in­side his prison.

Now a new fear ate at his mind: Had the kid­nap­pers de­cided he wasn’t worth the risk of ran­som­ing? Had they left him there to die, pos­si­bly of an in­fected wound?

He had be­gun to ex­plore the seams of the tent when the voice from the loud­speaker laughed, mak­ing him jump. “Plan­ning to leave us?”

“I thought you’d left me.” He hated how pa­thetic that sounded.

“Just a re­minder that it’s a bad idea to lie to me.” The slight hum be­hind the voice cut off, in­di­cat­ing that its owner had turned off the mi­cro­phone. He had to stop him­self from beg­ging the voice to keep talk­ing.

When a masked man fi­nally en­tered the tent with a bot­tle of wa­ter and a pack­aged MRE, Gabriel nearly sobbed in re­lief. Of course, the MRE was also a pun­ish­ment since he had no way to heat it or uten­sils to eat it with. Nor was there any more med­i­cated ap­ple­sauce. He had to wait while the man re­ban­daged his ear with a rough­ness that made Gabriel bite back groans. Then he tore into the cold lasagna like a starv­ing dog.

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