“Six thousand.” The offer comes brusque, rough, harsh.
“Six? But sir, I —”
Brown eyes flash dangerously, a hand brushes a coat edge aside, hovers over a gun butt. Threat is woven through that deep voice, deadly and unmistakeable. “Six thousand. Now get your hands off.” A thick stack of cash flies to thump at the seller’s feet.
The seller bends, retrieves the cash, straightens; he doesn’t stop to count it. “Very well, very well.” A moment of taut silence. “Do you wish—”
“Leave us. Now.” This is a command, snapped in a voice which brooks no disobedience.
The seller, the guard with his shotgun, the madam and the remaining women all leave, and now I’m alone.
With him.
Sold like so much meat.
His eyes roam my body, rake over my form. They take in my breasts, my core, and my hips. He moves toward me, boots clomping noisily, spurs jingling, coat tail billowing behind him. He circles to stand behind me.
“You belong to me, now.” He speaks this from behind me. Close, too close, smelling of wood smoke and leather and wool. His voice is a deep, rasping grumble, rough, rocky, but his speech is articulate, educated. “You understand this?”
I shake, tremble, and manage to nod. Clear my throat, find my voice. “Yes. I—I understand.”
“Good. Then there won’t be any trouble.” His boots thunk across the wood, and he kneels to retrieve a pile of neatly folded clothing from the floor near the far wall, beneath the bank of windows. He returns to me and hands me the pile. “Get dressed. We have far to ride, and it’s not getting any warmer.”
I dress quickly. Flannel underwear. Wool stockings. A thin, fine wool slip or underdress, tight against my skin, hem at my knees. Another one, looser and longer, made from thicker, coarser wool, coming to my shins. A blue-gray calico dress, ankle length, snug at the bust and hips, blossoming into voluminous skirts at the waist. A thick wool coat with a deep hood. Warm, fur-lined boots, a little too big. Thick mittens.
When I’m dressed, he nods once, and moves for the exit, clearly expecting me to follow. I move after him, noticing the holsters tied low on both thighs, revolver handles visible as his coat flaps.
He mounts a huge black horse, its flanks smeared with white patches; he’s gripping the reins of another, smaller paint, holding it for me as I make my way across the snow. I mount, settle my skirts over my thighs, and accept the reins.
He eyes me. “You run, I’ll catch you.” Reins in one fist, the other gloved hand on his thigh. “Won’t go well for you, if I have to give chase.”
“I won’t run,” I tell him.
There’s nowhere to run, nothing around us but trees and snow and mountains in the distance. It’s a frozen hellscape, and I have no clue where we are. So no, I won’t be running away. He’s my only hope for staying alive, it appears. Staying here clearly isn’t an option, nor would I choose that even if it were. I’ll take my chances with this man.
“All right then. Stay close and keep up.”
He rolls his spurs lightly against his horse’s flank, and it glides into a smooth trot. My horse follows automatically, stopping just behind the other horse.
Twenty or thirty minutes of riding, and it becomes obvious we’re in the foothills of a massive mountain range, and that we’re headed up into them, angling for a notch between two sky-spearing, snow-capped, craggy peaks. Trees carpet the waist and shoulders of the mountains, and surround us in thick, impenetrable ranks of pine and spruce and fir, with the mountains visible in patches and glimpsed between rustling needles and arm-thick branches. So far, we’ve stuck to a path meandering through the forest. Not a road, nothing so grand as that. More of a narrow dirt track, once a deer path, perhaps, now used by people.
Another hour, and we break through the forest’s edge. Before us is a wide frozen lake, snow-blanketed, and beyond it miles and miles of wide open space bellying up to the rise of the mountains themselves, rolling hills and fields dotted here and there with stands of trees, birch and aspen. The sky above is clear blue, cloudless, a wide cerulean dome that suffocates by virtue of its overwhelming expanse. It is bitterly, bitingly cold. I tug the hood of my coat over my head, burrow back into it, and rub the tip of my nose with a mitten. Despite my warm garments, cold seeps into my bones.
We angle around the lake, and as we ride, I notice that my new owner’s head is never still, but always swiveling and scanning, and occasionally he twists around to glance at me, or behind us. The skirt of his duster is draped across his horse’s rear, the edges pulled away to leave his guns free. He sits straight, spine flat and ramrod stiff, yet his body moves loosely and easily with the rolling walk of his mount’s gait, reins in one hand resting on the pommel of his saddle.
“Where are we going?” I ask, finally summoning the courage to raise my voice.
“Home.”
“And where might that be?”
He gestures with the reins, pointing at the notch between the peaks. “Other side of those mountains. Three, four days ride, maybe. Depends on how much snow there is in the pass.” He twists in his saddle, glances at me. “Why? You eager to get there?” There’s a thinly veiled hint of salaciousness to his words.
I shrug, trying for indifference I do not feel. “Only curious.”
He doesn’t quite smile, but the ghost of a smirk touches the corners of his lips. “Only curious. Right.” He swivels back around to face forward, and says nothing more.
Home.
Three or four days in the wilderness, in the dead of winter, in the company of a man who owns me.
Tears prick hot behind my eyes, but I force them down. They will do no good, and will only freeze on my face.
Besides, something tells me tears will not move a man such as he.
©
Copyright © 2016 by Jasinda Wilder and Jade London. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THE BLACK ROOM: DELETED DOOR
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Jasinda Wilder
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