CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

EVANGELINE

Though she was entering in handcuffs this time, there was something oddly comforting about 84 avenue Foch. She’d been here before. She’d walked out of it, once. But as calm as she felt as she was dragged past the secretary pool and the radio room toward the interrogation wing on the top floor, she very much doubted she’d be leaving again.

The guard shoved her into a chair in the small and grimy cell. It looked even smaller from this side of the metal grate. Hastily constructed within what must have been a lavish Beaux Arts penthouse to rival the Gaturins’ château, the cell was only dull plaster walls, already badly stained and battered from the treatment its temporary residents had endured. As the guard slipped her hands around the bars of the chair to secure her further, Evangeline found herself smiling.

“What’s so funny?” he asked with a scowl.

“Everything.”

He blinked, unsettled, and backed hurriedly out of the cell.

At least an hour must have passed since she’d last spoken to Simone. Wewelsburg would be expecting intruders if the sorry state Georges-Yves had been in the night before was anything to go by. Simone had seemed awfully confident about their chances of making it inside the castle, but Evangeline couldn’t share her optimism. Not that she was one to talk, with this mad scheme.

Just one more hour until Simone would be waiting for her to work the kind of magic that only a Gaturin could work. She had no idea how little that name would save Evangeline. The only thing she had to guide her now was the bald-faced, aggressive certainty that she’d learned from Simone.

Three minutes passed. Eight. How long were they going to make her sweat? Hours? Surely even Stefan didn’t have the patience for that. No, surely he’d be coming any minute to gloat and berate and torment, and God only knew what other tortures he had in store—

The cell door swung open, and he entered. Alone.

Evangeline’s wrists tensed within their shackles.

“Hello, Magpie.” He cricked his neck from side to side, took his time tugging on those leather gloves she hated so. They squeaked across his skin, too oiled, too broken in. “It is Magpie, yes? All these silly code names you cowards make up, to play at waging war.”

“Yes, we’re not nearly sophisticated enough for terms like Einsatzgruppen and the Torturer of Troyes.”

All the kid leather in the world couldn’t soften the crack of his knuckles against her jaw. Her head spun from the force of the blow, neck radiating with stabbing pain. Slowly, she twisted back to face him head-on and raised her chin, despite the blood she felt welling on her lower lip.

“Such a mouth on you,” he said. “I almost forget how delicate you are. With little bird’s bones.”

She tucked one thumb into her palm. He was right about that.

“Ordinarily I’d let you stew in your own failure for a few days. Let you soil yourself, get hungry and thirsty and delirious. Desperate. I do so wish I could hear what kind of bargaining and pleading and begging you’d do in such a state.” One finger ran down the side of her face, and she felt acid in her throat. “But I’m afraid you have us at a disadvantage, Magpie. Wewelsburg Castle is under assault, and you, it seems, were in touch with its attackers. They aren’t responding to our radio calls. So I fear we must rush this.”

Evangeline did her best not to sigh with relief. Probably half an hour until she was supposed to check in with Simone. Simone, who might at this very minute be waiting desperately for her to answer, to fend off countless guards—

“Understand, though, that urgency cuts both ways, little girl. If you don’t give us what we need, in the time we need it, then—” His eyes slitted. “You’ll be the one who’s out of time.”

“Tempting,” Evangeline said. “But . . . I think I like my way better.”

Another crack, this time on the other side of her jaw. It was so loud, so sharp, that it disguised the softer pop of cartilage elsewhere; it certainly lent authenticity to the agonized expression on her face.

“And what,” Stefan said, “is your way?”

“I thought it was past time you took me dancing,” Evangeline said.

He cocked his head, his confusion suddenly quaint, harmless somehow, like a pigeon strutting around the Tuileries. That moment of confusion was all she needed as she slipped one hand, dislocated thumb and all, free of its cuff. Then she was flying forward, good hand grasping for his waistband. Her fingers reached for the handle of his gun—

He knocked her away effortlessly, smashing her into the plaster wall. The wall rattled as she struck it—just as she’d hoped. So flimsy. They’d built their jail in a hurry, rushing about for efficiency’s sake. Simone would be appalled.

Stefan pulled his sidearm free and leveled it right at her. Cocked the firing mechanism. “I’ll give you one last chance to reconsider.”

A trickle of sweat ran down Evangeline’s back as she stared into that cavernous barrel, looming so large in her view. “My mind’s already made up.”

“A pity,” Stefan said, and pulled the trigger.

The makeshift cell echoed with a dull click.

Stefan reared back, shocked. Evangeline’s breath rushed out of her. It had been quite the risky bet that he wouldn’t think to check his gun’s ammunition between their car ride to the château, when she’d swiped the magazine, and now. But that wasn’t all the Magpie had taken. Now she withdrew the letter opener from its hiding place beneath the underwire of her bra and threw herself on Stefan. The closest she’d ever been to him. Certainly the only time she’d wanted to be.

He grappled with her, trying ineffectively to dig his nails into her face through his leather gloves. “You fucking harlot, I will destroy you!” He slammed his forehead against hers, sparking stars behind her eyes. “I will—”

But he never finished—the letter opener ground into his trachea. Enraged thrashing, crunching cartilage, and then—he was still.

A horrified sob rattled out of Evangeline’s throat as Stefan collapsed beneath her, and she scrambled off him, limbs shaking furiously. Too close, far too close. Was this the game she was always destined to play to do the right thing? Victory by fractions? If they were even lucky enough to defeat evil at all.

She snapped her left thumb back into place, redoubling the agonizing pain, but it was useless. She must have torn something. She dug around in Stefan’s pockets, recoiling from the sharp metal stink of his blood, until she found his torturer’s tool kit. Unfurled it. Ripped free knives and kept digging, until finally she found what she sought.

The cyanide vials he’d used to torment Georges-Yves. Individually, only enough to threaten death, not bring it about . . . but here she had access to all of them. And the intimate knowledge of Beaux Arts architecture that only a carpenter’s girlfriend possessed.

The interrogation cell walls were always meant to be temporary; the prisoners were never actually meant to touch them, for they’d always be cuffed. That made the plaster so easy to punch through when she hacked at it with a dead Nazi’s knife for a minute or so. But she was running behind schedule; Simone was already waiting. If she’d survived. Evangeline choked back a cry—if she was still alive.

She crawled out of the back of the cell wall she’d torn through, armed with a knife, a broken thumb, and inordinate quantities of cyanide pellets. These she held loose in her good hand, a layer of fabric between her skin and the pellets; too much body heat, and perspiration could cause them to start evaporating, and then she was sure to have some serious regrets. She was within the penthouse ballroom now. To her left, she saw the backs of the cheap plaster cell walls, and to the right, the beautiful crown molding, marble colonnades, and expansive views of the Bois de Boulogne at the end of the boulevard, the park’s leaves bright with violent reds and golds. There had to be something—

And she spotted it: a box hung from the wall. An air raid kit. Complete with a gas mask.

Evangeline strapped the gas mask on, then kicked at the thin metal grating that concealed a ventilation shaft. The wide shaft, necessary to ventilate such a stuffy plaster and stone monstrosity as 84 avenue Foch, was perfect for her purposes. She braced herself with her legs, not trusting her hands to the painstaking process. Down one floor. Two. This should be the radio room. She peered through the vents.

“Carpenter hailing Magpie,” a voice pleaded over the static. “Magpie, come in!”

“Listen,” one of the operators said, rolling their desk chair toward a new outpost. “It’s from the Wewelsburg outpost.”

“But who is it?”

A fist squeezed around Evangeline’s heart. God, she hadn’t been ready to hear her voice, both gruff and unyielding, and small and desperate. But that—that made it all worth it.

She slid the cyanide pellets from her hand and pushed them through the ventilation grate, then pulled the lever to tug the grate shut.

By the time she’d recited most of a Rilke poem in her head, Evangeline heard the gasping, flailing sounds of men suffocating to death, their own body heat and respiration hastening the poison’s conversion to gas. She had to wait another minute before she dared open the grate, despite the satisfying thumps the Gestapo radio operators’ bodies made as they struck the tile floors. Bless the Germans for shoving their radio misinformation team into a veritable closet. Bless them doubly for outfitting that closet with an obscene number of locking mechanisms designed to protect its inhabitants from attacks from the outside.

Gas mask still in place, she kicked a wheezing, bloody-eyed Nazi away from the desk and snatched up the transmitter. “This is Magpie,” she shouted in French through the muffled snout. “MAGPIE IS LISTENING, COPY, PLEASE!”

A silence far too lengthy, far too heavy with uneven static. One of the dying Gestapo officers reached out for her ankle, but she stomped on his hand as hard as she could. Blood spurted from his mouth; he didn’t move again.

The radio crackled with a fresh transmission. “Magpie, I read you.” Simone sounded like she was in tears. “Over.”

Evangeline clutched the transmitter to her chest like it was a precious gem. “I need you to use a new encryption scheme. Use—” Her heart thudded. “Use the street number of the last place we went. Over and out.”

Le Monocle. A heavy gamble. But it had to work—the Gestapo was still listening, somewhere. She spun the number dial to shift her own encryption frequency to match Le Monocle’s street address.

“Are you here?” Evangeline asked, tossing all protocol aside.

“Reading you. It’s a bit muffled. Do I even want to know—”

“No.” She laughed, manic. “My God, no. You’re . . . you’re alive—”

“You’re on our side,” Simone countered.

In the background, a man spoke in English. “This is great and all, but we really need—”

“Right.” Simone shifted to English as well. “Magpie, we’re inside Wewelsburg. It’s a war zone right now. German forces and—and something I can’t even explain. But we’ve been compromised. We need a way out of Wewelsburg. We need the entire Wehrmacht off our ass—”

“I’m afraid your network’s been blown,” Evangeline said. “Georges-Yves—he gave them everything, the encryption scheme, all of it.”

There was no missing Simone’s Arabic swearing.

“But right now I have something even better available to me,” Evangeline said. “If you can trust me, all right?”

“Yes,” Simone said in a rush. “Please, yes.”

“All right. Don’t go anywhere. Keep the line open. I’ll update you as soon as I can. Be safe until then,” Evangeline said.

“Je t’aime,” Simone muttered. Or something that sounded like it. Evangeline’s heart skipped a beat.

“W-what did you say?” Evangeline asked.

“I said you’re stubborn and resourceful and goddamned mad, and I couldn’t be more grateful,” Simone said. “Now hurry the fuck up.”

Evangeline did.