Still. Even soldiers had passions beyond the battlefield. So she nudged the door shut and leaned into him, stretching up on her toes and capturing his lips with hers.

He moved slowly, stiffly, but she knew it was only his injuries. He slid one arm gingerly around her waist, but the hand he pressed to her cheek was as urgent as ever. “Nadezhda,” he murmured against her lips.

She sighed, closed her eyes, and only now, when they’d been proven false, let the fears gnaw at her. She’d thought he was dead. Feared it. Dreaded it. “I have bad news.” It wasn’t her fault, but still she kept her eyes closed to keep from seeing the frustration that would enter his eyes. Her bag slipped from her shoulder, and she let it fall to the floor. It made it easier to grip his shirtfront in her fingers. “He is dead. Our Prussian.”

With her eyes closed, she could feel the hitch in his breath, hear it. “How?”

“The war, so far as I could gather. I claimed to be his sister, traveling to escape the unrest at home. They showed me his body. Bayonet through the chest.”

“Then there is no option,” Evgeni said. “We must find my bag. I have not yet been able to make it back to the site of the wreck.”

“Clearly.” She opened her eyes again so that she could visually trace each scrape, each bruise, each shadow visible. “How you survived so long on the front lines with barely a scratch and then managed to nearly die twice in France when you’re out of uniform, I will never understand.”

He breathed a laugh that was only an echo of his usual good humor. “I am a man above men.”

He was. And yet when he said it, he was joking. She shook her head and touched a finger to a cut on his cheek that had mostly healed over. It must have been from the train accident, rather than the shelling. “We will find your bag. And we must also find your brother.”

His expression shifted, shuttered. He pulled away. Didn’t let go of her completely, but angled himself toward the table, where she could see a white rectangle with Zhenya scrawled across it. “That is going to prove a challenge too. He’s gone to London.” His voice said it was bad, even before his words did.

She braced herself. But even so, it didn’t prepare her for the blow.

“He’s working for the British Admiralty.”

WEDNESDAY, 10 APRIL 1918