shiver of revulsion so deep Eve’s bones quivered. “Just talk to me.”
“You won’t believe me even if I—”
“I will, pet, I will. Because I think I’ve broken you. I think you’re finally willing to speak the truth.”
Eve’s eyes blurred. She wanted to tell him, that was the terrible part. The words were on her tongue: I worked for Louise de Bettignies, code name Alice Dubois, and she ran the entire network. Lili, whose name Eve wouldn’t know if they hadn’t run into that German general on the train platform. If only that had never happened.
I worked for Louise de Bettignies, and she ran the network—a woman not five feet tall and brave as a lioness. And if she were here in my place, she would not say a word no matter how many fingers she lost.
Or would she? How did one know what anyone would do when they had fourteen joints systematically smashed?
But Lili wasn’t here in this chair with her hands bound in front of her. Eve was. Who knew what Lili would do; all Eve could be sure of was what Eve Gardiner would do.
“Who is the woman?” René whispered. “Who?”
Eve wished she could smile mockingly. She had no more smiles to give. She wished she could summon a cutting phrase. She had no insults left. So she just spit blood in his face, spattering his immaculately shaved cheek. “Go to hell, you cut-price collaborating cunt.”
His eyes were all fire. “Oh, pet,” he breathed, “thank you.”
He reached tenderly for Eve’s left hand. She curled her fingers into a fist, fighting him, but he wrenched her hand open and flattened it on the table, holding her like a vise as he reached for the little marble bust. Fucking Baudelaire, Eve thought, baring her blood-laced teeth at René. The terror was overwhelming.
“Who is the woman?” René asked, enjoying himself now, bust poised over the little finger of her left hand.
“Even if you would believe me,” Eve said, “I won’t tell you.”
“You have fourteen chances to change your mind,” René replied, and brought the bust down.
Time splintered, after that. There was scarlet-edged pain, and then velvet-black unconsciousness. René’s metallic voice slid through both like a steel needle, stitching together the waking nightmare and the fainting relief. When a cup of water dashed in her face no longer brought her up from unconsciousness, he pressed a thumb precisely against one of her ruined knuckles until Eve woke screaming. Then he took his time wiping his fingertips on a clean handkerchief, and the questions would start again. So would the sound of breaking bones.
The pain came and went, but the terror was constant. Sometimes she cowered with tears sliding down her face, and sometimes she was able to sit upright in her soiled chair and meet René’s eyes. In either state, she had stopped answering his questions. The agony stole her ability to form words, or even a token laugh.
There was a kind of relief when the last of her finger joints shattered. Eve looked down at the carnage that used to be her hands, and it felt like crossing a finish line. I suppose he might move on to my toes, she thought, remote inside her own shaking, sobbing shell. Or my knees . . . But the pain was already so enormous, the thought of more no longer had the power to frighten her. She had come this far; she could continue her silence.
Because René couldn’t hold her here forever, bleeding all over his Aubusson rug as his restaurant remained closed, as his profits died, and as his neighbors began to wonder about the noise coming from his apartments. At some point he had to give up this game. He would either give her to the Germans, or kill her. Eve barely cared which anymore. Either meant that the pain would stop.
Endure, the whisper came. In Lili’s voice; Lili would never leave her. Endure him, little daisy. Enduring the Germans, once they got hold of her, would be a different game—unlike René, they would have the power to cross-check her lies, verify her truths. But she had no strength to worry about what agonies were to come, only the agonies that were here.
Endure. It was simple, really. No more need to pretend, to keep up a cover, to walk the razor’s edge. Eve was off the razor and in among the teeth now, but at least there was no more need to lie. Just endure.