She shifted against the beam he’d tied her to. “I don’t suppose I could stand for a while.”

Das Gespenst forced his lips to curve into a smile. “Of course. Allow me to assist you.” He moved to do so from behind, giving her feet a wide berth. So far as he could tell, she hadn’t been trained in how to take a man down even when bound . . . but then, he hadn’t thought Margot De Wilde had been trained in how to disarm one. A mistake that had left him limping.

Safely out of kicking range, he gripped her arms and helped her stand. “There we are. Better?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

He had to give her credit. Though she’d been a wreck when she’d first come flying out of the Old Admiralty Building—crying, shaking, heaving—she’d actually been rather calm since she awoke from the first dousing of chloroform. It seemed she was stronger under duress than she was under the anxiety of duress.

He moved back around to her front and took a seat on the rickety chair he’d found. “You remind me of my brother’s wife.” Ilse, too, had always shown the greatest distress over the thought of something evil befalling her family.

And yet when her little one died of fever last year, she had stood strong. When news of Heinrich’s death had reached her, he had no doubt she had done the same. Lifted her chin. Straightened her spine.

His fingers dug into his leg. She shouldn’t have had to. She shouldn’t have been stripped of her husband, when their second child was still a few months from being born. She shouldn’t have had to walk to that grave marker with his mother and see Heinrich’s name etched upon it, even though Heinrich’s body wasn’t buried beneath the grass.

He was sorry for that too. But there had been no way to get his brother’s corpse home. He had wasted an entire day trying to determine how to do so, but the High Command had been unsympathetic.

Heinrich had died a spy’s death. He had received a spy’s burial, secret and alone. But he would be sung as a hero in every story they told of him at home. Das Gespenst had at least made certain of that. Made certain they knew how honorably he had served Germany. His eyes slid shut. They never should have accepted these positions in intelligence. It had seemed a boon at the time, a lark, a . . . a game. “Think of the stories we will have to tell,” Heinrich had said.

But they’d never tell these stories. Even if his brother had lived, they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. They’d lived these last few years like he’d died—secret and alone.

Dorothea Elton stretched against the beam, rolling her head from side to side. “Where are you from?”