Simone rested a hand on his wrist. “Deep breaths, lover boy.”

Phillip’s face turned a dark plum, and Simone couldn’t help it—she smirked. He drew a ragged breath, then returned to the console. “Let me work on the frequency. You see if you can hail your contact.”

Simone worried at her lower lip with her teeth as she dialed into the shortwave frequency. “Carpenter hailing Magpie. Magpie, come in. Over.”

She imagined her voice bouncing across Europe, against the earth covered with German forces and the sky hedged in with clouds. Imagined it worming its way through the walls of Château à Pont Allemagne. Into the narrow cubby she’d built into Evangeline’s bedroom, where they used to cram inside together and tangle into a single soul. Did Evangeline keep her radio there? Was she sitting, even now, on that soft and devouring bed where Simone had left her heart?

But there was only a heavy silence, disrupted with static hiccups as two worlds crashed together.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

EVANGELINE

Though she was entering in handcuffs this time, there was something oddly comforting about 84 avenue Foch. She’d been here before. She’d walked out of it, once. But as calm as she felt as she was dragged past the secretary pool and the radio room toward the interrogation wing on the top floor, she very much doubted she’d be leaving again.

The guard shoved her into a chair in the small and grimy cell. It looked even smaller from this side of the metal grate. Hastily constructed within what must have been a lavish Beaux Arts penthouse to rival the Gaturins’ château, the cell was only dull plaster walls, already badly stained and battered from the treatment its temporary residents had endured. As the guard slipped her hands around the bars of the chair to secure her further, Evangeline found herself smiling.

“What’s so funny?” he asked with a scowl.

“Everything.”

He blinked, unsettled, and backed hurriedly out of the cell.

At least an hour must have passed since she’d last spoken to Simone. Wewelsburg would be expecting intruders if the sorry state Georges-Yves had been in the night before was anything to go by. Simone had seemed awfully confident about their chances of making it inside the castle, but Evangeline couldn’t share her optimism. Not that she was one to talk, with this mad scheme.

Just one more hour until Simone would be waiting for her to work the kind of magic that only a Gaturin could work. She had no idea how little that name would save Evangeline. The only thing she had to guide her now was the bald-faced, aggressive certainty that she’d learned from Simone.