strength from the blood we lose,’” René quoted. “Turns out the hidden enemy isn’t as dangerous as she thought she was.”
“Yes, she is,” I said. “Your hidden enemy isn’t Eve, you old bastard. The hidden enemy is me.”
His eyes snapped to me, and he looked surprised. As though he’d forgotten I was even in the room. Part of me wanted to shriek and cower from his eyes, from the pistol that jerked in my direction, but I set my chin at its most contemptuous I don’t care angle. Never had I cared so much.
“Shut up, Yank,” Eve growled. She was sweating, color gone from her face. How long did she have? I had no idea.
Get him closer. Eve had once said René planned brilliantly, but improvised badly. I had to goad him into something rash, and I knew I could. I might never have met the man before today, but I knew him through Eve. Knew him right down to the bone.
I gave him the most scornful look I could manage. “The enemy here is me,” I said again. “I’m the one who found your restaurant in Limoges. I’m the one who hunted Eve up. I’m the one who dragged her all the way from London. Me. You thought you were so clever, starting a new life, and all it took to find you was a college girl making a few telephone calls.”
His voice was arctic. “Shut up.”
Oh, I wanted to. But that wouldn’t save me or the Rosebud. It was either take a chance and provoke him now, or wait passively to die right after Eve. “I don’t take orders from an idiot like you,” I said, feeling sweat slide down my spine. “This Baudelaire obsession of yours, it isn’t just really, really boring, it makes you easy to find. You’re not clever, you’re predictable. If you hadn’t named your restaurant after the same damn poem twice in a row, you’d still be sipping champagne over dinner right now, not packing a bag and running. For the third time in your miserable cliché of a life.”
“I said, shut up.”
“Why, so you can talk? You do love to talk. All those things you told Eve, just because she looked at you with her big doe eyes. You’re a big talker, René.” I’d never called an old man by his first name in my life, not without a Mr. or Monsieur attached, but I thought we were on first-name terms by now. Bullets plus blood plus threats of imminent death equaled a certain intimacy. “Don’t even think about shooting me,” I added as his mouth tightened and the Luger twitched. “My husband’s back in Grasse right now, and if you kill me he’ll bury you alive. I left him a note; he’s on his way already. You might get away with letting Eve die here, but you can’t murder me in cold blood.”
Of course he could. I was just trying to muddy the water, get him flustered. His pistol twitched again, and fear froze me until I realized he was looking at my wedding ring, searching my face. Trying to see if I was telling the truth.
“It’s true,” Eve said, and bleeding out or not, she could still lie like a rug. “Her husband’s a Scotsman with a temper, a solicitor with colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic—”
“This is getting out of hand,” I pressed. “Look at you standing there like you’ve won the game. You’ve lost. You can’t control all of this. Let me go, let me bandage Eve—”
His eyes slid back to her. “I’ve waited thirty years to watch her die, you little American cow. I’m not passing that pleasure up for any price on earth. When she’s dead I’ll drink champagne over the corpse and take my time remembering how she wept on my carpet after spilling her secrets—”
“She didn’t spill any secrets, you filthy liar.”
“You know nothing,” René Bordelon said coolly. “That sniveling bitch was a tattling coward.”
From the corner of my eye I saw Eve’s chin jerk. The oldest, deepest wound: her betrayal of Lili. I felt Violette’s telegram burning in my pocket. If only it had arrived a day earlier, perhaps I could have averted all of this.
She might be bleeding out, but it wasn’t too late for her to know the truth.
“You lied to her,” I said. “Eve never gave you anything, not even under the opium. The convicting information about Louise de Bettignies came from another source, a Mademoiselle Tellier.” Violette’s search