A Baby To Bind His Bride. Caitlin Crews
And it had led here, to the side of a mountain in an American state Susannah had heard of only in the vaguest terms, trekking up to some “off the grid” compound where a man meeting Leonidas’s description was rumored to be heading up a local cult.
“It’s not exactly a doomsday cult,” her investigator had told her in the grand penthouse in Rome, where Susannah lived because it was the closest of her husband’s properties to the Betancur Corporation’s European headquarters, where she liked to make her presence known. It kept things running more smoothly, she’d found.
“Do such distinctions matter?” she’d asked, trying so hard to sound distant and unaffected with those photographs in her hands. Shots of a man in flowing white, hair longer than Leonidas had ever worn it, and still, that same ruthlessness in his dark gaze. That same lean, athletic frame, rangy and dangerous, with new scars that would make sense on someone who’d been in a plane crash.
Leonidas Betancur in the flesh. She would have sworn on it.
And her reaction to that swept over her from the inside, one earthquake after another, while she tried to smile blandly at her investigator.
“The distinction only matters in the sense that if you actually go there, signora, it is unlikely that you’ll be held or killed,” the man told her.
“Something to look forward to, then,” Susannah had replied, with another cool smile as punctuation.
While inside, everything had continued that low, shattering roll, because her husband was alive. Alive.
She couldn’t help thinking that if Leonidas really had repaired to the wilderness and assembled a following, he’d been trained for the vagaries of cult leadership in the best possible classroom: the shark-infested waters of the Betancur Corporation, the sprawling family business that had made him and all his relatives so filthy rich they thought they could do things like bring down the planes of disobedient, uncontrollable heirs when it suited them.
Susannah had learned a lot in her four years of treading that same water. Mainly, that when the assorted Betancurs wanted something—like, say, Leonidas out of the way of a deal that would make the company a lot of money but which Leonidas had thought was shady—they usually found a way to get it.
Being the Widow Betancur kept her free from all that conniving. Above it. But there was one thing better than being Leonidas Betancur’s widow, Susannah had thought, and it was bringing him back from the dead.
He could run his damned business himself. And Susannah could get back the life she hadn’t known she wanted when she was nineteen. She could be happily divorced, footloose and fancy free by her twenty-fourth birthday, free of all Betancurs and much better at standing up for herself against her own parents.
Free, full stop.
Flying across the planet and into the Idaho wilderness was a small price to pay for her own freedom.
“What kind of leader is the Count?” Susannah asked crisply now, focusing on the rough terrain as she followed her surprisingly hardy guide. “Benevolent? Or something more dire?”
“I can’t say as I know the difference,” her guide replied out of the side of his mouth. “One cult seems like another to me.”
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