Page 71 of Backwoods
“Behave, lady,” Miss Lula said with a narrowed gaze. “I’ll be up here listening, and I have a very keen sense of hearing.”
Amiya responded with an indifferent shrug, but the woman’s suspicion was going to complicate matters. She followed Westbrook onto the wide, descending staircase. Her heels clicked on the stone steps. The lantern flame cast huge, shifting shadows on the rock walls.
“This is my favorite area of the house,” Westbrook said. He paused, glanced over his shoulder at her, blue eyes twinkling in the candlelight. “Well, after the bedroom.”
He’s laying it on thick now, Amiya thought.This guy really believes he’s going to get lucky tonight.
They reached the bottom of the staircase. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees. The cellar was a wide, low-ceilinged space with a smooth stone floor. A wooden barrel stood just ahead, in the center of the room. On three sides—back, right, and left—wooden wine racks were built into the walls. A bottle occupied nearly every slot, hundreds of them. They glimmered darkly in the flickering light.
“This is impressive,” Amiya said.
“Isn’t it?” Westbrook strolled to the barrel and placed his lantern on top of it. He gestured toward the bottles. “Have a gander, lady. If you find one that intrigues you, we’ll select it for our next round.”
Down here, the walls muted the din of the household. Amiya assumed the obverse of that perception held true: anything that took place in the cellar would go unheard by anyone on the upper levels of the residence.
But how much would Miss Lula detect while posted at the open doorway?
Her heart thudding a slowlub-dub, Amiya stepped to a wall of bottles. She was no expert in Bordeaux; one bottle was as good as another in her limited experience, and presumably Westbrook had acquired only vintages worth owning. She ran her fingers along the necks of the bottles, pulled out one after another to glance at the labels. All of them, of course, were written in French, a language for which she possessed only a middling fluency.
She finally picked one that she thought she could understand. She slid the bottle out of the slot and presented it to Westbrook.
“This one,” she said. “Château Marguax.”
“A fine selection.” Westbrook nodded his approval. “While we’re down here, I think I’ll go ahead and pick another that I was thinking about as I was standing here.”
Westbrook brushed past her, his hair rustling like dry leaves. His back to her, he contemplated the collection of bottles.
Amiya had slid her hand into her pocket and clasped the knife handle. Her fingers trembled. She gauged the distance between her body and his, the length of her arm, the height of his neck.
“Aha,” Westbrook said. “Château Lafite. You’ll love this one, too, my lady.”
He drew the bottle out of the rack and turned around, a grin plastered on his pale face.
Using a backhand motion, a movement she had mastered from years of playing competitive tennis, Amiya whisked the edge of the blade across his neck. The cutting made a sound like scissors tearing through paper.
Westbrook’s lips froze in the midst of his shark smile.
“I thought . . . we were getting along well, lady,” he said softly.
He collapsed to the stone floor, blood pumping out of his carotid artery in great dark gouts. As he fell, the bottle flippedout of his hands and bounced against the stone with a clang, but the glass did not break. The wine rolled against the floor and came to rest at the edge of the barrel.
Amiya exhaled. Her heart slammed painfully.
“Is everything okay down there?” Miss Lula asked.
Hurrying, Amiya bent and searched Westbrook’s still body. She located the set of keys. More important to her immediate needs, she found the gun, too.
“Master Westbrook?” Miss Lula called out.
Westbrook’s gun was a silver revolver with a pearl handle. It looked like an antique, but she quickly figured out how to swing open the cylinder. The gun was already loaded.
Miss Lula was descending the staircase, heavy footsteps clopping against stone.
Amiya snapped the cylinder back into place. Holding the revolver in both hands, finger curled around the trigger, she rose just as Miss Lula reached the bottom of the staircase.
“You—” Miss Lula started to say, mouth spreading into a large “o” of shock.
The booming gun cut off her sentence as Amiya shot her point blank in the chest. The gun’s report was painfully loud in the cellar, punishing Amiya’s eardrums.
