“What exactly did you bargain, Elise?” Harry asked, standing over her. “What the hell did you bargain?”
“Myself,” Elise said. “I bargained myself, to the resistance, to fight for France.”
“Christ,” Harry swore, starting to pace again, his hand angrily tugging through his hair. “I thought ...” His voice trailed off, and Cate wondered what he had intended to say.
As Elise stood, Cate couldn’t believe how stoic she was being. “Elise, we can wait longer. The original plan was that we leave anyway and meet her an hour’s walk from here. She could meet us still, perhaps she just had to change the plan at the last minute?” But she could tell from the look on Elise’s face that she had already well and truly given up hope.
“No. If she were sticking to the plan, she would have waited for me, she wouldn’t have left the house without seeing me first. I knew when I woke up and she was gone that everything was unraveling. And she was supposed to leave a sign. Remember? She hasn’t done any of those things.”
Cate wished she had answers, or something helpful to say. “You think she’s fallen in love with him, don’t you?”
Elise’s throat bobbed, the only telltale sign that she was upset. She didn’t speak for what felt like a long while but could have been only a couple of minutes. “I know she has.”
Cate’s own belief in Adelaide wavered then. If even her own sister thought it were possible ... “Elise, she knows what kind of man he is. I don’t believe she could have.”
But she also saw the way Elise looked over at Harry before she spoke again. “I know how easy it is to fall for a foreigner, so who am I to talk?”
Cate knew as well as Elise that there was no comparison between Harry and Wolfgang, but she understood the sentiment. “You really think we should go now?”
Elise nodded. “What if I choose to believe that she hasn’t gone to him, that she hasn’t betrayed us, and then SS officers storm my house looking for you and shoot you where you stand? I’d never be able to live with myself.”
“I’m so sorry, Elise. I know how badly you wanted to get her away from here.”
“But if I leave her behind, if I’m wrong ...” Elise shook her head. “She can always come back here. No one will suspect anything, I suppose, and I can recruit her into the resistance with me later. If he hasn’t corrupted her, that is.”
Elise picked up her bag and Cate quickly did the same, and soon they were all standing, staring at one another, in the center of the room. There was no arguing with Elise when her mind was set. It was the first time since the night Cate had arrived that they’d all been downstairs together, and Cate found herself standing beside Jack again.
“We leave now,” Elise said. “We follow the plan, moving as fast as we can when it’s safe. It’s going to be dark soon, so we have no time left to spare.”
“We start out as a group,” Harry added. “If we need to split up, we do so, and we make our own way to the beach. Here are your maps.”
Cate took the one he passed her, pulse racing as she studied the markers for where they were to go. Alone, in the dark, she doubted how successful she’d be, but she would do her best.
“If we’re separated, it’s each man,or woman, for themselves,” Harry said. “No one goes back for anyone else, we don’t slow down for anyone. You just get to the beach.”
Cate sucked back a breath as Jack looked at her. She knew in her heart of hearts that Jack wouldn’t go on without her, no matter what Harry said.
“I think we should wait a little bit longer,” Cate said, the words spilling from her before she had time to stop them. “Until it’s almost completely dark.”
All three sets of eyes turned to her.
“That’s not what we agreed,” Harry said.
“I actually think she’s right, I’d rather have to go much faster under the cover of complete darkness,” Jack said. “But what if something has happened to Addy and she’s told him about us? With that in mind, I think we have to take our chances out there in the open rather than be sitting ducks, and we already have less time than we wanted to get there. We’re going to be pushed to make it at all.”
Elise didn’t contribute to the conversation, but she did turn and leave them for a few seconds before returning holding a pistol. She loaded it in front of them and passed it to Harry.
“Here,” she said. “You can take this, keep it under your jacket. At least it might give us a fighting chance against one or two soldiers.”
Cate hated the sight of the gun; after all the wounds she’d nursed, all the men she’d held who’d cried in pain from bullets that had ripped through their skin, she didn’t want to see one ever again. But if Harry had it, at least he could protect them.
Jack looked perturbed, probably because he would have preferred to have one too, but his injury wasn’t healed, which made Harry the logical choice.
When Elise swung open the front door, Cate’s heart nearly pounded clean from her chest, but she forced herself to follow the others outside. She expected instant gunfire or shouts to erupt around them, but instead they were greeted by silence.
She quickly looked around, hoping to catch sight of Adelaide, but there was no one there. The plan had been that she would lureWolfgang away under false pretenses and his men with him, then meet them once he’d left. It had been an ambitious plan, and one that involved deceiving him into believing there were British soldiers holed up in the opposite direction to where they were going, and Cate hadn’t liked it any more than Elise had. And their backup option, if Adelaide couldn’t get away from him, was that she’d discard her red scarf on the tree by the meadow she had often disappeared to with Wolfgang. That would be Addy’s signal that she wasn’t coming, that she’d had to stay with him instead of coming back. It was the worst-case scenario; or at least it had been, because none of them had imagined that she could ever betray them. Not sweet, quietly spoken Adelaide, who’d been the one to save them all in the first place. But part of the plan had also been that she would tell them when she was leaving, so they could time her. Instead, she’d just slipped out without anyone knowing, and had never come back.
“Come on, let’s go,” Harry said.
