Natural-Born Protector / Saved by the Monarch (23 page)

“I could show you some of the best slopes in a couple of hours. I’m pretty good at skiing. I could even show you some slopes that are private.”

God help her, the driver was actually flirting.

She stepped to the cab and opened the door. “Just meeting up with some girlfriends in town for breakfast. I’ll tell you everything along the way.”

Miklos was so going to kill her for doing this. He was going to be mad beyond belief. Probably not many women had ever run from the prince, especially not ones he had explicit plans for. He was going to be royally angry.

Not that they needed to ever meet again.

He would be busy saving Valtria, and she would be at a safe distance in D.C. Why didn’t the thought of that fill her with relief?

“Early risers, eh?”

“Want to hit the slopes as soon as they open.” She made up the story as she got in.

She flattened herself against the back of the seat and turned her head toward the driver’s side to hide her profile form the men who were coming from the inn. The warmth of the cab felt great.

Go, go, go.

She didn’t dare turn to steal a peek at whoever was leaving the inn.

“My name is Gunther,” the young man said as he slipped into his seat and slammed the door behind him.

Miklos would be worried about her. She would try to get a message to him somehow from the airport. He’d mentioned that he had radio contact with a man named General Rossi. Maybe through him.

“Judi. How long does it take to get to Sacorata from here?”

“Two hours at least.”

“Oh dear. I’d hate to be late.” She made an apologetic face. “Do you think we could hurry?”

Twenty minutes of Gunther’s outrageous flirting later, they’d left the village behind and were swerving over the ice-covered roads. She hung on for dear life and regretted having said anything. Gunther was using speed and reckless driving to try to impress her.

Which turned out not to be the biggest problem she faced, even if she’d been seriously beginning to fear loss of life or limb. An hour out of the village, she spotted a roadblock up ahead, armed men waiting, at least a half-dozen ominous dark figures in the moonlit landscape, big and menacing.

“Stop!” She grabbed Gunther’s arm.

But Gunther didn’t understand how much trouble they were in and didn’t slow the truck until it was too late. By then, the armed men had noticed them and were moving in for the kill.

She’d been taken.

Anger and concern about ripped him apart as Miklos paced the room, scanning it for clues, willing her to come walking back in, knowing he waited for that in vain. She wouldn’t have left without her gloves and at least a parka if she’d left on her own, willingly.

She was out there, the captive of conscienceless bastards somewhere in the cold, barely dressed, when what she needed was warmth and rest.

And him.

She needed him by her side, damn it all.

He cursed himself for leaving her. He’d thought he would be back before the doctor left. But the suspicious man in front of the inn had been gone by the time Miklos made his way down to the street, so he had to do a quick sweep of the village to find the guy. He did, a few streets down. By then the man had two other thugs with him. He followed them, then spent precious hours staking out the derelict cabin at the edge of town where they led him. Men coming and going was all he’d seen, watching and waiting all night, gaining little
information beyond the obvious: the enemy was numerous and well armed with military-issue weapons.

He’d gained nothing and lost Judi in the bargain. And could have lost Luigi, too. Miklos glanced at the man who was sitting in an old-fashioned armchair, rubbing the back of his head, stopping long enough to half sign, half say, “I’m sorry. I never saw them coming.”

“Not your fault,” Miklos told him. “Do you need a doctor?” He nodded toward the bump above the man’s nape.

Luigi shook his head.

Where in hell was the rescue team he’d asked for? They should have been here long ago. Maybe something was going down that he didn’t know about, something that suddenly required the general’s full attention and temporarily diverted the chopper the man must have sent here.

“General Rossi should have alerted the royal guard by now. The helicopter is on its way with at least a dozen men.” He’d also asked the general to dispatch a military unit to protect Maltmore Castle. They might be there already.

“So the only vehicle that left the inn today went to Sacorata?” he asked again.

Luigi nodded.

“I’m going after her.” General Rossi was going to blow a fuse, but he would deal with the man later. “Thanks for the help. Take care of yourself,” he said as he reached for the small, handheld radio that Luigi had scared up for him.

A snowmobile waited in the alley behind the inn,
also courtesy of Luigi. Miklos drove south on the winding road, looking for any meaningful tracks. The sun was taking its time coming up, darkness lingering late this time of the year. But he could make out the tracks of vans, with snow chains on the tires, and snowmobiles that had crisscrossed the road.

Judi could be anywhere by now.

Miklos gripped the handlebars tight enough to break them. The dawn air was brisk, the cold nipping at his face, wind pushing against him. He was all alone in the vast landscape.

Snow stretched for miles and miles, but farther south he could see green-capped hills. He floored the snowmobile, nearly wiping out a while later when he spotted a jumble of footprints and tried to stop too fast.

A group of people had trampled the snowbank; vehicles had parked by the side of the road. Vehicles that hadn’t gone to Sacorata, but driven off on the top of the frozen snow toward the east instead. He was grateful for Luigi’s snowmobile that allowed him to easily follow the tracks.

In the back of his mind, he was aware that this could be a trap. Whoever had taken Judi could have taken her specifically to draw him out. There had been no attempt made to cover their tracks. They might as well have drawn him a map.

The smart thing would have been to wait for the general’s men. He radioed in his new position, and found the general had been waiting for him on the other end.

“We’ve been trying to reach you. The chopper that was taking the royal guards to you had some technical
problems and had to make an emergency landing. I’ve sent another with my own men. I apologize for the delay, Your Highness.” He paused. “Chancellor Hansen has been placed under house arrest,” the general informed him.

“He can’t have anything to do with this.” Denial sprang to his lips at once.

He knew the chancellor too well to ever question his loyalties. They didn’t have time to go down the wrong path. Not now, not when so many lives were on the line, people who were so important to him.

“He alone had been left behind when you and the future princess were taken. Unharmed.” The general emphasized the last word. “And we’ve discovered some communications.”

Which were probably nothing, but the general tended to be overprotective of the royal family, particularly Miklos, who was like another son to him. Especially since the man didn’t always see eye to eye with his own son, who’d refused a military career. But with the other princes, too, he’d always been on friendly terms, always there to offer advice or support. In fact, at times the queen had wondered out loud if there didn’t exist a rivalry for the princes’ affection between the chancellor and the general.

Maybe the rivalry between them had prejudiced them against each other.

“It couldn’t be Chancellor Hansen,” Miklos insisted, keeping his eyes on where he was going. He couldn’t afford to drive into a ditch and flip the snowmobile over.

“He’s been maintaining contact with the top man of the Freedom Council over the last three months,” the general said gravely.

That had the power of turning Miklos’s blood a few degrees colder. They didn’t even know the identities of the three men who led the Council, other than that they were powerful businessmen. Funding for the Council was never in short supply.

A sharp sense of betrayal cut through him and stole the breath from his lungs. The chancellor had been like a surrogate father to the princes.

“Just hold him. Don’t do anything else until I get there,” he told the man who outranked him in the army but owed his fealty to him as prince. “The Queen?”

“Doing well. At the last report.”

“My brothers?”

“Locked up tight at Maltmore Castle and protected by the royal guard. I sent a full platoon of reinforcements to secure the perimeter. Hold your position and stay out of sight. Your backup is on its way.”

He let the general know in which direction he was heading and plowed ahead into the approaching night.

T
HE MEN SWITCHED BETWEEN
German and Hungarian. Judi didn’t speak enough of either to understand, although, at Aunt Viola’s urging, she’d taken lessons as part of staying in touch with her parents’ heritage.

Had she known that her life would one day come to depend on her vocabulary, she would have paid more careful attention in class.

She was alone, tied up in a small cave, straining to
listen for any sound beyond the men who were talking outside the cave’s entrance. She could think of little else but Gunther as they cut him down without mercy. His only sin had been giving her a ride.

Tears stung her eyes at the memory.

His cold-blooded murder had drained her strength. She had allowed herself to be captured, but was beginning to wonder now if she wouldn’t have been better off fighting, no matter what they would have done to her.

A distant rumble drew her from her dark thoughts. She turned her head to hear better. Couldn’t catch it again. Maybe she’d imagined the sound.

Or maybe not. Here it came again.

And all of a sudden her nerve endings buzzed with anxiety. As if a switch had been flipped in her brain, she could think of little else than being trapped in her cold prison by another avalanche. She could feel the panic and the cold of their mad dig, knew she would have never made it to the surface without Miklos.

She felt as if she were suffocating all over again.

Breathe slow.

Breathe deep.

Her captors said Miklos’s name enough times for her to know that she was nothing but bait in a trap. What they didn’t understand was that Miklos wouldn’t come for her. Duty to his country and the monarchy were the very spine of the man. Warning his brothers would be his first priority. He was probably on his way to Maltmore Castle already.

And she didn’t blame him one bit. She had no siblings,
her family long gone, but she was sure she would have done the same in his position. As much as she resented it at the beginning, along the way she had come to like and respect his old-fashioned sense of honor.

He was a man like no other.

A cliché, but so true in this case. He was a man of principle, of strong character. If things were different, if they’d met under different circumstances…The memory of his kisses distracted her from her fears for a minute.

When they had first been captured, faced with overwhelming force and tied up in a cabin in the mountains, she would have given up and would have done little but await her fate if Miklos hadn’t been there. But he’d taught her to fight against impossible odds. He’d gotten them out of the cabin, gotten them out of the cave after the avalanche. He’d never given up. And she wasn’t going to give up, either.

She yanked at the ropes behind her back, then felt along the rock wall for a sharp protrusion. When she found it, she rubbed the rope against it. She had to save herself. Miklos couldn’t save her this time. He had to save his country. And as much as she wished that he were with her, she knew he was doing the right thing.

She said a brief prayer that he would make it safely to Maltmore Castle. The fate of the royal family had great bearing on the fate of the country. And when she thought of all those women and children and everyone who lived in and loved this small country, those millions of Valtrian lives, her own didn’t seem all that important in comparison.

She was starting to understand Miklos’s sense of duty.

She worked on the rope, but with little success. Maybe the rock wasn’t sharp enough, or maybe she was too tired to provide enough pressure. She took a moment to rest, then tried again, aware that she didn’t have too many more lives left and they were at level ten of the game.

H
E HAD THE CAVE IN
sight, but he was outnumbered at least twenty to one. Could be more. The cave might hold others. Miklos lay on his stomach and mapped the area: three military trucks and a tank.

The men back in the village had military-issue weapons. A picture started to form, even though he hated to consider that a group of soldiers from the Valtrian Army could be turned against the monarchy they’d sworn to protect.

He couldn’t not think about the fact that the chancellor’s youngest brother was an army colonel. The sense of betrayal that washed over him was a distraction he couldn’t afford. He’d deal with the chancellor’s role in all this later.

The presence of the tank and the location of the cave should have been passed along to General Rossi, as well as Miklos’s suspicions about traitors in their ranks. But now that he saw the military equipment here, he couldn’t be sure that his enemies wouldn’t pick up his transmission with their own radios. They’d definitely be monitoring the military channels.

The general knew which way Miklos had been heading, and he was a military man; being ready for
anything and everything was his basic stance. They would find him. And when they did, the chopper had enough firepower to take care of the tank.

The fact that for a second he considered whether the general might not have turned against him, too, just showed how exhausted he was. The general had always treated him like a son. He needed to snap out of paranoia before he made things worse than they were.

Backup couldn’t be that far away.

At least the sun was finally up, so he had no trouble with visibility.

Miklos moved ahead and identified four men standing guard at the perimeter of the enemy camp, at a distance from the others. None were in an easily approachable position. He stole toward the one closest to him. The man was leaning against a large rock, his back protected. Flat, snowy ground lay between him and Miklos, not much to hide behind if Miklos tried to approach him.

Miklos dropped to his stomach and crawled forward as far as he dared, waited for the man to look the other way, then rose enough to give his arm free range to move as he threw one of Luigi’s knives. He’d armed himself as best he could before taking off after Judi, but a couple of kitchen knives seemed pitiful compared to the enemy’s arsenal.

The knife hit where he’d aimed it, went through the man’s throat, preventing a shout. Miklos was moving forward even as the man folded to the ground. He ignored the hands that clawed at the bloody throat, as the man choked on his own blood, and finished the job
without wasting time. He grabbed the man’s communications unit and his weapon, kicked enough snow over the prone figure so that he wouldn’t be immediately visible if one of his buddies came this way. His mouth thinned as he retrieved his weapon and registered how young the guy was, no more than midtwenties. He covered up the face. He had no sympathy for traitors.

He moved along the rock that formed the top of the cave. The general had only sent a platoon to Maltmore, thirty soldiers. He didn’t realize that the army had been compromised, that their enemies had tanks. And if they had this one, they could have others. On their way to Maltmore Castle or already there. The clock was ticking.

Miklos climbed the rock and stole forward until he was above the next guard. He took off his belt quietly, held the ends and in a sudden movement looped it and positioned it so that it caught the man under the chin. Then he pulled up as hard as he could, hard enough to pull the man’s body off the ground and up to the top of the rock, to him. The man kicked wildly, then less and less as he suffocated. Miklos dragged the body behind a pile of snow on top of the rock and left it there.

He glanced at the sky, hoping for the chopper, but all he could see was more snow clouds gathering. Judi was in the cave, he was pretty sure of that. Inside the cave and at the mercy of whoever held her.

The third guard was relieving himself when Miklos snuck up behind him. He broke the man’s neck in one smooth move, killing the traitor. Miklos moved along, ready for the next.