Robyn Donald - Prince Of Lies

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

SOMBRE fir trees crowded against the small stone crypt constructed in the living rock of the mountain, concealing it from all but the keenest eyes.

The man who threaded his way so quietly that even the deer didn’t sense his presence had such eyes, strange, colourless eyes that refracted light like shattered glass. At a muffled sound in the still silence he froze, his big body somehow blending into the gloom, that fierce gaze searching through the trees and up the mountainside.

A hundred years ago an eccentric English gentleman had built a little castle high in the Swiss Alps, but it was his wife who decided that the estate needed something extra, a romantically outrageous touch to set it off properly. A couple of ruined follies sufficed for dramatic impact in the woods, but the pièce de résistance was the crypt, never intended to be used, constructed solely to induce the right mood.

During the past century the carefully laid path had become overgrown, scarcely noticeable, but the crypt had been built by good Victorian tradesmen, and it still stood in all its Gothic gloom, the rigid spikes of an elaborately detailed iron grille barring steps that led down to a solid wooden door.

Frozen in a purposeful, waiting immobility, ears and eyes attuned to the slightest disturbance, the man decided that as an example of the medieval sensibility admired by many Victorians the hidden crypt was perfect. Not his style, but then, his self-contained pragmatism was utterly at variance with the romantic attitudes of a century before.

In spite of the fugitive noise that had whispered across his ears, no birds shouted alarm, no animals fled between the trees. His penetrating gaze lingered a moment on stray beams of the hot Swiss sun fighting their way through the dense foliage.

He hadn’t seen anyone since entering the wood and his senses were so finely honed that he’d have known if he’d been followed, or if the crypt was being watched. The waiting was a mere formality. However, when a man lived on his wits it paid to have sharp ones, and the first thing he’d learned was to trust nothing, not even his own reactions.

A small, bronze butterfly settled on one broad shoulder. Not until the fragile thing had danced off up the nearest sunbeam did he move, and then it was soundlessly, with a smooth flowing grace very much at variance with his size. Within moments he was standing at the dark opening in the shoulder of the mountain.

The iron door looked suitably forbidding, but the old-fashioned lock that would have been, for all its ornate promise, ridiculously easy to pick, had been superseded by a modern one, sleek, workmanlike, somehow threatening. After a cursory glance he fished in his pocket and pulled out a ring of keys. No clink of metal pierced the silence. Selecting one, he inserted it, and as the key twisted and the lock snickered back a look of savage satisfaction passed over his hard, intimidating face.

He didn’t immediately accept the mute invitation. Instead, his eyes searched the stone steps that led down to another door, this one made of sturdy wood. For several seconds the cold, remote gaze lingered on what could have been scuff marks.

Eventually, with the measured, deliberate calculation of a predator, he turned his head. Again his eyes scanned the fir trees and the barely visible path through them, then flicked up the side of the mountain. Only then did he push the iron door open.

Although he knew it had been oiled, he half expected a dramatic shriek of rusty hinges. One corner of his straight mouth tilted in mordant appreciation of the horror films he and his friends used to watch years ago, when he was as innocent as he’d ever been.

Moving without noise or haste, he slipped through the narrow opening between the iron door and the stone wall, relocked the door, and turned, his back pressed against the damp, rough-hewn stone. Now, caught between the grille and the wooden door, he was most vulnerable to ambush.

Still no prickle of danger, no obscure warning conveyed by the primitive awareness that had saved his life a couple of times. Keeping well to the side where the shadows lay deepest, he walked noiselessly down the steps. Some part of his brain noted the chill that struck through his clothes and boots.

A different key freed the wooden door; slowly, he pushed it open, his black head turning as a slight scrabble sounded shockingly in the dank, opaque darkness within.

‘It’s all right, Stephanie,’ he said in a voice pitched to reach whoever was in the crypt. Grimly, he locked the door behind him. A hitherto concealed torch sent a thin beam of light slicing through the blackness to settle on a long box, eerily like a coffin, that rested on the flagstones. The man played the light on to the box until the keyhole glittered. For the space of three heartbeats he stood motionless, before, keys in hand, he approached the box.

* * *

Inside her prison she was blind, and earplugs made sure she could hear little. However, another sense had taken over, an ability to feel pressure, to respond somehow to the presence of another living being. For the last few minutes she had known he was near.

Almost certainly he was one of the two men who had abducted her on the road back to the chalet. The memory of those terrifying moments kept her still and quiet, her shackled limbs tense against the narrow sides of the box.

After the initial horrified incredulity she had fought viciously, desperation clearing her brain with amazing speed so that she was able to use every move Saul had taught her. She’d managed to get in some telling blows, scratching one’s face badly as she’d torn off his Balaclava. She had been trying for his eyes, but a blow to her head had jolted her enough to put off her aim.

Not badly enough, however, to stop her from crooking her fingers again and gouging at his face, so clearly seen in the moonlight.

Then the second man had punched her on the jaw.

Two days later the man whose face she’d seen had hit her again in exactly the same place when she’d refused to read the newspaper.

Half-mad with terror, convinced that she was going to die in the makeshift coffin, she had managed to shake her head when he’d forced her upright and thrust the newspaper in her hand, demanding that she say the headlines.

She’d known what he was doing. Saul must want some reassurance that she was alive before he paid any ransom. The torches that had blazed into her eyes had made it very clear that her assailant intended to video her.

Her refusal had made her gaoler angry, and he’d threatened to withhold the food and water he’d brought. Still she’d balked, folding her mouth tightly over the cowardly words fighting to escape, words that were pleas for freedom, craven offers to pay him anything he wanted if only he would let her go.

So he’d hit her, carefully choosing the site of the bruise he’d already made when he’d knocked her out in the street. Pain had cascaded through her but she’d only given in when he’d told her viciously that he was prepared to send a video of him beating her up to her brother if that was what it took.

It had been the only thing he could have said to persuade her. Saul must never know what had happened to her in that crypt.