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The first thing to hit Annabelle as she regained consciousness was the pain.

Her shoulder was on fire, her head throbbed like a bitch, and a million sharp needles pressed into her body.

She groaned. Anyone would think she’d been hit by a…

well…a truck. Her eyelids fluttered open and she winced, something crusty crinkling on the side of her face?

Blood? She tried to touch her face, but her hand wouldn’t move.

She scrunched up her brow and moaned again. Oooh, that hurts.

She squinted at the flickering light bulb above her. A bug buzzed around the dim, yellow glow. On the edge of her awareness, the murmur of voices coming from the other side of the room. Am I in a hospital? What’s my prognosis? Gabriel?

Oh, God. Gabriel. He’d taken the full force of the impact.

He was a shifter, but… A sob caught in her throat and her eyes teared up.

Could he have survived that? She closed her eyes and let the tears slide down her cheeks.

She tried to move her hand to wipe them away, but again, she couldn’t move her…

No. That wasn’t right. Annabelle flexed her fingers.

She had movement. She wasn’t paralyzed, but she couldn’t raise her hands to her face.

A memory scratched at her foggy brain. Of being pulled from the car and put…

no, thrown into the back of a vehicle. A van, not an ambulance.

She tried moving her arms again. And her legs.

Nope, nothing. Awareness punched her in the gut.

Someone had tied her to the bed. She wasn’t in a hospital. Someone had kidnapped her.

She blinked, blinked again and her vision cleared. Rough log walls, a small window blacked out and a low ceiling with copper pipes running the length. Boxes stacked up against the wall and a dripping water heater. On the far side, a set of stairs going up. Someone’s basement? But whose?

“Annabee. You’re awake?”

“Dutton?” Her voice was little more than a croak.

“You should have agreed to marry me, Annabee. We wouldn’t be here if you had.”

Annabelle growled at the smarmy face leaning over her. Gabriel would have been proud of her effort. Tears pricked her eyes again.

“Gabriel?” She had to ask.

Dutton chuckled. “Not even a shifter could have survived a collision with a Mack truck. He won’t be bothering us. Shame, really. I was looking forward to seeing the look on his face when I stole his one true mate from him.”

One true mate? Annabelle blinked back tears.

No, Dutton was wrong. If she were Gabriel’s mate, he never would have left her in Paris.

Would he? Did it matter now? She swallowed around the lump in her throat.

If Gabriel was gone? Could she trust anything Dutton said?

Annabelle rolled her head to the side and closed her eyes.

Dutton was right about one thing. A shifter couldn’t survive the kind of injuries Gabriel would’ve sustained. Could they?

He’d been gone from her life for three years.

A pain that had hummed in the depths of her heart no matter how deep she’d tried to push it down.

But if he was really gone? Forever? She choked back a sob.

Not now. She couldn’t fall apart now. Not here.

Not trapped like this. Not in front of Dutton.

There was no way she was letting Dutton see her pain.

Dutton settled on the bed beside her. “Ah, Annabee, did you love the growly shifter? Sorry, not sorry. I did tell you it wasn’t appropriate to spend time with other men. Now the broody shifter is out of the picture, there should be no more obstacles to our marriage.”

Annabelle shuddered. If she ever got out of this mess, she was going to kill Dutton. “You never stood a chance, Dutton. And since you’ll soon be dead, I’m absolutely certain I won’t be marrying you.”

Focus. She dug deep, past the pain in her shoulder and her head.

Past the images of Gabriel—his sexy smile, his dark eyes, laughing with her as they walked along the Seine, the way he looked at her when he kneeled between her thighs—images that threatened to overwhelm her and shut her down.

She was a Jackson. A blood witch. A strong blood witch.

She would get out of this. Then Dutton was going to pay.

She rubbed her fingers together and winced. There. A particularly nasty cut. Probably from a piece of glass from the shattered windscreen. She picked at it. If she could get the blood flowing…

Dutton’s hand pressed against hers. “Uh uh, Annabee. No blood magic. I know what you can do with it, given half the chance. But even if you should try, it won’t matter. This whole room is warded. You’ll never break out of here.”

“You think your wards could stop me?” Could they? Her blood magic was powerful, but was it powerful enough?

“Not my wards, darling.” Dutton’s supercilious grin chilled her. “Guess whose basement we’re in?”

Annabelle swallowed. God, no.

Triumph glittered in Dutton’s eyes . “That’s right. Great Aunt Cordelia has a vested interest in our union. So, you could try to best her wards, but all you’ll probably do is waste more of that precious blood of yours.”

He brushed his hand across her injured forehead. Annabelle recoiled.

“Personally, I’d rather you save it for when we join our two bloodlines together.”

Annabelle bared her teeth at him. “Never going to happen, dickhead . You think my family won’t find me here? That they aren’t already searching? That this wouldn’t be the first place they’d look? Have you forgotten Stefanie? And the Langeais wolves?”

“Oh, our union will happen, Annabelle. There’s nothing you can do to stop it now. They’ll never find this place. No one is coming to save you. And by the end of the day, it will be too late. By then, we’ll be married.”

Annabelle chortled, wincing at the flare of pain from her shoulder. “Really, Dutton? You think after smashing a truck into the side of my car, then kidnapping me, tying me to a bed and denying me medical treatment I so obviously need… You think I would marry you? You’re delusional.”

“Oh, Annabelle. So na?ve. I’d hoped you’d come around to my way of thinking. Come to appreciate what I’m offering you. I wanted to give you one last chance, but I don’t need you to agree. Not now. I just need your blood.”

Annabelle swore her heart stopped beating.

“That’s right, my darling Annabee. Once we have your blood, we can control you. And by we, I mean Great Aunt Cordelia.”

No. He wouldn’t? Cold blue eyes stared down at her. Oh yes, he would. Fuck. She had to get out of here.

“Zhat iz enough, Dutton. Zhere iz no need to tell her all ze plans.”

A man Annabelle had never seen before came to stand beside the bed, his French accent far stronger than Gabriel’s, as though English was a language he rarely spoke.

Beady dark eyes in a scarred face stared down at her.

He slipped his hands into a pair of black leather gloves and Annabelle’s heart stuttered.

Every murder mystery, every thriller movie she’d ever watched, flicked through her head.

“Stop wasting time. We have work to do. Get her blood . ”

“Of course.” Dutton stepped away from the bed and returned with a large syringe and some sterile wipes.

“This is going to be my best Christmas ever, thanks to you, Annabee.” He broke open a wipe and swiped it in the crook of her elbow.

Annabelle thrashed against the restraints.

“Hold her arm still,” he snarled at Scarface.

Strong arms pressed against her shoulder and pain stabbed through her body.

Annabelle screamed, and struggled harder. “No, no, no, noooo!”

“Hold still, Annabelle, and it will be all over in a flash.”

“Don’t do this, Dutton. Please. I’m begging you. Please! ”

Dutton chuckled. “I love it when you beg, Annabelle.” His smile disappeared. “But it’s wasted on me. With one vial of your blood, I get to have you to do with as I please. Then the coven will be mine.”

The leer on his face, the sick excitement in his eyes sent a soul-deep chill through her body.

He leaned forward and jabbed the needle in her arm. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”

* * * *

Gabriel slipped his arm gingerly in the coat Stef had brought him as they exited through the hospital’s main doors.

It’d taken forty-eight hours for Stef to get him out of the hospital.

He’d already started healing when they’d wheeled him in on the ambulance stretcher, and they couldn’t afford for him to remain there any longer.

Pierre and Louis were working overtime to erase any records of his hospital stay, any test results, blood samples.

Marjory had called in help from the coven and the shifters.

No one wanted a shifter’s blood in the hands of the authorities.

Already questions were being asked. How had he even survived the impact of the truck?

And with so few major injuries? No human body could take that kind of trauma and survive.

He should be dead. He would’ve been, were it not for his pack’s heritage.

Other shifters would have fared better than a human, but would most likely have died, too.

But he was a Langeais wolf. Maxime would have a conniption if his blood ended up in the hands of the authorities.

Gabriel limped to their hire car and slid into the passenger seat, grunting as a rib snapped back into place. He may be healing, but it would take him at least a week for all his injuries to mend and for the bruises to fade.

“Have the twins found anything? Anything at all that might tell us where the Kings have taken Annabelle?”

Stef turned the engine over and pulled out of the parking space, steering her way to the car park exit.

“No. We’ve checked every one of the premises they gave us.

Some of them were well hidden—corporate holdings, shadow companies and the like—but Pierre and Louis found them.

You can’t hide anything from them. But we still haven’t found her. ”

Dark circles ringed Stef’s eyes. She probably hadn’t slept any more than he had since the accident.

Stef sighed. “Gabriel… We don’t even know if it was Dutton. You mentioned the DGSE.”

He stared at the traffic as they drove through downtown San Francisco.

“If it was the DGSE, I wouldn’t be here now.

It would’ve been me they grabbed, and I’d be in some top-secret research facility, being poked, prodded and dissected.

No. It has to be something to do with the coven.

Dutton’s involved in this. I’m sure of it.

” And maybe this Cordelia Maxime had spoken of.

He’d never had the chance to ask Annabelle about her.

“We find Dutton, we find who took her. We find Annabelle. Putain, Stef, she has to be injured. She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

The impact had to have flung her against the door. ”

He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He could still hear her screaming his name. It was all he could think about, replaying it over and over again in his mind. He had to find her. Save her. Before it was too late.

“I should never have left her in Paris. I should have claimed her then.” He thumped his fist against the dash. “I can’t lose her, Stef. Not like this.”

“We’ll find her, Gabriel. We’ll get your mate back. The twins will come through for us. They always do.”

He couldn’t wait that long. They’d taken her over two days ago. She could be dead already. They were running out of— Time. He sat upright in his seat, wincing at as pain radiated across his ribcage. That was it. Time.

“Take me to Annabelle’s apartment.”

“Why? How will that help us? I’m sensing you have an idea.”

“We need to find that grimoire. We need that spell.”