Page 4 of The Captive

The leader looked at me down the length of my aim and said something in Russian. Rich voice, unhurried, and unmistakably amused. A ripple of laughter went through his men.

I glanced at my unconscious interpreter, knowing he couldn’t help me. Semyon watched me, jaw tight, and offered nothing.

Whatever the outlaw had said, I would not be getting it in French, and the laughter was still running around the circle of riders, and my arm was beginning to shake.

So I gave up on Russian entirely.

“Touch my horses, monsieur,” I shouted in French, “and I will put a ball through your heart!”

The grin that broke across his face was sudden, delighted, and intriguing.

“With that pistol, madame?” he answered—in French. Fluent, easy, drawing-room French, barely roughened at the edges. “At this distance? I invite you to try. But your accent is also Parisian, and now I am intrigued.”

An educated outlaw?

Somewhere south of Voronezh, at the ragged edge of the map, a bandit chief had just addressed me in better French than my late husband ever managed.

He swung down from his horse while I was still staring, shocked—beautiful movement, no stirrup-hop, just off and landing soft as a cat. He dropped his reins on the ground, and the ugly little horse stood as though tied to a post. The animals were well-trained, I would give them that.

On his feet, this bandit leader lost nothing. Some big men diminish when they dismount. He somehow seemed more impressive.

He crossed the camp toward me at a saunter.

Perhaps it was the shock of the situation, that allowed my focus to narrow to just him. But it seemed as if I couldn’t take my gaze from him as he slowly approached, my hands aching from my grip on the pistol.

He dressed in clothing I’d never seen before: A long dark coat, fitted through the chest and skirted like nothing in London, with a row of silver-tipped cartridge cases sewn slantwise across each breast—ornament and ammunition at once. A crimson sash wound at his waist, a long knife through it.

The sabre at his hip hung in a scuffed black scabbard, worn low, and it had none of a gentleman’s sword-furniture about it; it looked like a tool that got used. Dust to the knee of his boots. He wore all of it carelessly, and it made every man I’d ever danced with or flirted with or smiled at look like…well, foppish affections.

Adventure indeed.

I took a step back. My heel found a tent stake and I stopped, which robbed the retreat of considerable dignity.

“We have followed your party four days,” he said conversationally, still coming. “Since the river. You should dismiss your guards, by the by—they never once looked behind them.” Another few steps. “I intended only your silver, madame. Silver is easily carried and easily spent. But then…” His grin bloomed again, too charmingly. “Then we saw the tracks.”

“The tracks?” I whispered, confused.

“Long stride. Heavy shoes. Nothing of this country makes a track like that.” He stopped a few paces off, and his eyes went past me to Juno, and the admiration in them was a horseman’s, thorough and assessing, and somehow that frightened me more than greed would have. “English blood horses, here. Do you know what such animals are worth, so far from England? A prince in Taganrog would beggar himself.”

He meant to sell them.

Sell Juno, whom I had foaled with my own hands at two in the morning against the advice of every man on the estate. Sell Hector to some prince’s stable to be ruined by hard hands?

The pistol had drooped. I brought it back up between his eyes, and my arm did not shake now.

“They are my babies,” I said. “I bred them. I raised them. You may have my silver and my plate and every trunk in that wagon, monsieur, but you will not take my horses from me.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. The charmed smile didn’t leave his lips—I doubted the charm left it while he slept—but between one heartbeat and the next, his dark eyes glinted with real anger. Real danger.

I sucked in a breath as he growled, “I will have them, my lady,” and stalked toward me.

Instinctively, in sudden fear, my finger tightened on the trigger and the shot cracked out the same time as a terrified little scream.

I would tell it more heroically if I could—a decision, an aim.

But the truth is his hand had already closed on my wrist, wrenching upward, and the ball went harmlessly over his shoulder into the sky, the powder-flash highlighting us both in the dawn glow.

My ears rang. The horses screamed down the picket line—Juno’s voice on top, tearing at me—and smoke hung around us and my wrist was caught fast in a grip like a manacle, and I stood there half-deafened in the grey dawn, wide-eyed, pressed nearly chest to chest with a man who had every reason to kill me.