It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the wood. She knew the clearing where Herr Muller worked and wound her way there at a half run, barely registering the brambles scraping her legs, tearing at her skirt.

Not until she was almost to the clearing did Benita realize the sound of the ax had stopped. She could hear voices. She paused and strained to listen over her own ragged breath. It was Herr Muller and another man. A Russian. And the exchange did not sound friendly.

She was too late! The thought struck her physically. It was impossible. She could not be. She would not allow it. She plowed forward into the clearing. At the center stood two men: Herr Muller and a Russian soldier with blunt, stubby features, wearing a bedraggled Red Army uniform. He spoke in a harsh, guttural voice.

“Herr Muller!” Benita called, and both men whirled to look at her.

“I came to tell you”—she panted—“to go back.”

Confusion spread over Herr Muller’s face.

The Russian grinned. “Shlyukha,” he swore. Whore.

This word Benita knew.

More Russian followed—words she did not understand, but she grasped their meaning from his leer. For a moment, the Russian seemed to forget about his fight with Herr Muller and moved toward her.

Staring at his ugly, smirking face, the acne pits half covered by a growth of stringy beard, Benita felt something inside her explode and this man, advancing on her now, became not just the prisoner who had reached Herr Muller before she could, but every other man who had ever called her a whore. Every man who had ever pummeled and beaten and clawed his way into her with stinking breath and rancid sweat and rage about things for which her body had no responsibility. Of course he had reached Herr Muller first! How could she have imagined herself powerful enough to intervene? She was nothing but a lump of flesh to be tossed between fighting dogs. She was half-dead already, torn up, chewed on, spat out. This was how he saw her. She could see it in his eyes.

But it was not true! She was a mother with a son, a woman who had escaped once already. She was the wife of a resister, a friend of Marianne von Lingenfels. She was no longer little Benita Gruber—a pretty, expendable peasant girl with no money, no father, and no power. She drew herself up and spat as hard as she could at the man’s feet.

The look on his face turned from amusement to irritation. He did not understand. He saw only her old self. With a torrent of fury sweeping through her veins, she reached into her pocket for the knife.

CHAPTER TWELVE

BERLIN, LATE APRIL 1945

Benita’s first time was not the worst. The soldier had been clean, relatively speaking, and had given her food—a roll, with jelly even—and beer. He had taken the satchel of belongings she carried and steered her into the courtyard of a bombed-out building in Neukölln. She had not even made it home from the prison hospital. He chuckled and grinned and rubbed her feet like a devoted husband. Never mind that the outcome of his advance was fixed. It didn’t matter if she acquiesced. He tried to win her over anyway, which, under the circumstances, seemed tantamount to romance. When he finally pressed her against the courtyard wall, he was disgusting but not cruel, only avid and self-absorbed.