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She was done with apologizing. Done.
“Oh, really?” he spat out, crouching down to her level. “Just what don’t I understand? The part about your fleeing your wedding?”
“I didn’t flee,” she shot back. “I was abducted! Or didn’t you notice that I am tied to the water closet?”
His eyes narrowed menacingly. And Lucy began to feel scared.
She shrank back, her breath growing shallow. She had long feared her uncle—the ice of his temper, the cold, flat stare of his disdain.
But she had never felt frightened.
“Where is he?” her uncle demanded.
Lucy did not pretend to misunderstand. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me!”
“I don’t know!” she protested. “Do you think he would have tied me up if he trusted me?”
Her uncle stood and cursed. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy asked carefully. She wasn’t sure what was going on, and she wasn’t sure just whose wife she would be, at the end of the proverbial day, but she was fairly certain that she ought to stall for time.
And reveal nothing. Nothing of import.
“This! You!” her uncle spat out. “Why would he abduct you and leave you here, in Fennsworth House?”
“Well,” Lucy said slowly. “I don’t think he could have got me out without someone seeing.”
“He couldn’t have got into the party without someone seeing, either.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“How,” her uncle demanded, leaning down and putting his face far too close to hers, “did he grab you without your consent?”
Lucy let out a short puff of a breath. The truth was easy. And innocuous. “I went to my room to lie down,” she said. “He was waiting for me there.”
“He knew which room was yours?”
She swallowed. “Apparently.”
Her uncle stared at her for an uncomfortably long moment. “People have begun to notice your absence,” he muttered.
Lucy said nothing.
“It can’t be helped, though.”
She blinked. What was he talking about?
He shook his head. “It’s the only way.”
“I—I beg your pardon?” And then she realized—he wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to himself.
“Uncle Robert?” she whispered.
But he was already slicing through her bindings.
Slicing? Slicing? Why did he have a knife?
