By the time they left 84 avenue Foch, the first rays of sun had already stained Paris’s eastern flank. It all looked so wrong, given the night she’d had. Twilight Paris was seductive: glamorous and mature. But predawn Paris should look more innocent; its hands should not ache from being too long clenched in fists; its teeth should not throb from a tense jaw. Its eyes should not be dried out and swollen from exhaustion, terror, tears.

If Stefan saw anything wrong with the morning, though, he was careful not to show it. He was still onstage—for how could any of this not have been part of a careful performance, one he’d possibly been scripting since the day they met? If the act was wearing him out, if the hours of Georges-Yves’s screams had taken any toll on him, he gave no hint. He whistled as he opened Evangeline’s door for her, then slid in behind the chauffeur.

More than anything, she was shocked he was letting her leave Gestapo headquarters at all.

“I apologize for the long evening,” he said, as the car nosed its way toward the Champs-Élysées. The Arc de Triomphe seemed like a cruel mockery as it loomed into view. “But given your position, I am sure you recognize how terribly important it was. That interrogation simply could not wait.”

He folded his overcoat between them on the bench. Her gaze swept over it, the pockets, the lining, all the little creases and folds she’d carefully memorized. Her father once called her a thieving magpie, an insult she took to heart. Now, the Magpie’s fingers twitched.

“I see the point,” Evangeline answered carefully. “However, I’m not sure it has much to do with my office.” Through the blear of exhaustion, she managed to chain together an alibi. “We only deal with requisitions, after all. Not counterintelligence.”

“Ahh, but that is where you are wrong. Counterintelligence is the duty of all subjects of the Third Reich.” Stefan folded his hands neatly over one knee as he leaned toward her. “Those requisitions your office manages—why, it is just that kind of critical intelligence that someone has been leaking across the airwaves that poor imbecile’s network established.”

The hours of fear and visceral horror as she watched Stefan conduct his interrogation had wrung her out, leaving a frayed, filthy dishrag of a girl behind. She scrabbled for purchase in some kind of lie, some kind of subterfuge, but only came up with broken nails.

“That’s why you came to my office in the first place,” she said slowly. “You were hunting a mole.”

He smiled, far too pleased with himself. “That’s right.”