And Then She Fell (The Cynster Sisters Duo 1)

Morning sunshine eventually slanted through the grimy windows set high in the wall of the basement in which James was imprisoned. He woke, blinking in the faint light. Gradually his senses refocused, informing him that his head was still pounding, albeit not as painfully as it had been, but to add to his woes he was stiff in every joint.

His shoulders ached; his neck felt tortured. But he could stretch his legs. He concentrated on flexing and lifting them, working the muscles until they felt reasonably normal.

By then he’d realized what he would have to do. He’d arranged with Henrietta to meet that morning and go for a drive in the park. When he didn’t arrive, she would, eventually, send to his house, and then . . . but the murderer had proved beyond question that he was intelligent enough to have anticipated that.

Easing his shoulder

s, trying to loosen the bonds, James muttered, “He’ll have already sent her word that he’s captured me, because otherwise she would raise a hue and cry, and that’s the last thing he wants. He wants her, so he’ll offer to spare my life for hers, and get her to go to him somewhere.” Settling back on the chair, he narrowed his eyes and tried to think like their villain. “He’ll get her to meet him somewhere, but he’s already decided he’s going to stage this double murder, which he needs to do to throw everyone off his scent, so he’ll bring her here.”

He glanced around. He couldn’t afford to sit and wait in the chair. “When he brings Henrietta in here, I have to be free and able to save her.”

She would come to save him, that he didn’t doubt, so he would have to be in a position to return the favor.

“So . . .” He looked around again, this time with greater concentration, searching for anything that might help his cause. He didn’t see it at first, but a glimmer of light, of sunlight slanting off glass, drew his gaze to the area beneath the second window, the one further from his present position.

He squinted and, eventually, made out the shards of a broken bottle. “Perfect. Now . . .” He assessed his strength, debated, but he needed to get free as soon as possible; he had no idea when the murderer would bring Henrietta to the house, to the basement.

Summoning his will and his still-wavering strength, he planted his feet and slowly tipped forward, until he was standing, still lashed to the chair and bent over at a peculiar and rather painful angle. But, glory be, he had just enough freedom to shift his legs and feet and shuffle, foot by foot, across the floor.

Once he was standing over the shattered remains of the bottle, he had to work out how to get his hands on a suitable piece of glass—there were at least three he thought would suffice—without risking slashing himself in the process.

Eventually, he used the tip of one shoe to nudge one shard along the floor until it lay well clear of the rest. Then he went down, first on one knee, then on the other—a complicated maneuver that had him swearing—then, kneeling with his knees pressed together, he gauged the distance to the single shard, wriggled into position, and then tipped onto his shoulder.

The move jarred his head so badly he saw stars. He lay on the floor, panting, until the spinning stopped, then, carefully, he stretched his fingers, feeling, searching.

He had to shift a trifle further, but finally his fingers brushed the shard. He teased it nearer, into his hand, careful not to cut himself. Blood would only make the glass harder to hold, harder to work with.

Exhaling, he filled his lungs and waited until his heart slowed and his mind sharpened again, then he turned the shard and set what felt to be the sharpest edge to the rope—

Wait, wait, wait!

What if the murderer didn’t bring Henrietta down to the basement?

James lay awkwardly twisted on the floor and tried to think. Forced himself to put himself in the murderer’s shoes, at least as far as he was able.

The murderer wanted to stage a double murder and make it appear to be a believable murder-suicide, with echoes of Lady Winston’s murder thrown in, and chances were he intended to carry out the foul deeds in the order he’d described, namely killing Henrietta first . . . and given the murderer’s cold-bloodedness, James had no difficulty believing that the blackguard intended to kill Henrietta in front of his own eyes.

From all Barnaby and Stokes had said, the murderer was more than sadistic enough for that.

But killing Henrietta and James in the basement wouldn’t support the fiction of a murder-suicide; such a setting would strike a discordant note, especially if Henrietta’s murder was supposed to be a replay of Lady Winston’s. The basement was hardly the place for a lovers’ rendezvous, and this murderer was very intelligent, and very aware of how the ton thought. So he would shift James to some more believable location.

“For instance, a room upstairs.” Twisting his still aching head, James glanced at the basement stairs, closer to him now; in the strengthening morning light he could see them clearly. There was no landing at the top, and the door opened inward. If he were free and ready to engage, and standing on the stairs when the murderer opened the door . . . James grimaced. “He’ll have plenty of time to shoot me, and if we grappled, I would be the one most likely to end falling down the stairs and breaking my neck.”

While that might put a crimp in the murderer’s plans, it wasn’t how James wanted this to end.

And such an end wouldn’t save Henrietta, and that, after all, was his principal and dominant aim.

From his strained position on the floor, he glanced at the windows, then sighed. Even once he was free, there was no way he could break out of the basement; the door was bolted on the outside, the windows were small, too small to fit through even if he could break their thick glass, and the murderer had told him the houses were deserted, so there was no reason to suppose that there would be anyone passing outside the windows for him to hail.

It took him a little while to convince his brain of what would have to be, and even longer to get his body to cooperate. Getting up onto his legs again was an excruciating feat, but eventually he managed it, and managed to laboriously work his way back across the room and set the chair down, with him still lashed to it, in exactly the same place where the murderer had left him. There was, thankfully, enough dust layered on the floor, smudged not just by the murderer’s boots but by countless others previously, for his shuffling progress across it to have left no obvious trail, and the murderer must have dragged him in, because his evening clothes were already too filthy for his recent brush with the floor to have made any additional impression.

Shifting on the chair, James settled again; closing his eyes, he concentrated, and managed to ease and inch the glass shard up beneath his shirt cuff, along the inside of his right wrist. He wriggled his fingers, shifted his hands, but the shard remained safely tucked away, ironically held in position by the rope that bound his hands.

Slumping in the chair, he ran through the possible scenarios again, but there was nothing more he could think of to do.

Closing his eyes, he worked at relaxing his muscles and getting what rest he could—until the murderer returned to fetch him to wherever the blackguard intended to bring Henrietta.

Henrietta kept her distressing news entirely private all through the morning. Not because she wished to but because she had to; given that James’s life was at risk, she had to take the murderer at his word and assume he would know if her family was alerted to his plan. So she couldn’t allow anyone who might react precipitously to know of the murderer’s demand. And she had to go about her life as if nothing at all was wrong.