A smile tugged up the corners of his lips. Heinrich would have enjoyed this ghost story. A tale of hauntings and recompense and evening the score. It wasn’t his brother’s usual type of yarn, but still he would appreciate it. Not every tale was one of glory. Of heroics.

What did playing the part of a hero ever really get one, anyway? Death, that’s what. An enemy’s bullet. A pathetic medal sent home to one’s wife.

Das Gespenst. He closed his eyes and drew the name close. Let every other name—and he’d had no fewer than half a dozen—fade away. He’d be no one. Everyone. Faceless. Nameless.

Heinrich had a name, and it would be carved for eternity in a slab of granite in the cemetery. Their mother and Ilse would take flowers every Sunday until they too were just a few letters carved on other slabs.

All that nobility, all those stories of glory and feats of honor and bravery, forgotten.

Margot De Wilde had a streak of the heroic in her, too, trying to provide as she was for the crippled man. She, too, would learn that it was a weakness. And he would be the one to teach her. He’d use it, as surely as he used Go.

Das Gespenst opened his eyes again and stared into the world that lost its color a little more with every minute. Daylight fading, night oozing in, stripping it of green and pink and orange and leaving muted grey behind. She wouldn’t understand, she with that noble streak. Just as Heinrich had never understood.

It couldn’t be about nobility. Or honor. Or bravery. It could only be about the game.

16

Drake counted it a victory when, on Thursday, he managed to get himself out of bed before his sister left for work in the morning. It still hurt like the dickens if he made too abrupt a movement, but he’d not touched the pain medication in two days—not because the doctor hadn’t given him a stern look and told him to keep taking it, but because he couldn’t get a bit of the work done that the admiral had been sending home with Dot when he did. The stuff muddied his mind.

He could handle this amount of pain, though. He tired easily, yes, but that would only get better by pushing himself a little more each day. Today, that meant shuffling out of his bedroom while the scents of tea and porridge were still fresh.