Evangeline stared around the darkening mansion, around her bedroom of silk and gold and brocade. Stefan’s men were almost certainly watching the house, waiting to see what her next move would be. He wanted her to rush straight to her radio set and try to warn the others in the network, implicating herself and them. He wanted to see her in action.

Well, Evangeline was well versed in the dangers of wanting too much.

She moved to the far corner of the upstairs sitting room and found the corner piece just beside the fireplace mantel. Simone’s work was so flawless that she doubted even the finest Nazi spy hunter could ever detect the faint dip and groove in the molding that Evangeline was now prying loose.

Deep in the bones of Château à Pont Allemagne, something clicked.

Evangeline rushed back to her bedroom and wrenched open the panel that had been unsealed. She pulled it all out—all of it. The cipher books, the transmissions she’d yet to make, the radio and Morse code communicator and signal booster and everything else, everything someone might possibly need to hang her for subversive acts against the occupying forces.

Evangeline’s hand brushed against the frame of the large panel, and she stared into it, into the space where once they’d huddled together, legs dangling out, arms intertwined, lips like bruises as they kissed and mouths like sacrament as they did more. And then she closed it. Perhaps for the last time.

She assembled her radio kit. Recalibrated her ciphers. Scratched out a few rough drafts of the million billion thoughts dancing around her head: the apologies, the pleas, the promises to do something meaningful. And then she sat down before her radio set and waited.

Waited.

It wasn’t too late. Not just yet. It wasn’t too late to pack it all away or smash the radio to bits or burn the cipher books. She was only listening in, the silence deafening now that Georges-Yves was gone. No matter how many Gestapo agents Stefan had set around the château, none could catch her if all she did was listen in. It was only when she began to transmit that her fate was sealed.

She crawled toward her bedroom window. Peered around the thick damask curtains, careful not to let them shift. Stefan’s men were surely listening for her to give herself away.

She dropped back down and gripped her face in her hands.

You will never understand what it’s like to be hungry, Simone had said. You will never know what it is to truly want. And without that need, then you will never have the courage to do what must be done. We fight because we have everything to gain. But you will never fight, because no matter how righteous your purpose, how just your cause—by fighting, you will only lose.