pain and longing for oblivion—I couldn’t stay there or I’d drown. I wasn’t letting Finn drown either. I wasn’t letting him go, not like the others I’d failed and lost. “Stay with me,” I murmured against his lips, my breath coming as ragged as his. “Stay with me—” And we were tangled up along the leather seat, the important parts of my black dress all yanked out of the way, Finn’s shirt and belt on the floor.
This was normally when my mind slid away from what was happening. This was when I stopped trying to feel something and instead grew distant and disappointed that I felt nothing—that the easiest equation in the world, man plus woman, always added up to zero. Not this time. The heaving scramble of limbs across the seat and the sounds of squeaking leather and heavy breathing were the same as all the other times, but now I wasn’t drifting away. I was melting and burning and shaking with need. Finn was trembling too, braced above me, a shadow against more shadows, his hands tangled so tight through my hair that my scalp sparkled with pain, and his mouth drank the skin at my throat and my ears and my breasts as though he could devour me. I locked my arms and my thighs around him and clung as though I were trying to climb inside him, nails sinking deep into his back. We grappled, skin against sweating skin, and it still wasn’t close enough. I clawed at him, pulling him deeper, dimly hearing the sounds I was making as we clashed in desperate, furious rhythm. It was fast and rough and good, messy and sweaty and alive. His face was hard against mine at the final shudder that speared us both, and I felt a tear slide between our pressed cheeks.
I didn’t know which of us it had come from. But I didn’t care. It hadn’t come from grief, and that was enough.
CHAPTER 28
EVE
October 1915
If there was a day of the week to be arrested, it was Sunday. The one night out of seven that Eve didn’t work, because even decadent Le Lethe closed on the lord’s day. Eve was back in Lille by late Sunday night without needing to miss a shift. “Small favors,” she said aloud. The room was bitterly cold, and though nothing had changed—not the narrow bed, not the false-bottomed carpetbag in the corner where her Luger was hidden—it had a deserted air. Violette would not come stomping through in her heavy boots, grumping about English pilots too rash to hide properly. Lili would not come waltzing in with a story of how she bribed her way past a checkpoint with a smuggled sausage. Eve looked around the joyless little room, remembering evenings they’d spent here smoking and laughing, and a wave of despair hit so hard it nearly knocked the breath from her lungs. She had a job to do, and she would do it—but there would be no more moments of joy in it. There would be days at Le Lethe and nights in René’s bed, and that was all. No one would use this room anymore but Eve.
Antoine will, she thought. We can work out a new schedule. Quiet, rock-steady Antoine knew the most about Lili’s sources, since he had constructed false papers for so many of them under the counter of his bookshop—perhaps he could reconstruct Lili’s rounds for someone else to take over. Somehow it had to be done. She gave in to a wave of weariness, and lay down without even taking her coat off. She should have been hungry, but somehow she was imagining the smell of René’s expensive cologne—dreading the moment she would go back to him tomorrow, no doubt—and even the imagined whiff turned her stomach. She buried her nose in her thin pillow, imagining the smell of tea and English tweed instead. “Cameron,” she whispered, and a soft tactile memory flashed of his hair under her hand and his lips lingering in the space behind her ear. She wondered if he regretted their time this afternoon. She wondered if he hated her for seducing him and then sneaking off. She wondered . . .
But she was exhausted from terror and arrest, from anguish and love, and sleep descended in a black wave.
The next day was brilliant and cold, and Eve trudged toward Le Lethe bundled to the tip of her nose. Normally in late afternoon the restaurant was bustling: waiters laying