Page 105 of A Lady's Handbook of Espionage
Thorne’s expression softened. “Understood. But when we do find her, keep her close, yeah? I don’t fancy tearing apart the East End every few months because you can’t hold on to your woman.”
“I’ll do my best. Though I warn you, she’s slippery. Makes eels look stationary by comparison.”
“All the best ones are,” Thorne said sagely. “That’s how you know they’re worth the trouble.”
30
There was a rhythm to pain. A meter. A cadence.
Isabel knew this with the same visceral certainty as her own name. The ropes bit into her wrists with each shallow breath, keeping time like a metronome. Flay and soothe. Flay and soothe. Bright sparks of agony, followed by a duller throbbing that settled under her skin.
She let her head fall back against the headboard. The sensation grounded her. Reminded her that she was still here. Still breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
With each careful exhale, she forced down the fear, the revulsion, the phantom echo of Favreau’s hands on her. She took those feelings and locked them away in that dark place inside herself where she kept such things. Where she hid all the bits of herself she could not afford to feel.
Tears were a luxury, and luxuries were for the weak. Isabel had long since carved weakness from herself, learning young that it was a thing that got you caught. Got you killed.
Breathe. Feel the air in your lungs, your ribs expand with it. This is real. You are real.
Time became an endless stretch of shallow breaths and hurt – the pain in her shoulders, her arms, her wrists. She let it wash over her in waves. Let it carry her out of herself.
Favreau would return.
He would come, and there would be more agony. He would smile that slow, knowing smile, and it would be just like it had been before.
No. Never again.
She would not break.
Isabel shook off the daze with a shudder. She couldn’t drift now. She needed the clarity that had saved her in impossible situations.
Desperation had been her constant companion since she was old enough to grasp its shape. She knew how to take that gnawing dread and spin it into something that could cut. Panic was an indulgence. Icy logic, ruthless calculation – that was a weapon.
And right now, she needed a weapon.
She dragged her fingers over the whorls and ridges of the headboard at her back. Favreau had undoubtedly paid a fortune to a master woodworker to whittle a tree into submission.
There.
Her thumbnail snagged on a splinter marring the grain. Some flaw in the wood or a slip of the carving knife. She traced that little imperfection again, no wider than a shilling. It wasn’t too sharp, but it was enough.
And so Isabel began to saw at the ropes.
The angle wrenched at her shoulders and spine with every movement, but she welcomed it. Used it as fuel.
Flay, soothe. Flay, soothe.
The rope was thicker than she’d like – something meant to lash down cargo – and the fibres were rough against her skin as she moved back and forth, back and forth. Let the hurt flow through and over and out of her. Down in the vault of her mind it went.
She might have been sawing at the ropes for hours or days. All that remained was the need to be free. The determination that had seen her through the fetid alleys of Paris, the gilded drawing rooms of Vienna and St Petersburg, and the thousand hurts.
Isabel imagined the blood on her hands was Favreau’s.
She sawed and sawed andsaweduntil—
The rope snapped.
