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The beating of a heart sounds nothing like a drum.
That this should occur to her right now, as she’s losing her vision and tearing at her own throat with her fingernails, strikes her suffocating, delirious brain as funny. Delphine would giggle into hysterics if David wasn't sawing a garrotte against her windpipe. Her open eyes lose the light, numb fingers scrabble on the bed, then her whole hand tingles when she finds what she needs.
Not the gun.
What sort of spy would she be if she only had a single knife?
He’s too preoccupied with her throat to stop her desperate backwards stab. She has no aim, is lucky that she only cuts herself slightly. The sudden scrape-stop of the blade against bone is a lighthouse in the rapidly approaching fog of death.
In training, she would have tried to be graceful. At the edge of her own demise, she smashes her knee into the side of the bed and uses those dance-honed thighs to power them both back and away. There is a second of slack on her throat, just enough for a frantic gasp, but it’s enough. David has to choose between her death and his blood.
He chooses wrong.
Her rapid, arrhythmic pulse thunders in her ears as he wrenches at the cord again. The air is gone. The light is gone. But the knife.
The knife remains.
She feels it scrape and catch, lunges back and falls and drags and he SCREAMS. It is no taunt, no victory cry. His left hand falters and she twists like a weasel, gnashing her teeth around whooping gasps of air. When there is slack again, she lurches for the bed, falls over and off it, hears him tumble after her.
She kicks, as hard as she can, as high as she can. The ball of her foot connects with something that is stiff, then soft, and the sound that follows is nothing human. It is his turn to gasp and scratch and wail, but she doesn’t want him to die as much as she wants to live. She listens to him flop back and forth on her silly crocheted blanket, only risking a look when she’s got her back to the wall.
He is in agony, thrashing on her bed, grabbing at his own throat. Something is wrong there, a black bruise puffing the side of his neck. His breathing is tortured. His legs kick and flail.
Delphine dimly thinks she should call someone. She has no handler anymore, no other intelligence allies to reach out to. None that wouldn’t take a very dim view of a dying MI6 agent in her apartment. They were all better friends with him than her. The only one who might not throw her to the wolves of Berlin is Lorraine, and Lorraine is-
David falls off of the bed, propelling himself with his feet and one desperate hand towards her. Delphine stumbles, her head throbbing. She will have to finish this herself. His clawing hand catches on her ankle and she pulls a book of poetry down on his head. She cascades the entire shelf after it, then wrenches at the wood.
There is a crash, a snap-pop, and the hand around her ankle goes limp.
Delphine raises her eyes, breathing in harsh pants. The adrenaline in her muscles shakes through her, chatters her teeth. On the other side of a curl of cordite smoke, Lorraine looks like she fought her way up from hell itself. Listening, watching through the blue haze, she meets Delphine’s eyes. Lorraine’s lashes lower. Something along her edges softens.
“That’s going to get you killed one day,” Delphine rasps.
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Lorraine’s lip curls, a snarl instead of a smile, as she lies and lies and lies again. She sells them the death that trailed her through Berlin as though she was not the one sowing it, gives them her hate and her spit and her bile, until they’d rather stick with believing the big things than bother stirring the ashes to find one silly little French girl who wanted to be a poet and a rock star but became a spy instead. Delphine’s death can remain with them, one more black mark in a sea of ink and blood.
On a flight from Paris to New York, the life of Mirielle Cormier has only just begun.