Page 22 of A Lady's Handbook of Espionage
Her captor knew his knots.
She’d made a mistake, letting down her guard enough to sleep. A fatal, foolish error born of desperation and exhaustion and the kind of weariness that came from always looking over her shoulder. One of Favreau’s men had broken into her little bolthole and tied her up.
Across the room, the Butcher stood by the door. She’d heard all about this man. That he liked to cut his victims up into small pieces and send them to loved ones over weeks and months. A finger. A toe. A foot. Each gift more gruesome than the last.
By the time he sent the head, his marks went insane.
Favreau loved the Butcher’s methods.D’une manière animale,he’d said.
In an animal way.
The Butcher looked almost bored as he cleaned his nails with the point of a blade. His eyes, when they sliced towards her, were flat. Empty. Twin grey stones plucked from the bed of a river that had drowned its share of screaming victims.
Shark eyes. Dead and cold and utterly without mercy.
“Comfortable?”
Isabel gave her most dazzling smile. The one that had charmed tidbits of information from tight-lipped marks and made Favreau’s face gleam with hunger.
“Exceedingly. I especially appreciate the ropes. You’re very good at knotwork.”
But not better than her.
She flexed her aching fingers behind her back, testing her bonds. She’d started to slip her wrist out millimetre by painful millimetre.
“I confess,” she continued, “I wouldn’t have thought playing watchdog was quite your style. Don’t you have some fingernails to pull out somewhere? Kneecaps to shatter? Is being a nursemaid truly the best use of your prodigious skills?”
She’d known men like him before. Had the scars to prove it, written on her body in a brutal cipher.
“Keeps my knife sharp,” he said. “Been a while since I had a live one to practise on. And you?” His stare raked over her, taking in her coat and men’s trousers. “Oh, I’ve heardyou’rea thing of beauty when you bleed.”
Isabel’s heart tripped over itself. Cold sweat prickled along her nape and the small of her back.
Cold hands, cold voice, cold blade on her skin, and she wants to scream, but her throat won’t make a sound—
She held back a flinch as the Butcher pushed off the wall. He stalked towards her, each thudding footfall echoing like a drumbeat.
Somewhere, in a distant corner of her mind walled away behind steel and ice, a younger version of her started to cry.
Weakness, Favreau would croon as he fucked her.It has no place in our line of work, ma petite. Even monsters have standards.
For an instant, she was back in his bed, his dagger tracing idle patterns over her skin. Leaving the ugly latticework of scars he’d loved to make.
Take it, ma petite. Let the hurt shape you. Better a weapon than a woman, non? Weapons don’t flinch when you use them.
Ruthlessly, she shoved the memory down deep. Isabel had learned long ago how to smile through her hurts and wear her scars like armour. All those inconvenient human things that had no room in this life she’d made.
She was a blade, and blades didn’t break.
“If you think,” she said, holding the Butcher’s dead gaze, “that Favreau will let you take liberties with his property before he’s done with it, you’re more of an idiot than you look. And that, quite frankly, strains the bounds of credulity.”
It was dangerous to play with a man like this. A fine line between restraint and provocation. Too little, and she’d never get what she needed from him. Too much, and, well . . . men like the Butcher seldom required more than the flimsiest excuse to indulge their baser instincts. She was not afraid of pain, had made an art of smiling through torments that would crush another woman.
But she did so hate wasting her time.
His face darkened, fingers tightening around his knife. “What makes you think he’s got any use for you now? You’re damaged goods. Maybe he’s planning to put you down. Cut his losses now that you’ve gone and grown a conscience.”
The cold certainty of it knifed between her ribs. Because there was truth in the Butcher’s words.
