Elaine shook her head. “She cannot be anywhere else. I cannot leave her. She didn’t leave me.”
Jean approached, no doubt drawn by the passion with which Elaine spoke. “Marcel is correct, Elaine. It is far more dangerous now than before.” His usually jovial expression was muted by the solemnity of the situation, by the pain Nicole’s disappearance evidently caused him. “That’s why I’m coming with you.”
The warehouse door opened and a young woman with short, dark hair entered. Nicole’s replacement, Celine. There was an edge to her, aged eyes in a youthful face. She did not have the cheerful countenance of Nicole and took her place as courier in job alone.
The position needed to be filled, yes, but the haste with which it was done was an insult. As if they were all simply interchangeable. As if none of them mattered more than the role they filled. Not people, but nameless parts in the workings of the great Resistance machine.
That someone like Nicole could be so easily forgotten, that the organization could so readily move on…it was more than Elaine could stand. “I am going now.”
Before Marcel could reach for her again, she was gone, sprinting toward the warehouse door with Jean close behind her. The world whirred by as she ran out into the heat of the June day.
Jean joined her, matching her pace and saying nothing, slowing only when they reached the Rh?ne. The shade from the plane trees lining the river helped cool the sweat gathered on her brow and dampening the lower back of her dress. But the rustle of the pointed leaves overhead drew her awareness, its sound ominous, tugging her onward with the same press of determination she’d felt earlier.
“What are they looking at?” Jean nodded toward a crowd leaning over the stone wall to the river below.
An icy premonition cascaded over Elaine as she walked on legs she could not feel. A man turned to the side and retched, creating a break in the crowd, a place to slide into and peer toward the glittering river below.
A nude woman floated in the water, bobbing facedown in the gentle waves. The stiffness of her body was guided toward the stone walkway by a police officer with a long metal pole. Blond hair floated around her like a pale mist and her skin was white as a marble statue, marred with patches of black bruises covering her legs and back. Hideous strips of meaty pink showed where skin was missing entirely, as if peeled away.
Bile burned up Elaine’s throat.
“Don’t go down there,” Jean cautioned at her side.
But she was already making her way to the stairs, guided by the same macabre unseen hand that had led her on this path.
She had to know.
Rather, she already knew, but had to confirm.
The police officers yelled at her, but they were too busy with pulling the body from the water to physically stop her. So it was that she was there when they pulled the corpse from the lapping waves and rolled the woman face up onto the stone walkway.
Milky blue eyes stared up at nothing in a face so misshapen, the woman’s features were indistinguishable. If the signs of torture were monstrous upon her back, they were nothing compared to what had been done to her front.
Elaine’s stomach rolled with nausea. This woman could not be Nicole. Her light was too bright to be snuffed out, her guile too smooth to be snagged, her beauty too breathtaking to be made hideous, even with torture.
Yet even as Elaine tried to convince herself, she could not stop her gaze from creeping toward the woman’s right arm, to the spot just above the crook of her elbow where a small heart-shaped mole showed black against her pale skin.
Nicole had been found.
TWENTY-THREE
Ava
At exactly noon every day, Mr. Smith—one of the vice-consuls from the legation office on the first floor of the embassy—came upstairs for a cup of coffee. And at exactly noon every day, Ava met him there.