Page 86 of Beehive

The thought of him snapped me fully awake.

My attention snapped to the figure lying on a makeshift cot. I’d assembled it from a door I’d found torn off its hinges and a moth-eaten blanket. He looked so pale, his skin chalky. His hair was stuck to his forehead, damp with sweat. His breathing was shallow.

My mind raced, replaying every gunshot, every step, every bend and turn of the road. I stared into Visla’s eyes, our guide—our handler. Her betrayal bit with the sharpness of fangs.

Who were we supposed to trust?

I needed to focus on what I could fix.

Thomas was alive.

He’d taken a bullet in the shoulder, but his wound didn’t appear life-threatening. Blood loss and infection could change that and had to be addressed. I’d bandaged him as best I could, using strips of my shirt and a rag I’d boiled in water using a kettle I found. Finding a safe place to hide had seemed impossible, but I’d done it. We sheltered in an apartment building at the edge of a half-collapsed street. The outer doors were wrenched from their frames by some blast last year, or the year before. Berlin’s timeline of destruction felt endless.

Despite the climb that was more difficult with Thomas’s dead weight, I picked a room on the top floor that still had four walls and one window. It wasn’t ideal—nothing here was—but at least it wasn’t compromised, not so far as I could tell.

We only had the supplies we carried.

No proper medical kit. Just a handful of pain pills and some antiseptic I’d found in the safe house. The label on the antiseptic was torn away, but it smelled sharp and clean, so I used it to rinse his wound.

Thomas hadn’t stirred, just moaned softly, his head rolling to one side, his body feverish.

“Come on, Thomas,” I whispered, sitting beside him and stroking his head. “You need to wake up.”

I’d said it a hundred times since we hunkered down.

Maybe he heard me in his dreams. Maybe he didn’t.

Either way, Ineededto speak the words.

Taking his hand in mine, I felt the roughness of his knuckles, the warmth of his skin. The touch was a tether to him, tous. We’d been through so much. First the war itself, now this messy aftermath, playing spy games in a city of ruin. I pressed his palm to my cheek, closing my eyes for a moment, ignoring the sting in them.

I couldn’t afford tears.

I needed to stay clearheaded.

For him.

Without him, I was a man adrift.

That admission gnawed at me.

Without him, I’d have no one to talk to, no partner to watch my back, no friend to share my burdens. The statue we’d risked our lives for lay wrapped in a bit of cloth in the corner, its secret canister tucked into my jacket pocket.

Without Thomas, none of that mattered.

I could run to the Americans, hand them the canister and the statue, but who would I share that victory with? A faceless spook in a back room who’d give a curt nod before sending me on the next mission?

No.

Thomas waseverythingthat made this fight worth surviving.

I checked his bandage again.

I had no idea if the bullet was still inside him. That was the sickening truth. I’d probed gently last night—lighting a bit of newspaper and an old candle stub, just enough light to see into the wound. I couldn’t find the slug. Maybe it had passed clean through. The entry wound was ragged, and there was a place on the back of his shoulder that looked like an exit hole, but I wasn’t sure. I cleaned and bound both sides. That was all I could do.

If infection set in . . .

I forced that thought away.