"Oh my God!" she whispered, snatching up the tankard and turning it over. A few drops of ale poured out of it. Wildly, she looked about her, expecting hoping to see Jiyong lying in the path, perhaps passed out from too much drink, as Uncle Monty had occasionally done. Instead, she saw a small gleaming pistol on the side of the path.

Snatching it up, Dara whirled around and let out a stifled scream as she collided with a hard masculine body. "Youngbae! Thank God it's you," she cried.

"What the devil's wrong?" Youngbae said, gripping her shoulders hard in his anxiety as he steadied her. "Top said Jiyong's vanished and you saw a man hiding in the trees."

"I found Jiyong's tankard of ale right here and a gun on the ground near it," Dara said, her voice and body trembling with terror. "And I saw a man I think was the same one who was trying to kill Jiyong the night we met."

"Go back to the clearing and stay in the light!" Youngbae said sharply. Snatching the gun from her hand, he turned and ran down the path, vanishing into the deep woods.

Stumbling over a thick root growing across the path, Dar raced back to the clearing, intending to get help rather than find safety. Wildly, she looked around for Wooyoung or Top, and seeing neither she ran straight toward one of the cottagers who had taken a brief respite from the shooting contest and was staggering toward the ale table in the same state of cheerful inebriation as the rest of his fellows. "Mam!" the man gasped, snatching off his cap and starting to execute a bow.

"Give me your gun!" Dara demanded breathlessly, and without waiting for him to hand it over, she snatched it out of the stunned man's hand. "Is it loaded?" she called over her shoulder, already racing toward the path.

"Shore is." His breath labored from a long sprint down the path to the forester's cottage.

Youngbae put his ear to the door, listening for sounds. Hearing none, he cautiously tried the latch, and when it stuck he reared back two paces and rammed his shoulder against the door with enough extra force to send it flying wide open. Off balance because the door had opened so easily, he staggered into the cabin, stumbled, and stopped short, his mouth falling open in shock.

His mother was seated stiffly upon a chair in front of him. And beside her, sitting on the table, was Jiyong. In his hand, Jiyong was holding a gun.

It was pointing straight at Youngbae's heart.

"W-what the hell is going on?" Youngbae's burst out, panting

Youngbae's arrival demolished the last slender hope Jiyong had clung to that Dara and his cousin had not conspired to end his life at this party.

In a soft voice of deadly menace, he said to Youngbae, "Welcome to my party, cousin. I believe we're still expecting another guest this evening to make the party complete, aren't we, Youngbae? My wife?"

Before Youngbae could answer, Jiyong added, "Don't be impatient she's bound to come looking for you, thinking I've been safely disposed of, won't she? I'm sure of it."

His silken drawl suddenly became clipped. "There's a bulge in your pocket which is undoubtedly a gun. Take off your coat and throw it on the floor."

"Jiyong"

"Do it!" Jiyong bit out savagely, and Youngbae slowly obeyed.

When Youngbae had dropped his coat on the floor, the point of Jiyong's gun shifted slightly to the left, indicating the chair lying on its side by the shuttered window. "Sit down. And if you move an inch," he warned with frightening calm, "I'll kill you."

"You're mad!" Youngbae whispered. "You must be. Jiyong, for God's sake, tell me what the hell is going on."

"Shut up!" Jiyong snapped, his head tipped toward the sound of footsteps on the cabin step.

More than anyone, his rage was directed at the girl he had been obsessed with for over a year the scheming liar who had made him believe she loved him, the little who had lain in his arms and surrendered her eager body to him; the beautiful, laughing, unforgettable barefoot girl who had made him believe that heaven was a stream with a picnic blanket beside it. And now, he thought, with a wrath he could barely contain, she was about to fall into his clutches.

The door creaked open, slowly, a few inches; a familiar lock of mahogany hair peeked through the opening, then a pair of  eyes that widened like saucers as her gaze riveted on the gun in his hand.

"Don't be shy, darling," Jiyong said in a voice so low it was a deadly whisper. "Come inside. We've been waiting for you."

Expelling her breath on a rush of relief, Dara pushed the door wide open, stared at the fallen thug, then rushed forward as Jiyong stood up.

Tears of fright streaming down her face, she wrapped her arms around him, the gun in her hand forgotten.

"I knew it was him I knew it!"

She cried out in surprised pain as Jiyong wrapped his hand in her hair and viciously yanked her head back. His face only inches from hers, he bit out, "Of course you knew it was him, you murderous little !" and with a cruel jerk of his wrist, he flung her sprawling onto the floor, her hip landing painfully on the gun in her hand.

For a moment, Dara simply sat there, staring at him through fear-widened eyes, unable to assimilate what was happening.

"Are you afraid, sweetheart?" he jeered smoothly. "You should be. Where you're going, there are no windows, no lovely clothes, no men other than a few jailers who'll avail themselves of your delectable little body until it becomes too gaunt to interest them. Hopefully, it will hold their interest longer than it held mine," he added with deliberate cruelty.

"Don't look so surprised," he said, misinterpreting the reason for her shock. "I've bedded you because it was necessary to keep up the sham of the unsuspecting husband not because I wanted you," he lied, feeling an almost uncontrollable urge to murder her for her treachery.

"Jiyong, why are you doing this?" Dara cried, then recoiled in terror from the blaze in his eyes when she called him by his given name.

"I want answers, not questions," Jiyong snapped. Estimating that it might be another ten minutes before Psy realized he was missing and last seen heading in this direction, Jiyong relaxed against the table again, his weight braced on one foot, the other swinging idly as he turned toward Youngbae.

"While we're waiting," he invited smoothly, pointing the gun at him, "suppose you fill in some details for me. What else has been poisoned in my house?"

Youngbae's eyes lifted from the gun in Jiyong's hand to his relentless features. "You're mad, Jiyong."

"I wouldn't mind killing you," Jiyong said thoughtfully, raising the gun higher as if he was about to do it

"Wait!" his aunt screamed, casting desperate glances at the empty doorway and beginning to babble. "Don't hurt Youngbae! H-he can't answer because he d-doesn't know about the poison."

"And I suppose my wife knows nothing about it either," Jiyong inserted sarcastically. "Do you, my dear?" he asked, the barrel of the gun shifting toward Dara. Disbelief and fury drove Dara slowly to her feet, clutching her gun in the folds of her skirts.

"You think we've been trying to poison you?" she breathed, staring at him as if he had kicked her in the stomach.

"I know you have," he countered, enjoying the anguish he saw in her eyes.

"Actually" Bertie Kwon drawled from the doorway, his gun pointing straight at Jiyong's head, "you're wrong. As my hysterical mother is undoubtedly about to confess, I'm the one who conceived these effective admittedly, not successful plots to rid us of you. Youngbae hasn't the stomach for murder, and since I have the brains of the family, if not the legs, I've handled the planning and the details. You look surprised, cousin. Like everyone else, you assume a cripple can't pose a significant threat to anyone, don't you? Drop your gun, Jiyong. I have to kill you anyway, but if you don't drop it, I'll kill your charming wife first, while you watch."

His body coiled like a tight spring, Jiyong tossed his gun down and slowly came to his feet, but Dara suddenly sidled up against him as if she mistakenly believed there was safety there.

"Move away!" he snapped under his breath, but she clasped his hand in an outward display of terror and simultaneously pressed a pistol into his palm.

"You'll have to kill me, too, Bertie," Youngbae said softly, standing up and starting forward.

"I suppose so," his brother agreed without hesitation. "I intended to eventually, anyway."

"Bertie!" his mother cried. "No! That's not what we planned"

Dara's gaze riveted on the man on the floor, she saw him slide his arm toward Youngbae's coat and, behind him, another man stepping into the doorway, slowly raising a gun.

"Jiyong!" she screamed, and because there was no other way to protect him from three assailants, Dara threw herself in front of him at the exact moment two guns discharged.

Jiyong's arms automatically clasped her to him as Bertie Kwon collapsed, shot by Psy  from the doorway, and the bandit on the floor rolled over, clutching the wound in his arm inflicted by Jiyong's gun.

It happened so fast that it took a moment before Jiyong realized that Dara was suddenly very heavy, a dead weight sliding down his body.

Tightening his arms, he tipped his chin, intending to about fainting after everything was over, but what he saw struck stark terror in his heart: Her head had fallen back, lolling limply on her shoulders, and blood was streaming from a wound at her temple.

"Get an ambulance!" he shouted at Youngbae, and lowered her to the floor.

His heart hammering with fear, he knelt beside her, ripped off his shirt, and tore it into strips, binding the ugly wound in her head. Before he'd half finished, blood had already soaked and spread around and through the white linen, and her color was rapidly turning an ashen grey.

"Oh my God!" he whispered. "Oh my God!"

He knew the signs of a hopelessly fatal wound, and even while his mind was recognizing that she would not live, Jiyong was snatching her into his arms. Cradling her against his chest, he ran down the path, his heart hammering in frantic rhythm with the refrain pounding in his heart: Don't die don't die Don't die.