As if they were a dime a dozen in these parts. Perhaps they were.
And then it didn’t matter anyway, because they’d reached the compound.
One moment there was nothing but forest and then the next, great gates reared up on the other side of a small clearing, swaddled in unfriendly barbed wire, festooned with gruff signs warning intruders to Keep Out while listing the grisly consequences of trespassing, and mounted with aggressively swiveling video cameras.
“This is as far as I go,” her guide said then, keeping to the last of the trees.
Susannah didn’t even know his name. And she wished he could come with her, since he’d gotten her this far already. But that wasn’t the deal. “I understand.”
“I’ll wait down by the truck until you need to go down the hill,” the man continued. “I’d take you inside…”
“I understand that you can’t,” Susannah said, because this had all been explained to her down in that ramshackle cabin. “I have to do the rest of this alone.”
That was the part that had given her security detail fits. But everyone had agreed. There was no way that Susannah could descend upon some faraway compound with an entire complement of Betancur security guards in tow when it was likely her husband was hiding from the world. She couldn’t turn up with her own small army, in other words. Even a few hardy locals would be too much, her guide had told her, because the sort of people who holed up in nearly inaccessible compounds in the Rocky Mountains were usually also the sort who didn’t much care for visitors. Particularly not if said visitors were armed.
But a young woman who called herself a widow and was dressed to look as out of place on this mountain as Susannah felt was something else entirely.
Something wholly nonthreatening, she hoped.
Susannah didn’t let herself think too much about what she was doing. She’d read too many thrillers while locked away in the Swiss boarding school where her parents had insisted she remain throughout her adolescence, and every last one of them was running through her head on a loop this afternoon.
Not helpful, she snapped at herself. She didn’t want to think about the risks. All she wanted—all she’d ever wanted—was to find out what had happened to Leonidas.
Because the sad truth was, she might be the only one who cared.
And she told herself that the only reason why she cared was because finding him would set her free.
Susannah strode toward the gates, her skin crawling with every step she took. She knew the video cameras were trained on her, but she was worried about something worse than surveillance. Like snipers. She rather doubted anyone built a great fortress in the woods like the one she saw before her, sprawling this way and that, if they didn’t intend to defend it.
“Stop right there!”
She couldn’t see where the voice came from, exactly. But Susannah stopped anyway. And raised her hands up, though not entirely over her head. There was no point coming over completely submissive.
“I’m here to see the Count,” she called into the silent, chilly forest all around her.
Nothing happened.
For a moment Susannah thought nothing would. But then, slowly, a door at the side of one of the great gates before her swung open.
She held her breath. Would this be Leonidas after all this time?
A man came out through the door, but it wasn’t Leonidas. This man was much shorter than the husband she’d lost, with an alarming semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder and a distinctly unfriendly expression on his round face.
“You need to get off our mountain,” he told her, waving the rifle as punctuation.
But he was frowning at her as he spoke. At her clothes, Susannah realized after a moment. Because she certainly wasn’t dressed for an assault on a compound. Or even a walk in the woods, for that matter.
“I have no particular desire to be on this mountain,” she replied crisply. “I only want to see the Count.”
“The Count sees who he wants to see, and never on demand.” The man’s voice throbbed with fervor. And more than that, fury. As if he couldn’t believe Susannah’s temerity in suggesting she should have access to a being of such greatness.
It was possible she was imagining that part. What did she know about cult members?
She inclined her head at the man. “He’ll want to see me.”
“The count is a busy man,” the man scoffed. “He doesn’t have time for strange women who appear out of nowhere like they’re begging to get shot.”
That would be a direct threat where she came from, Susannah reflected, while her heart beat out a desperate tattoo in her chest. She reminded herself that here, in the middle of this vast and dangerous wilderness, the people who held these places had a different relationship to their weapons. And to threats, for that matter.
The man before her was perhaps being nothing but matter-of-fact.
“I’m not looking to get shot,” she told him as calmly as possible. “But the Count will want to see me, I’m sure of it.” She wasn’t sure of any such thing. The fact that Leonidas had locked himself away in this place and started calling himself something so ridiculous suggested that he had no desire to be located. Ever. But she wasn’t going to get into that with one of his wild-eyed true believers. She aimed a cool smile the guard’s way instead. “Why don’t you take me to him and he can tell you so himself?”
“Lady, I’m not going to tell you again. You should turn around. You need to get off this hill and never come back here again.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Susannah said, with that iron matter-of-factness she’d developed over the past few years. As if she expected her orders to be obeyed simply because she’d issued them. As if she was Leonidas himself instead of the young widow everyone knew he’d never meant to leave in charge of anything, much less the whole of his fortune. But Susannah had done exactly what her mother had told her to do. She’d taken Leonidas’s name and gained his authority at the same time. She’d been confounding people in the corporate world he’d left behind with this exact same attitude for years now. “I have to see the Count. That’s nonnegotiable. Whatever needs to happen so that I can do that is up to you. I don’t care.”
“Listen, lady—”
“Or you can shoot me,” Susannah suggested coolly. “But those are the only two possible outcomes here.”
The man blinked at her as if he didn’t know what to do. Susannah didn’t entirely blame him. She didn’t cower. She didn’t shift her weight from side to side or give any indication that she was anything but perfectly calm. She simply stood there as if it was completely natural that she should be thousands of feet high on the side of a mountain in the Idaho wilderness. She gazed back at the strange man before her as if she marched up to the doors of cults and demanded entry every day of the week.
She stared at him until it became clear that he was the one who was ill at ease, not her.
“Who the hell are you?” he finally demanded.
“I’m so glad you asked,” Susannah said then, and this time, her smile was something less than cool. Something more like a weapon and she’d had four years to learn how to shoot it. “I’m the Count’s wife.”
Copyright © 2017 by Caitlin Crews
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A BABY TO BIND HIS BRIDE
by Caitlin Crews,
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ISBN-13: 978-1-488-09566-5
MALONE’S VOW
First published in 2000
This edition published in 2017
Copyright © 2000 by Sandra Marton.
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