An indiscernible amount of time later, the door swung open again to reveal a guard as miserable to be minding them as the prisoners were to be there. “Elaine Rousseau,” he barked. “Come.”
The other two women cast their gazes downward to avoid any unintentional association. Elaine didn’t blame them. She had been guilty of a similar act when she met them.
Her blood prickled as she recalled Etienne’s exclamation of how people sent without baggage were to be killed and the ones with baggage were relocated to a work camp. Like Joseph had been.
But really, none of them had luggage of any type. It was merely a code for living or dying.
That bone-deep tremble began again, the one that shook the core of her soul and made her grit her teeth to endure the rush of anxious energy.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded with more bravado than she could physically muster.
The guard mutely led her outside where the rain still dripped from the thick gray clouds overhead. Her feet felt clumsy, her knees weak. The unknown stretching before her weighed with a maddening pressure that left a silent scream knotting in her chest.
Elaine was placed in the Citro?n once more with another prisoner, a man whose face was mottled with bruising. His dark hair fell over his brow as his head lolled forward, and a sour, unwashed smell adulterated the enclosed space. It was then she noticed a wound on the end of his finger, angry and raw where a nail might have been. He shifted his hand, and she realized every digit appeared thus, each nail savagely removed.
Bile burned up her throat, but she swallowed it down. In its place remained something strange and metallic she had never tasted before, and yet could somehow innately recognize: terror.
She did not know how much time passed as they drove, the once familiar sights of Lyon now blurring into a dizzying rush. But she knew the building as they turned onto Avenue Berthelot—école de Santé Militaire—formerly used as a medical school for the military and reclaimed as the Gestapo headquarters.
Using every drop of strength within her, she kept her gaze from creeping toward the man’s missing fingernails. Such a fate might soon be hers.
She had seen accounts in the newspaper of how the Gestapo extracted secrets from people, their cruelty unimaginable.
This was the exact path Joseph had been down, yanked into the dark unknown, led on a tether of fear and uncertainty.
Would she be strong enough to endure torture? Would she be the vital thread that snapped and sent all her fellow Resistants to a similar fate? She’d once tried to imagine what torture might feel like, but even then, she had not accounted for the poignancy of her own panic.
In her imagination, she kept her head lifted and back straight. But her knees were too weak and her stomach too bunched with dread.
She was led up the stairs with the man and made to wait in a hall alongside several other prisoners. They were all silent, heads bowed, bodies revealing various signs of trauma. Behind the closed doors came noises that filled in the gaps of the unknown in ways Elaine did not want to see realized.
Crunching and cracking, splashing and gasping, screaming and sobbing. The sounds of nightmares. Those involuntary cries wrenched from the victims were by far the worst—primal and raw and utterly helpless.
Would she be strong enough?
Elaine closed her eyes and willed her strength into place, like a wall being assembled brick by brick. But before the mortar of her newly constructed fortification could dry, her name was called once more.
She rose on legs that wobbled. However, she managed to stiffen her back with the consideration of all those who would suffer if she spoke. Jean with his ready smile, Antoine whose sage wisdom always came when needed, Marcel whose wife was due to deliver their new baby any day now. But not only them—Josette and Nicole. And Manon, Sarah and little Noah.
Those names swelled in a power greater than any brick and mortar. They had become a family to her, one she would die to protect.