Something flickered across his father’s eyes. Relief? Disappointment? It was gone too fast for Hugh to identify, his father’s face freezing back into its usual icy mask.
“So she kept her word,” his father murmured. “Why are you here then?”
“I’m looking for Hope,” Hugh said curtly. “Have you seen her?”
“The charming young lady in the wheelchair? Only briefly.” His father tilted his head, a small frown curling his mouth. “She seemed happy enough, but broke off our conversation abruptly. She said that she’d thought she’d spotted someone she knew, but she needed to get a closer look to be sure.”
Disquiet prickled down Hugh’s spine. “Was it—wait, where did he go?”
“Who?” his father asked, but Hugh was already pushing past, heading for the staircase down to the ballroom.
There! His unicorn lowered its head, pointing out a door across the room. It should have been firmly closed and locked…yet now it stood fractionally ajar.
Hugh hurried through the crowd, regardless of the white-hot shock as he brushed past people. The door creaked as he pushed through it, into the shadowed corridor beyond. He was just in time to catch a flicker of movement, the edge of a black jacket whisking round the corner ahead.
“Hey!” he shouted, breaking into a run. “You! Stop!”
EYES! His unicorn reared, horn blazing. Beware his eyes!
Swearing under his breath, Hugh squeezed his own tight shut. If the basilisk shifter had brazenly strolled straight through his front door, he couldn’t risk meeting his stare.
He sped up, trusting in scent and hearing and his unicorn’s sense of the man’s vital energies to guide him. Even blind, he was faster than the intruder. He’d grown up in this house. He knew every inch of these corridors—
An unexpected obstacle caught his ankle, sending him sprawling. On pure reflex, his eyes flew open…and the world dissolved into crimson.
Chapter 19
He came back to pain. Red pain. Pounding through every part of him. His blood had been replaced by liquid agony. He would have screamed, but he couldn’t even feel his mouth. Just pain.
“Feeling returns first,” said a light, amused voice. “Then hearing. Hello, Hugh Argent. Or should I say Hugh Silver?”
The voice was an anchor in the sea of pain. He clung onto it, letting it pull him back into his body.
Slowly, he became aware of other sensations. The low snarl of a car engine. The coldness of metal around his wrists. The shallow, jerky rasp of his own breath in his throat.
“This will be rather a one-sided conversation for a while longer yet, I am afraid,” the voice continued. “Though your sight should be coming back right about…now.”
His eyes felt like stones in his head. With great effort, he blinked, and the black-red haze across his vision thinned.
The ‘blind’ man from the party had replaced his dark glasses with mirrored shades. His tuxedo jacket hung open, tie loosened casually. He lounged opposite Hugh with an ankle crossed over one knee, a whiskey glass in his hand. He looked for all the world like he was on the way home after a particularly extravagant stag night.
“I’d offer you something from the minibar, but you’d only choke on it.” The man took a sip of his own drink. “Or spit it in my face. You know who I am, of course.”
The crimson agony was slowly ebbing away, but he still couldn’t move more than his eyes. He swiveled them, trying to take in more of his surroundings. Dim blue lighting. Wide leather seats. A smoked glass privacy screen behind Gaze, separating them from the driver. He was in a…limousine?
Well, at least I’m being abducted in style.
More importantly, he didn’t see Ivy. Nor did he have any sense of her being hurt. Even though they weren’t fully mated, he was certain that he would have been able to feel if anything had happened to her.
He let out a ragged breath, relief overwhelming him despite his own predicament. Ivy was okay. He had a vague sense of distant fear and rage, but Gaze clearly hadn’t managed to capture her as well.
“Something funny?” Gaze asked.
His smile widened. “You,” he managed to croak.
One of Gaze’s eyebrows rose above his mirrored sunglasses. “Oh? Please, enlighten me.”
“You haven’t thought this through.” His tongue was still stiff and heavy, making his words thick. “You think that you’ve captured some great prize. But you’ve got nothing.”