Page 15 of Power's Fall

The fact that Montana was her second spouse hadn’t surprised her. Once she was told there was a task assigned to her trinity, she had guessed he’d be one spouse based on the prep work she’d already done at the Grand Master’s behest.

She and Montana had been planning this trip to Crimea for several months, but she hadn’t actually met him before their marriage was announced. They’d communicated through video calls and email.

She realized she’d closed her eyes as she focused on her breathing and opened them. She didn’t want to miss seeing something, even if it was mundane. She wanted to see everything. While she still could.

Beside her, Montana had his arms crossed, his shoulders tight.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yes. That was…”

“It was,” she agreed.

A suited immigration official, accompanied by a soldier holding a very large gun, had taken Dahlia and Montana to different interview rooms. The room had looked and felt like a cell.

She’d been acutely aware of how easy it would be for this to go horribly wrong and turn into not just a bad situation for her personally but a diplomatic nightmare that even her mother, the former foreign service officer and ambassador, wouldn’t be able to fix.

But Dahlia hadn’t panicked or shown she was afraid. She’d been to far more dangerous places than Crimea, at least dangerous to her personally. This trip was dangerous because she wasn’t traveling solo, she had Montana…and Vadisk…to worry about. If she made a mistake, it wasn’t just her life and freedom at risk.

And she was, in fact, doing something nefarious. She would film an episode or two of her show “Don’t Follow Me” while here in Crimea, but that wasn’t the primary purpose of the trip. Given her skill with languages, fluency with different customs, and citizen-of-the-world approach to life, she’d been heavily recruited both by the foreign service and the CIA. Not that the CIA wanted her to be an agent. No, they wanted her to be an information asset.

She’d turned down both organizations.

Maybe if she had been a CIA asset, she wouldn’t be quite so unnerved by the multi-hour, relentless questioning she’d gone through at the airport, because if their investigative activities were discovered, it was vaguely possible the CIA might have launched a covert mission to extract her. Then again, she wouldn’t want to be extracted if it meant leaving Montana, and yes, Vadisk, behind.

Vadisk might be an ass, but he was her husband.

Her thoughts had spiraled to the point that her heartbeat was picking up again, so she took a few more deep breaths and squared her shoulders, leaning forward to speak quietly to Vadisk, who was in the middle row bench seat.

“Did you have any issues in the airport?” she asked softly in English.

Vadisk glanced back at her, then at the driver, before answering in an equally low voice that wouldn’t be heard over the radio playing Russian pop music.

“I don’t think they liked me.”

It took a minute for his deadpan remark to register, and Dahlia snorted in amusement. “I don’t think they liked me either.”

Vadisk shifted, his big shoulders rocking. “You were there a long time.”

“I was,” she agreed. “They wanted to make sure I knew that this wasn’t a safe place for a foreigner.”

“It’s not.” Vadisk’s shoulder muscles tightened, straining the seams of his long-sleeved dress shirt. “Depending on who you ask, coming here, especially with a Russian visa, is illegal.”

“They had me repeat information on how we got clearance to arrive by plane at least four times.”

Vadisk grunted, and when he didn’t say more, she went back to looking out the window.

The Pivdennoberezhne Highway paralleled the southern tip of the peninsula, the view out the right-hand side of the van occasionally offering glimpses of the water when there was a break in the buildings or landscape.

Vadisk sat forward, speaking to the driver in Russian as they slowed.

“We’re almost there,” he said when he sat back.

The van turned right off the highway, and the nose of the vehicle tipped down the rather steep grade of the curved road that wound through the verdant cliffs of the shoreline.

They came around a curve, and an oasis of buildings made of butter-yellow stone and rough-cut porous rock spread out before them. The buildings were tucked into the sloped ground and between the trees, sometimes seeming to rise up right out of the hills.

The driver turned off the radio, putting a phone to his ear. Dahlia frowned as she listened.

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