For the second time in a month, Felix Wolfe woke up with a headache. Not the dull kind sometimes acquired by sleeping too long, but the splitting type that afflicted people after their twin sister pistol-whipped them upside the head. One Felix was becoming far too well acquainted with.
He found himself staring at box springs—the underside of a bed. Rolling over was a difficult task, since Adele had bound his wrists behind his back with twisted bedsheets. She’d done the same with his legs, clearly trying to prevent him from wriggling free and ruining her evening.
Felix’s feet thrashed the bed frame as he turned onto his side. Something silver dropped to the floor—Martin’s pocket watch—lying open, cracked face showing. Beyond it, the Imperial Palace guest quarters were bathed in the light of the flickering television screen, empty. His sister was gone. Off to the Victor’s Ball to complete her mission for the resistance: assassinate the most powerful man in the world.
Adele had always been a rule-pusher: pinching sugar from the Wolfe family’s rations, reading issues of Motor Schau with a flashlight hours after lights-out, entering male-only motorcycle races under Felix’s name. Growing up, Felix had kept a multitude of his sister’s secrets, both big and small. They were—after all—a team. It didn’t matter that they weren’t identical: male versus female, homebody versus wanderer. They were Wolfes. There was iron in their blood, and it bound them together.
But this time his sister had wandered too far. This time the secret was too vast. One could not murder the Führer of the Third Reich and walk away from it. If Adele went through with her plan, she and the entire Wolfe family would pay the price.
It was ten past six, according to the spindly hands of Martin’s pocket watch. The Victor’s Ball had only just started. There was still time for Felix to stop this madness.
Guttural half curses pressed against Felix’s gag as he rolled his body another ninety degrees, flailing his bound hands at the metal mattress springs above. There were nearly a dozen sharp points. Something had to catch.…
It didn’t. The mattress springs’ hooked ends were small, demanding precision, which Felix—nose-first on the floor, with skull-splitting pain—did not possess. He kept trying, thrashing his numb wrists at the bed’s underside again and again.
His dead brother’s watch kept ticking. It was five past eight when Felix managed to slip the cotton over the pointed loop of the mattress spring. It was ten past eight when the first bit of bedsheet began fraying. At twelve past, the tie broke. Felix’s arms flopped to his side, wrists braceleted in deep purple.
First order of business? Getting rid of this stupid gag. Felix’s tongue was a vast, cracked wasteland. It felt too big for his mouth as he dragged himself out from under the bed.
Black, white, gray images of the Victor’s Ball cast their spell through the darkened room. There on the screen was his sister, her teeth bared in a smile as she accepted the Führer’s invitation to dance.
Their bodies started to whirl to some tempo Felix couldn’t hear (the television’s volume knob had been twisted into silence). He kept an eye on the screen as he sat up and started unknotting the three separate bindings on his legs.
Felix used to think he could read his twin’s thoughts—her emotions hummed in his, and he often knew the words she’d say before they were spoken. But if their bond was so strong, then why hadn’t he known until just over a week ago that Adele felt the world was wrong? That—at the risk of everything they held dear—she’d joined the resistance to right it?
Don’t do it, Ad. Don’t. Please don’t. Felix hoped there was still some semblance of a connection between them. That these pleas weren’t just beating useless against the glass screen.
Adele went rigid in Hitler’s arms. Her mouth was moving, her features wrenched with an expression Felix had never seen before: a loathing so vast and deep it poisoned all facets of her face.
He’d witnessed his sister’s anger—felt it buzz through his own veins—many times over. In the third year of primary school, when the Schuler boy tried to kiss her, Adele punched him in the stomach so hard he decorated the school yard with his lunch. After Martin’s motorcycle accident, when their parents forbade the twins to race, Adele’s face flushed redder than a Reich flag.
But this… this emotion was something else. A fury Felix could not understand, much less feel. It wasn’t just in Adele’s face. It raged through her whole being: Her arm, as it ducked into her obi. Her hand, as it drew out a pistol and pointed it at the Führer’s chest. Her finger, as it squeezed the trigger.
Martin’s pocket watch kept counting the seconds, its gears grinding through the room’s stillness. Tick, tick, tick as the Führer collapsed to the floor. Tick, tick, tick as blood spread across Hitler’s chest, oozing through the fabric and onto the television’s pixels.
The screen cut to static.
Felix’s fingers fell away from the knotted sheet on his knees. He retrieved Martin’s pocket watch and snapped its warped casing shut without checking the hour. It didn’t matter what time it was because he was too late.
There was nothing to stop.
The ballroom was a whole copper-roofed building away from Adele’s quarters, but Felix could still hear gunshots as he slipped the watch into the breast pocket of his Hitler Youth uniform. Screams followed, punctuated by more bullets.
Felix tried not to think what each of them meant. He tried not to imagine his twin sister’s body crumpled next to Hitler’s, blood blending purple into her kimono. He tried not to imagine her gravestone next to Martin’s.
What was he thinking? Adele wouldn’t be given a gravestone. Not after what she’d just done. None of the Wolfes would. From this moment forward, the Wolfe family’s fate was this: to be wiped off the face of the earth. All records that they ever existed would be burned by the SS. Forgotten forever and ever. Amen.
And there was nothing, nothing, Felix could do to save them.
He couldn’t stay here. This room would be the first place the SS searched. If they found him…
Felix scratched at his leg bindings, but the harder he tried to undo the knot, the more it seemed to grow—double, triple, tenfold. He edged his way back to the mattress springs, looped the first twisted sheet over the metal, and began to saw.
One strip down.
The gunshots were gone. The screen was still a mess of electronic noise.
Two strips down.
Were those footsteps he heard or the thud of his own heart?
The third strip had just fallen from Felix’s legs when the door slid open.
Footsteps, then. A trio of men stood in the doorway. All three wore the sharp black dress uniforms of the SS. All three had their Luger barrels pointed at Felix’s face.
Felix lifted his hands above his head. He felt his own emotions well enough: Fear, piss-warm against his crotch. Shock, shaking under his fingernails.
The leader of the group frowned. His gray eyes raked through the room, trying to make sense of the shredded bedsheets, the fuzzing television, the boy in the middle of it all.
“Secure him!” he barked to the soldier on his left, then turned to the other. “Search the room.”
The first man hauled Felix to his feet, binding his arms once more behind his back. The second—a beefy, yellow-haired soldier with a bulbous nose—kept his Luger out as he checked the quarters’ more obvious hidey-holes: beneath the bed, behind the curtain.
They’re still looking for Adele. Relief… Felix should not have felt it rushing down his throat, cutting new paths through his heart. But the emotion was there, reassuring him that somehow—in the midst of all those gunshots and screams—his sister had escaped.
“She’s not here, Standartenführer Baasch,” the second soldier announced from the washroom once he finished scouring it.
Baasch didn’t look particularly surprised or displeased at the news. He pulled a spotless white kerchief from his pocket and coughed into it. A single, dry wheeze.
“No,” he said once his throat was clear. “She wouldn’t be. You saw how she moved through that window. She’s had training.”
Bulbous Nose stepped back into the bedroom, itemizing everything he saw. “Clothes, a phone, makeup brushes… It doesn’t look like she left anything of use behind.”
“Oh.” Baasch turned. The screen’s light caught the silver Totenkopf on the officer’s hat: cracked skull, crossed bones, leering grin. The eyes beneath the cap were the same mixture of dead and shining as they settled on Felix. “I wouldn’t be too certain about that.”