“Get up,” said the officer who had argued with Zwerger, and he kicked her just hard enough to propel her to her knees, and from there, somehow, she managed to get to her feet. He drew a knife from his belt, and she held her breath, waiting for him to strike, but he only cut the rope that had bound her wrists.

He grabbed her arm and dragged her from the room, along a hall, and outside. Into the night.

A truck was waiting, idling, and he pushed her forward until grasping hands pulled her into the truck. It was filled with other prisoners, nearly all of them men, and they stared at her, their jaws agape, their expressions a mix of horror and pity and disgust.

She looked down, wondering, and remembered that the bodice of her dress was soaked through with milk. She glanced lower still, to her skirt that was stained with blood. The blood that came after a baby was born.

They found a place for her, one act of kindness to lighten her pain, and the truck lurched forward. She sat, rubbing the life back into her arms, and tried to look outside. But the only light came from above, where a wide rent in the truck’s canvas top lay open to the starry dome of the night sky.

She and Nico had danced under such a sky. They’d sung of love and stardust and the promise of brightening dreams, and she’d been so stupidly certain their happiness would endure. Yet how could goodness endure, let alone flower, in a world that emboldened and embraced men such as Karl Zwerger? And how was she meant to survive when her Nico was no longer a part of it?

Chapter 26

12 October 1944

The stars faded as the night bled into dawn, and still the truck rumbled along, never stopping, relentlessly bearing her away from home and hope. Hour by hour, Nina’s thirst and hunger and grief carved steadily away at the last of her courage, and even the milk in her breasts, so painful in the hours after her arrest, soon shrank to a bittersweet memory.

Nico was dead. He was gone, lost to her forever, and though she tried to still her mind, to close her eyes to the memory of his body hanging from the gallows in that unspeakable place, she couldn’t stop herself from imagining his last moments.

When they’d placed the hood over his head and set the noose around his neck. When Zwerger’s pitiless words had rung in his ears. When Nico had known that death was seconds away, and he’d been frightened, alone, and tormented by fear for her and their baby.

It hurt to breathe, to think, to be. Grief roiled through her, and she was defenseless, drowning, desolate.