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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 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.”
CHAPTER TWO (#u7f16f372-c946-544d-ba84-b431224dac0f)
THE COUNT DIDN’T have a wife.
Or he hadn’t had one in as long as he could remember—but that was the trouble with everything, wasn’t it? It was eating at him more and more these days that there were so many things he couldn’t remember.
There were more things he couldn’t remember than things he could. And all of them had happened in the last four years.
His followers told the stories of how they’d found this place. How they’d come here, each finding his or her own way up the mountain and proving themselves worthy of entry. They spoke of what they’d left behind. The people, the places. The things. The dreams and expectations.
But the Count knew only the compound.
His first memory was of waking up in the expansive set of rooms he still occupied. He been battered, broken. It had taken him a long time to return to anything approaching health. To sit, then stand. Then slowly, painfully, walk. And even when he’d been walking around of his own volition at last, he hadn’t felt that his body was back to his standard.
Though he couldn’t have said what his standard was.
It had taken him almost eighteen months to feel something like normal.
And another eighteen months to realize that no matter what he pretended because it seemed to make his people so nervous when he did not, he didn’t really know what normal was.
Because he still couldn’t remember anything but this. Here. Now.
His people assured him it was preordained. They told him that it was all a part of the same glorious plan. They had gathered, they had prayed, and so to them a leader had appeared in this same forest where they lived. The end.
The Count had agreed because there was no reason not to agree.
He certainly felt like a leader. He had since the first moment he’d opened his eyes. When he issued an order and people leaped to fill it, it didn’t feel new. It felt deeply familiar. Right and good.
He rarely shared with anyone how much he liked the things that felt familiar. It seemed to shy too close to some kind of admission he didn’t want to make.
His every need was attended to here, of course. His people gathered to hear him speak. They fretted over his health. They fed him and they clothed him and they followed him. What more could a man want?
And yet there was a woman in the compound, claiming she was his wife, and the Count felt as if something in him he’d never known was there had cracked wide open.
“She’s quite insistent,” his closest adviser, Robert, said. Again—and this time with more obvious disapproval. “She says she’s been looking for you for some time.”
“And yet I do not have a wife,” the Count replied. “Have you not told me this from the start?”
Robert was the only follower with him then, watching the woman in question on the bank of monitors before them. The Count waited to feel some kind of familiarity or recognition. He waited to know her one way or another, but like everything in his life, there was no knowing. There was no memory.
Sometimes he told his people that he was grateful for this blank canvas.
But then there were other times, like this, when the things he didn’t feel, the things he didn’t know, seemed to batter at him like a winter storm.
“Of course you do not have a wife,” Robert was saying, sounding something like scandalized. “That is not your path. That is for lesser men.”
This was a place of purity. That was one of the few things that had always been clear to the Count, and it was handy that he’d never been tempted to stray from that path. The men and women here practiced a version of the same radical purity that he did—with a special dispensation for those who were married—or they left.
But in all this time, the Count had never gazed upon a female and felt something other than that same purity, drowning out anything else.
Until now.
It took him a moment to recognize what was happening to him, and he supposed that he should have been horrified. But he wasn’t. Lust rolled through him like an old friend, and he couldn’t have said why that failed to set off any alarms within him. He told himself temptation was good, as it would make him even more powerful to conquer it. He told himself that this was nothing more than a test.
The woman who filled his screens looked impatient. That was the first thing that separated her from the handful of women who lived here. More than that, she looked... Fragile. Not weathered and hardy the way his people were. Not prepared for any eventuality. She looked soft.
The Count had no idea why he wanted to touch her to see if she could possibly be as soft as she looked.
She was dressed in clothes that didn’t make any sense to him, here on top of the mountain. He could never remember being off the mountain, of course, but he knew that there was a whole world out there. He’d been told. And all that black, sleek and slick over her trim little figure, made him think of cities.
It had never occurred to him before, but he didn’t really think about cities. And now that he had, it was as if they all ran through his head like a travelogue. New York. London. Shanghai. New Delhi. Berlin. Cairo. Auckland.
As if he’d been to each and every one of them.
He shoved that oddity aside and studied the woman. They’d brought her inside the compound walls and placed her in a sealed-off room that no one ever called a cell. But that’s what it was. It was outfitted with nothing more than an old sofa, a toilet behind a screen in the corner and cameras in the walls.
If she was as uncomfortable as the last three law enforcement officials had been when they’d visited, she didn’t show it. She sat on the sofa as if she could do it forever. Her face was perfectly calm, her blue eyes clear. She looked almost serene, he might have said, which only drew attention to the fact that she was almost incomprehensibly pretty.
Not that he had many other women to compare her with. But somehow the Count knew that if he lined up every woman out there in the world he couldn’t remember, he would still find this one stunning.
Her legs were long and shapely, even in the boots she wore, and she crossed them neatly as if she hadn’t noticed they were splattered with mud. She wore only one rather large ring on her left hand that kept catching the light when she moved, and she crossed her fingers in her lap before her as if she knew it and was trying to divert attention away from all that excessive sparkle. Her mouth caught at him in ways he didn’t entirely understand, greed and hunger like a ball inside him, and the Count wasn’t sure he liked it. He concentrated on her remarkably glossy blond hair instead, swept back from her face into something complicated at her nape.
A chignon, he thought.
It was a word the Count didn’t know. But it was also the proper term to describe how she had styled her hair. He knew that in the way he knew all the things he shouldn’t have, so he shoved it aside and kept on.
“Bring her to me,” he said before he thought better of it.
Then he thought better of it and still said nothing to contradict himself.
“She’s not your wife,” Robert said, scowling. “You have no wife. You are the Count, the leader of the glorious path, and the answer to every question of the faithful!”
“Yes, yes,” the Count said with a wave of his hand. What he thought was that Robert didn’t actually know if this woman was his wife. Neither did he. Because he couldn’t simply have appeared from nowhere in a shower of flame, the way everyone claimed. He’d understood that from the start. At the very least, he’d thought, if he’d simply appeared one day in a burst of glory, he wouldn’t have needed all that time to recover, would he?
But these mysteries of faith, he’d learned, were not something he could explore in public.
What he knew was that if he’d come from somewhere else, that meant he’d had a life there. Wherever it was. And if this woman thought she knew him, it was possible she could prove to be a font of information.
The Count wanted information more than anything.
He didn’t wait to see if Robert would obey him. He knew the other man would, because everyone did. The Count left the surveillance room behind and walked back through his compound. He knew it so well, every room and every wall built of logs. The fireplaces of stone and the thick rugs on the common floors. He had never thought beyond this place. Because everything he wanted and needed was right here. The mountain gave and the followers received, that was the way.
Sydney. Saint Petersburg. Vancouver. Reykjavik. Oslo. Rome.
