“Well, perhaps I was not. Perhaps you can explain it to me, yes?” Stefan said. “I don’t fully grasp your job with the Vichy.”

Evangeline took a sip of champagne to buy herself a moment to think. She had a speech perfectly memorized for whenever a supervisor or colleague questioned her. She’d run through it a dozen times. But all that flew through her mind just then was a memory like a blade through her ribs: the look of betrayal on Simone’s face, that moonlit face, those dark eyes so full of pain.

You were right, she wanted to scream at that girl. I’m not cut out for this. I’ll never escape this cage.

She was trying. Dear God, she was trying. But it couldn’t do anyone much good if she got herself killed.

“I must approve requisitions to the Reich’s forces within the Occupied Zone.” She smiled sweetly, the way a schoolteacher might while explaining simple arithmetic. “We have our inputs, we have our outputs. So I must allocate where it all goes.”

“I understand that much.” Stefan waved his fork, irritated, and a fleck of juicy lamb’s blood splashed her dress. “I mean that they are asking for enough to feed our men and keep the electricity churning at the command posts, yet you are not requisitioning it for them.”

“Well, that is the funny thing about occupations. A system that kept one country running cannot instantly be made to accommodate two.”

The warning flashed in Stefan’s expression, his genial mask gone in an instant. But she couldn’t be cowed by him. If she backed down now, he’d know she was bluffing. It was better to keep up the indignant front, even if it meant a smack on the wrist, than retreat too easily and reveal it all for a sham.

“Well, I suppose you understand it better than I do,” he said at last. “I just want to make sure nothing is being sent awry, is all.”

Like entire warehouses full of rifles, dispersed to the Libération-Nord in the dead of night. Like half a shipment of grain bound for a German marshaling yard that wound up in the hungry village of Lyon. Like a careful inventory tracking how requisition requests moved across the Occupied Zone, the spikes indicating where German forces were building up and when, the sort of information that was so easily tapped out in Morse code and bounced off to London and even further.

It had been so easy. So easy to make the contacts she needed—so easy to misfile paperwork, lose correspondence, copy ledger pages. The hardest part had been convincing the Resistance network that she wasn’t a plant. Spying was the easy part. Not getting caught was still a work in progress.

“If I could produce supplies out of thin air,” Evangeline said calmly, “then I gladly would have done so by now.”