It was her father on the telephone. His voice was very husky, and she knew at once what he was calling to tell her.

“The soldiers who were rescued from Tehran. They came back by way of Israel. They saw…Julian didn’t come back with them.”

Petra knew perfectly well what had happened. And, more to the point, what Bean would have made sure people thought they had seen happen. But she let the scene play out, saying the lines expected of her. “They left him behind?”

“There was…nothing to bring back.” A sob. It was good to know that her father had come to love Bean. Or maybe he only wept in pity for his daughter, already widowed, and only barely a woman. “He was caught in the explosion of a building. The whole thing was vaporized. He could not have lived.”

“Thank you for telling me, Father.”

“I know it’s—what about the babies? Come home, Pet, we—”

“When I’m through with the war, Father, then I’ll come home and grieve for my husband and care for my babies. They’re in good hands right now. I love you. And Mother. I’ll be all right. Good-bye.”

She cut off the connection.

Several officers around her looked at her questioningly. What she had said about grieving for her husband. “This is top-secret information,” she said to the officers. “It would only encourage the enemies of the Free People. But my husband was…he entered a building in Tehran and it blew up. No one in that building could possibly have survived.”

They did not know her, these Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians. Not well enough to say more than a heartfelt but inadequate, “I’m sorry.”

“We have work to do,” she said, relieving them of the responsibility to care for her. They could not know that what she was showing was not iron self-control, but cold rage. To lose your husband in war, that was one thing. But to lose him because he refused to take you with him….

That was unfair. In the long run, she would have decided the same way. There was one baby unfound. And even if that baby was dead or had never existed—how did they know how many there were, except what Volescu told them?—the five normal babies shouldn’t have their lives so drastically deformed. It would be like making a healthy twin spend his life in a hospital bed just because his brother was in a coma.

I would have chosen the same if I’d had time.

There was no time. Bean’s life was too fragile already. She was losing him.

And she had known right from the start that one way or another, she would lose him. When he begged her not to marry him, when he insisted he wanted no babies, it was to avoid having her feel as she felt now.

Knowing it was her own fault, her own free choice, all for the best—it didn’t ease the pain one bit. If anything, it made it worse.