Simone had never been to Lyon—she’d never been more than a few dozen kilometers outside of Paris, aside from a brief visit to a dying grandmother in Algiers now lost to the blur of childhood memories—but she wished she had been. Lyon was unafraid. Lyon killed Nazi occupiers in train stations, on the street, at outdoor cafés like they were pigeons just begging to be kicked. When the Nazis demanded Lyon cough up its resisters, Lyon refused, no matter how many the Nazis insisted on killing in their stead.

That was the kind of stubbornness Simone admired. The foolhardy, granite-carved stubbornness that yielded to nothing, despite all good sense to the contrary. The stubbornness of the stump in the field, the one that remained even after the offending tree had been cut down. It was that stubbornness that got Simone her first apprenticeship, and that got her stuck with the most detested woodworking gig in all of Paris. It was that stubbornness that drew in Evangeline, and that same stubbornness that sent her away.

Simone had to be hard, she had to be cold, because without that, she had nothing else. And if she died for it, well, at least she would die holding her convictions close. At least they would have to be pried from her hands, stiff, snapping away bone.

Georges-Yves saw some of this when he recruited her and gave her the tasks others were too afraid or unskilled to carry out. Her final test was at the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme, the glamorous maison where all the clever monsters like Hermann Göring lounged. When they weren’t at sparkling soirées, or torture sessions at the Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Foch, anyway. Georges-Yves had access to the hotel’s rooms, cabinets, corridors. He knew of gaps in the walls; he’d measured all the empty space the hotel’s architects left behind. In true partisan fashion, he would turn that proletarian excess into his means of resistance.

After Simone installed a listening nook tucked beneath the wardrobe for Göring’s many capes, she was brought deeper into the network: vetted, verified. Simone carried her secret in her back pocket, a bit of sandpaper to smooth out every irritation. The sight of SS strutting down the boulevard only reminded her of the secrets Georges-Yves’s people snatched from Göring every night. It made bearable the rumble in her belly while she waited in ration lines. Even Evangeline’s snide remarks had lost their sting, for Simone knew at least one of them was doing what they ought. It was intoxicating . . . and all she wanted was to do more.

Georges-Yves, as it turned out, had been counting on just that.