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She didn’t know if he’d actually remember—but it didn’t matter. He’d woken up, he’d spoken, he’d drunk...he wasn’t going to die.

The rational part of her knew that one waking didn’t guarantee that. Didn’t mean infection wouldn’t overrun the antibiotics or that internal damage wouldn’t yet take him. But she knew. She knew he’d live, because he wasn’t ready to die yet.

The fear hadn’t retreated enough that she went to her own room that night for longer than it took to grab her pillow and a blanket. But she slept on the floor beside the bed and only woke up six times to check on him.

Disoriented was too meek a word for the way Christian’s senses swam, for the cacophony of sounds and fire and light and agony all trying to elbow their way into his awareness.

His back hurt—no, his whole torso, in a cocktail of pains that he hadn’t known got along so well.

Piercing and throbbing and aching and screeching.

But he bullied his eyes open, because last time he’d managed it, Corinne had been there. Blurry gold and cream in a vague shape, but her voice had pulled him toward consciousness, out of the darkness that weighed him down.

He listened now, but he couldn’t hear her. Couldn’t see her fuzzy outline or feel her beautiful fingers wrapped around his, squeezing life into him.

He heard laughter though, young and bright, and then a deeper echo. Felix and Josef, playing in the living room.

Only...no. Not Josef.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember what he wanted to forget, wanted to deny. Not Josef. He had an image of Josef burned into his eyes, but not him laughing with Felix. On the floor. On his back. Hands held up, his necklace in his fingers. Panic in his eyes.

His voice rattled in Christian’s ears, but not lifted in a silly song like the one coming from outside this room. Screaming. Screaming, Stay back, stay back, stay back!

Corinne had told him, whenever that was that she’d held his hand and kissed him so tenderly he’d known he must have been every bit as hurt as he felt.

She’d told him Josef had been arrested, sent only God and the Nazis knew where.

She’d told him that Ackermann had shot him.

Based on something Kraus’s cousin had shared in a letter about Christian’s behavior at the university.

She’d told him something else, too, about a man who would be watching Felix. A friend. An uncle.

She’d mentioned an uncle before. Georges, that was it. And when he tried to sit up and ended up grunting and collapsing back down again, the agony feasting on him so greedily everything went dark again for a moment, he knew he was about to meet him.

“Easy there, mon ami .” Strong, large hands steadied him, helped him settle. A masculine blur filled his vision when the darkness retreated again.

Christian blinked, squinted. It was one thing to see only the outline of Corinne, whose every feature he’d long ago memorized, whose mannerisms he knew so well. But if he was going to meet a stranger, he’d like to be able to see him. “Could you...glasses?” he managed between the waves of pain.

A moment later they were positioned on his nose. The earpieces didn’t settle quite right, but he’d worry with that later. Right now, he could at least see the man.

He wasn’t as old as he’d expected when Corinne called him uncle . Mid-forties, perhaps, with streaks of silver in his middling-brown hair, smile lines creasing his face, and a decided absence of a smile as he regarded him with brown eyes that pierced to his very soul.

On an ordinary day, he could imagine that look would have made him squirm. Just now, his soul felt stripped down to its essence, no secrets left to hide. He nodded his thanks for the help. “Georges, isn’t it?”

“Georges Piers. Most of the time.” It took a long few seconds for the words to register as the man sat in the dainty armchair Corinne had been in before. For Christian’s muddled mind to realize that he wasn’t speaking French, wasn’t speaking German, but that they were words he ought to know.

English. They were English.

“Other times,” the man continued in an accent that didn’t sound like the polished ones the BBC chaps used, “I’m George Pearce.”

Christian was too tired, too aching to frown. “You’re British.”

“I was stationed here in the Great War. Spent four long, arduous years serving and scouting and learning this land inside and out, top to bottom.” He shifted back into French. “I fell in love—with the country, but mostly with Minette. My wife, God rest her soul.”

Christian nodded. He didn’t know why this man was telling him his story—but he had a feeling it was important.

“Corinne—she was five when I met her. Most precocious, bravest, most trouble-seeking child I’d ever met, and that was saying something, because I grew up in a pack of street rats in London’s seediest neighborhood.

Do you know how she’d found the dying soldier who became her stepfather?

” Georges didn’t give him time to answer, just leaned forward.

“She was searching dead bodies for tins of food. Rations. Hardtack. Four years old at the time, and that mite was scavenging from corpses left in the battlefield by her village in Somme.”

Christian winced. Wondered briefly if this would turn into an accusation—it was Christian’s people who had killed those men, who had helped churn up that mud, who had fought against this man in that war. Not Christian , not even his father, but even so. His people, then. His people, now.

Enemies.

But Corinne had said they were friends. That he could be trusted. That he knew everything.

So he waited.

Georges sighed and eased back again. “I’d promised Minette, when we married, that I’d take her back to England with me.

Introduce her to my family, who by that point had all made something of themselves.

My one sister’s married to a novelist—another to a musician.

My brother, the one who gave me his last name because I didn’t know my own—he works for a division of the government that blokes like you aren’t supposed to know exists. ”

“Germans, you mean?”

Georges’s lips twitched. “That too. But mostly I mean ordinary people. People who just live their lives, as long as they’re able.”

Christian’s weary eyes shifted toward the door.

He would have lived his life, if they’d let him.

Raised his son. Taught his classes. He’d have been content to leave his mark on the world only in words and papers and lectures.

Perhaps a book, when he had the time to write one.

Thoughts—that was all he’d ever imagined he would offer. Just thoughts .

“But you know what I found, when we made it back to London?” His eyes didn’t leave Christian’s face.

“I wasn’t fit for it anymore. For society .

And Minette, she wasn’t a city girl. She missed her little French town, where everyone knew her name.

So we came back. And I thought, let me see this place, now that it’s healing.

Now that the war’s just a memory. And I went looking for the grave of a friend’s brother, thinking to give his family that closure, and instead I found Bastien.

Alive, newly married to Yvonne. I found Corinne, trying to steal a stick of gum from my pocket like I wasn’t a thief long before she was born.

I found a brother in him, and a sister for Minette in Yvonne, and a little girl who wrapped me around her finger in about ten seconds flat. ”

That part he could imagine easily enough, and he risked a small, aching smile that made his lips strain toward cracking.

“I will do anything for her,” he said, because that must be what Georges was getting at.

“Anything you tell me to do. I’ll leave as soon as I’m able, if that’s what you want.

I won’t put her in danger if I can help it. ”

Georges hooked an ankle over the opposite knee, the picture of ease. “Do you love my little girl, Christian Bauer?”

“More than life. More than anything but my son.”

He was going to make him promise to leave—he knew he was.

He was going to name all the reasons that this couldn’t work, all the risks Christian brought with him, all the pain he’d already caused.

He would say, as Christian had tried to when he last awoke, that he was putting Corinne’s life in danger by being here.

Instead, he nodded. “Then you have common sense to match your intellect—I’m never willing to assume as much. And I can put you to work, if you want to be useful once you’re well.”

Had he not learned his lesson just minutes ago, he would have tried to sit up. Because cryptic offers like that weren’t meant to be received lying down. “What sort of work do you do?”

The man’s grin was disarming. Boyish and full of a mischief that left no doubt as to why he and Corinne got along so well. “This and that. At the moment, I’m working mostly in words. That should appeal to you, shouldn’t it?”

“Words.” An Englishman, in France, with a brother in a division of the British government that people weren’t supposed to know about. Christian suddenly wished for more water.

Georges dropped his smile, his ankle, and the pretense of being nothing but a doting uncle. He leaned forward again, eyes burning now. “From what Corinne tells me, you hate the Nazis more than any of us. Is that true?”

Hate. It was the word he would have used, had someone asked him before. Before his soul had passed so close to the fires of death. Just now, he didn’t want to give that word safe harbor in his spirit.

But whatever word he chose, the idea would be the same. “I was against the Nazi Party before the rest of the world even realized they were a threat.”

“Your work here—you’ve been subverting them as much as you could. Correct?”

He half expected Ackermann to leap from the shadows, that gun in his hand again. “As much as I dared.” Paltry efforts, and they’d come to nothing. But he probably knew that already.

“Perhaps we can find a way for you to do more. I can connect you with others—with French, with English contacts. We could look into trading what you know of them for safe harbor in England, if you want to take Felix and Corinne there.”

Desert? He shifted, uncomfortable against the pillows. “Turncoats have never been respected by either side of a war. You surely know that, Georges. No one trusts a man who turns on his own country. Much as I despise the party in charge, they are not all of Germany.”

The older man granted it with a tilt of his head.

“True enough. And I’ll be honest—England could be the next place to come under Nazi rule.

Much as we’re fighting against it, they could overcome us.

They could win. In which case, England would be no safer than here.

Paris may, in fact, be the safest city in Europe just now. ”

Christian’s head sank in half a nod. It was true.

Paris might be under Nazi rule, but there were no bombs falling.

No attacks. The same couldn’t be said of England or any other free country left in Europe, and crossing the Atlantic was a bigger risk still.

Strange to think, but this captured territory was quite a safe haven.

Georges leaned closer. “If you want to stay here and work with the Resistance, I could try instead to get you new papers. Claiming you’re French—for now, for the duration.”

The Resistance? He said it like it was a.

..a thing . An organization. Something more than a phrase intoned by a defeated general trying to rally his countrymen to fight on in his absence.

“You don’t think that would be too big a risk?

I have not been unseen in Paris. My face will be recognized, by Nazis and Parisians alike. ”

Georges pursed his lips. “I know. You would have to remain hidden, for the most part. Only daring a few meetings now and then. Largely...you’d be in hiding. Here, or wherever else we could find for you. But you could still help. Somehow.”

It sounded less like an opportunity than a meager attempt at a handout. Hiding. A life where he could never show his face in daylight, in public. A life where his very existence here would mean danger for Felix, for Corinne, for Georges.

His eyes slid closed. He was so tired. In such agony. And he’d learned such a hard lesson already, struggling against the might of the Party: That those only fighting against something never won. It was only when you had something to fight for that you stood a chance.

He’d fought for Felix. He would fight for Corinne.

But abstract concepts like freedom, brotherhood, equality?

He saw their goodness. He wanted them. Wished he had energy enough, even without a bullet hole in his chest, to pursue them.

But those slippery concepts were so hard to keep hold of when your fingers were tired and your chest was aching and every breath burned.

When something concrete and living and breathing demanded your whole focus.

Georges’s expression softened. “Just things to think about—you don’t have to make any decisions now.

I just want you to know you’re not alone.

We’ll find the best way forward for all of you.

” He patted his knees and then stood. “You need rest. Corinne will have my head when she sees how I’ve exhausted you.

But I wanted you to know. We’re even now—all our secrets on the table.

Equals. Maybe, once you’re better, we can be friends. ”

He was friends with Gestapo and Nazis, with outcasts and exiles, with Jews and Aryans, with atheists and Christians. But he’d never been able to claim an English street rat as a friend. He mustered up all the smile he could. “I’ll hold you to it.”