It fell to the floor, and I lunged for it, but René reached out with his undamaged hand and seized hold of my hair, still howling in agony, trying to wrench me back. So I kicked the pistol instead, sending it skittering across the floor to Eve.
She lifted her blood-soaked hands and raised René’s Luger from the reddened floor. Brought it level with an effort that skinned her lips back from her teeth, as I wrenched my hair away from that vengeful grip and dove to the ground—
As Eve calmly buried a shot between René Bordelon’s eyes.
His face disappeared in a red mist. The pistol cracked again as Eve spaced three more shots into his chest.
He toppled back, sliding to the floor with his ruined hand flung out in surprise. Surprised to the end that there was pain he couldn’t outrun, vengeance he couldn’t escape, consequences he couldn’t evade. Women who couldn’t be beaten.
The air stank, acrid with gunsmoke and the sharper tang of gore. The silence fell like a lead weight. I struggled up from the floor, still clutching the bust of Baudelaire. I couldn’t look away from René’s crumpled body. He should have looked small and old in death, pitiable. All I saw was an aged viper with its head cut off, venomous to the end. My stomach lurched and suddenly I wanted to vomit. I turned away, folding one arm around my belly, lurching back toward Eve who still had the Luger in her ruined hand. She looked tattered and blood splashed, splendid and terrible, and she gave a slow pitiless smile like a Valkyrie riding in howling triumph over a horde of dead enemies.
“One shot left,” she said quite clearly, still looking at René’s corpse, and before my suddenly horrified eyes she lifted the Luger to her own temple.
CHAPTER 44
EVE
Eve’s finger was tightening on the trigger when pain split the world apart. Not the dull pain in her shoulder, slowly pulsing blood, but a hot agony sharp and bright as silver, lancing through her fingers. Charlie St. Clair, keening that berserker cry that had torn out of her throat as she lunged for René, had swung the bust of Baudelaire straight at Eve’s hand. The shot went off, deafening Eve’s already ringing ears, deflected into the wall as Eve’s arm jerked off target. Eve strangled a cry of her own as she cradled hand and empty pistol alike to her chest.
“You Yank bitch,” she managed through clenched teeth, tears starting in her eyes. “My goddamn hand is broken. Again.”
“The way you tricked me and ran out at the hotel, you deserve it.” Charlie dropped to her knees, and with quick strength wrested the Luger from Eve’s hooked fingers and tossed it aside. “I’m not letting you shoot yourself.”
“I don’t have to shoot myself to d-die.” The Luger would have been the better way, poetic justice: when Eve sighted down the scratched barrel at René’s suddenly widening eyes, she’d seen it was her own Luger that he’d taken from her so many years ago. The one Cameron gave her. But Eve didn’t need a bullet to die. She could bleed out right here; all she had to do was—nothing.
“Get off me,” she snapped at Charlie, who was trying to get a better look at Eve’s shoulder. The pain chewed like an animal, slow and steady. “Let it go, girl. Just let it go.”
“I will not,” Charlie roared. She lunged around the room looking for supplies, completely ignoring the corpse on the floor. She came back with an armload of clean linen shirts from René’s half-packed traveling case, and a decanter of brandy. “Let me clean this, it’ll be disinfectant enough until we can get a doctor—”
Eve struck her away with the broken hand. The agony was excruciating. Once again the sensation of red-hot sand crunching in her knuckles. Eve wanted to curl up and weep, curl up and die. She was weak and shaken and done. She had no more enemies to kill. Hatred was the steel strut that had kept her upright; she felt now like a snail without a shell, soft and helpless. It was time to go, didn’t the girl see that?
Of course she didn’t. Charlie was moving like quicksilver, refusing to give up. That moment when she spat in René’s face that he was too goddamn dumb to pick the right side in two wars—Eve had wanted to cheer. It was as though Charlie had turned into Lili right before her eyes, little and fierce as a wolverine, dancing on her wits just a hair’s breadth ahead of disaster, improvising her way out of death. Lili had been defeated in the end, but not Charlie.
“You don’t have to die.” Charlie pressed a wad of linen around Eve’s shoulder, stanching the blood. “Eve, you don’t have to.”
Have to? Eve wanted to. She was a whiskey-soaked cripple with a stutter and no future. Most of her life had been wrecked because of guilt and grief and one bad man. And Eve knew enough about justice to know that killing René wasn’t enough to make life sweet again.
She must have muttered some of this, because Charlie was arguing. “Didn’t you hear what I said to him? You didn’t betray Lili. The Germans got their information about her from someone else. The moment you told me how you’d been drugged into giving it up, I wondered—”
Eve shook her head, feeling tears tremble. “No. It was me.” It had to be. Charlie’s accusation spat at René had passed over her ears in a blur. She had lived with the guilt so long, it was part of her soul. A few words had no power to shift it.
“—opium isn’t a truth drug, Eve! It made you hallucinate, but that doesn’t mean it made you talk! I asked Violette to look into the trial, the things said when the defendants weren’t present, and I was right. It was this Tellier woman, whoever she was, another prisoner—”
Eve went on shaking her head back and forth.
“Isn’t it worth trying to find out more? Looking at those trial records yourself? You’re a spy, you have an O.B.E. and people like Major Allenton owe you favors! Telephone Violette, get more details—”
“No.” Back and forth, back and forth.
“You goddamn bitch, don’t you even want to get out from under all that guilt? Or will you just lie under it like a donkey in a harness?” Charlie thrust her sharp little face right into Eve’s and bellowed, “You didn’t do it!”
The tears spilled over Eve’s cheeks. This afternoon she had cried crocodile tears to get away from this girl, but these tears were real. She wept and wept, and for a moment Charlie held her, Eve sobbing into her sharp little shoulder.
But then Charlie was pushing and prodding, urging Eve up. “We can’t stay here. Lean on me, keep that pad pressed tight.”
Eve wanted to let it fall, let the blood fall out after it. Let the police find two curled corpses in the morning: source and spy, captor and captive, collaborator and betrayer, locked together till the bitter end. But—
You didn’t do it.