Page 4 of Gabriel: Duke of Bencalor

“Mostly money.” How did she ex­plain all the paths that she’d fol­lowed and con­nec­tions she’d made? She knew how crim­i­nals worked from di­rect ex­pe­ri­ence, but she had no in­ten­tion of shar­ing that in­for­ma­tion. It was bad enough that Mikel knew her ugly his­tory. “Ko­dra re­ceived sev­eral large de­posits on sus­pi­cious dates. They didn’t make sense in the con­text of the rest of his fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion. He was also com­pletely out of touch with ev­ery­one he knew dur­ing the, er, rel­e­vant time frame.”

Gabriel fixed his sil­very eyes on her. “Out of all the peo­ple in the world, how did you de­cide to look at his fi­nances?”

She had sifted through moun­tains of data and found the gold nugget amid the dross. She was good at that, re­ally good. That’s why Mikel had hired her de­spite her back­ground. “He fit the pa­ram­e­ters.”

“There are pa­ram­e­ters?” His eye­brows rose in dark slashes.

“Yes.” She hes­i­tated be­cause she didn’t want to add to his dis­tress with the darker se­crets of her method­ol­ogy. “I used pat­terns in be­hav­ior and back­ground, fam­ily and as­so­ciates, travel, and fi­nances and com­bined that with some high-level pro­fil­ing soft­ware.” Soft­ware that she had per­son­al­ized and fo­cused on Gabriel’s ab­duc­tion.

Then she had got­ten ac­cess to the IN­TER­POL data­base through Mikel’s con­nec­tions with Cal­eva’s gov­ern­ment. Ko­dra had been one name on a list of about thirty that she was still sort­ing through. So far he was the only one that she could say with con­fi­dence was in­volved in the crime, mostly be­cause he wasn’t that smart.

She loved stupid crim­i­nals.

“Mikel and I are cer­tain that this man was one of the kid­nap­pers,” Quinn said.

Gabriel turned back to the screen, star­ing at Elio Ko­dra’s face. “Mikel is never wrong.”

In the short video, Gabriel’s kid­nap­per smiled like a nor­mal hu­man be­ing. His laugh­ter held noth­ing but amuse­ment with no edge of cru­elty.

Gabriel searched the im­age for some hint of the kind of in­hu­man­ity that could strip a per­son naked, con­fine him in a tent with­out win­dows within a larger room, and refuse to speak a word to him for fif­teen days, even af­ter…

The ter­ror climbed into his throat, clamp­ing a fist around it. He grabbed the glass of wa­ter and swal­lowed down a gulp to wash the fear back into the dark re­cesses of his brain.

He nearly broke the frag­ile crys­tal when he slammed it back onto the ta­ble. He was no longer that ter­ri­fied twenty-eight-year-old cap­tive. “Where is he?”

The woman at the end of the ta­ble pushed her black-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Er, why?”

“That would seem ob­vi­ous. I want him ar­rested, con­victed, and sent to jail for the rest of his life.”

She blew out a sigh that sounded like re­lief. “Okay. He’s liv­ing in Italy.”

“Muy bien. Cal­eva has good re­la­tions with the Ital­ian gov­ern­ment.”

“Be­fore you start ex­tra­di­tion pro­ceed­ings, you should talk with Mikel,” the woman said. Quinn. The Amer­i­can Mikel had hired six months ago. His un­cle, Luis, had not been happy about that for some rea­son, but Mikel had changed the king’s mind. Mikel was one of the few peo­ple who could do so.

He looked at her with cu­rios­ity for the first time since he’d walked into the of­fice. All he’d no­ticed then was her black leather jacket dec­o­rated with sil­ver zip­pers that seemed out of place in Mikel’s an­tique-filled re­cep­tion area. Now he caught the glint of red in her brown hair, the in­tel­li­gence that lit her fine-boned face, and the al­most de­fi­ant set of her shoul­ders that was be­lied by how she fid­geted with her glasses.

Mikel had said she was a wiz­ard with pat­tern recog­ni­tion pro­gram­ming, es­pe­cially as it per­tained to crim­i­nal ac­tiv­ity.

“I would like to talk with you,” he said. “Tell me why we don’t go af­ter him now.”

She gave a tiny nod. “Ko­dra’s just hired help, not the brains. If we watch him, we hope to be able to find an­other con­nec­tion that will lead us to who­ever planned the ab­duc­tion. That’s who you re­ally want, isn’t it?”

Fa­tigue sucked away the anger, and he leaned back in his chair. “Some­times I don’t know if I want any of them.”

“But they might try again.” Her lips curved into a frown of re­proach.

“We were fool­ish boys then. Care­less. Ir­re­spon­si­ble. Drunk. Raul would never be caught un­pro­tected now.” Not to men­tion that Gabriel would no longer be able to im­per­son­ate the prince, be­cause it was too easy to de­tect the scars from his mu­ti­la­tion. He stopped him­self from lift­ing his hand to the numb ear­lobe.

“Pro­tec­tion can be elim­i­nated or even bought off.”

Her tone matched his for cyn­i­cism, and he stud­ied her again. Her skin was pale and smooth, with no lines around her mouth or at the cor­ners of her eyes. Too young to sound so jaded, yet her brown eyes held an edge of bit­ter knowl­edge. “You can­not buy off the prince’s pro­tec­tion. His guards are loyal to him per­son­ally.”

“Like you are.”

“He’s my fu­ture king.” She looked skep­ti­cal, so he felt the need to add, “And he’s fam­ily.” More a brother than a cousin. They’d grown up to­gether. Sad­ness rolled through him as he con­sid­ered how the kid­nap­ping had changed their re­la­tion­ship, the long shadow of Raul’s mis­placed guilt cre­at­ing a gulf be­tween them.

Her mouth slanted in dark amuse­ment, and she snorted. “Fam­ily is not the best mo­ti­va­tor.” She blinked and pushed her glasses up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

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