Page 54 of Hooked

He had the audacity to chuckle. “You silly women,” he mocked. “You’re all the same. Always thinking you have a say in the matter.” He sheathed his sword, giving me one glimmer of hope before he pulled a knife from his boot. He kept the knife pointed at me as he stooped down and hauled me to my feet. “Time to go, Wendolyn, darling.”

I pulled back, digging in my heels, resisting all that I could, but he dragged me across the room, his fingers bruising my arm.

I couldn’t figure out where he was going; there was no door over here.

He pulled aside a large tapestry. I don’t know why I’d never before considered hidden doors or passageways. Why hadn’t that been part of my reconnaissance? They were common in large houses such as this, so why had I not considered? If I had found one, I might have been gone already!

Huckley yanked me with him right up to the door, ignoring the way I pried at his fingers. Then he placed the hilt of his knife between his teeth as he dug a key from the pouch on his belt and fitted it inside the lock. The door swung open and he pulled me into the darkness beyond, shutting the door firmly behind us.

It was pitch black, but Huckley must have navigated this passage many times before, because he didn’t slow.

I kept my free arm in front of my face, worried that my head would go careening into a stone wall if I didn’t prevent it.

“One thing you should know about me, darling,” Huckley hissed from the darkness. “I always have a way out, and I always win.”

“Even if you have to kill to get what you want?”

“Yes,” he said with a chilling calm. “Even then.”

“You killed your other wives.” I just wanted him to admit it so that I could stop wondering altogether.

“Not my first wife,” he said, giving my arm another hard yank. “She truly did die in childbirth. Too weak to accomplish the most basic of feminine tasks.”

His disdain for a woman who died trying to give him a child cut at my insides, but I forced my mind to the next question. “And the second?”

“Do you know why I spent nearly ten years searching for you?” he asked as he rounded a corner and I stumbled after him.

“I would dearly love to know.”

“Because it’s the hunt that I enjoy. The anticipation.” I could hear it in his voice—the love, the devotion he had for this subject. “I realized it with my first wife. The moment we were wed, I lost interest. There was no challenge anymore.”

I gaped in shock, trying to find the words to respond when Huckley came to an abrupt halt. He grabbed hold of both of my arms, pushing me back until my shoulder blades and head hit the wall. I cried out in pain.

“Hush, you,” he admonished.

The noise of ripping fabric rent the air just before he grabbed my hands, forcing them together and binding them. I wondered for a few seconds where he’d gotten the fabric. Did he have lengths of fabric on him at all times, waiting for a victim to subdue? But then I recognized the feel of the fabric. A napkin from the dining room.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said, desperate as I realized that my situation, against all odds, was becoming even worse.

He just scoffed. “Yes, because you’ve been so very docile during the length of our acquaintance.”

I needed a different angle. I needed to reason with him in a way he would understand. “If you know there will be no challenge after you marry, then why marry at all? You found me after all these years. You’ve forced me into your home. You’ve won. Why not let me go and hunt someone else? Find another challenge.”

“Because then I wouldn’t win. I can only win if I have you and no one else does. There must be fidelity in marriage. It’s why I decided to rid myself of my second wife, after all. She’d found another. I saw the way she looked at him, the way he looked at her, and it was unacceptable.”

I blinked into the darkness as shock crashed into me. “You killed her…for a look?” I had wanted to know, wanted the truth. But somehow the truth was worse than I’d let myself believe.

“She could not be allowed to stray. I may be many things, but unfaithful is not one of them.” He tied the knot tight, causing the fabric to cut into my skin.

A moment later, the other half of the napkin was forced between my teeth, then he tied it behind my head as I struggled in vain to push him away.

The moment he had finished gagging me, I heard the scrape of a key in a lock and then a door right beside me swung out, revealing the starry sky and the expanse of lawn and shrubbery pushing out toward the cliff. We had exited the back of the house.

I cried out the best I could, hoping to alert the magistrate and whoever it was that Huckley so desperately wanted to escape, but Huckley just clamped his hand over my mouth and dragged me toward the cliffs.

We were halfway there when our destination came to the forefront of my mind. Why the cliffs? Why the cliffs?

Realization hit and I threw my weight back, digging in my heels even as I tried to drop to the ground. He obviously viewed whoever was at the house as someone who would take me away from him, and he’d said only moments ago that if he couldn’t have me…no one could.