But they were silent.
For a moment, I didn’t understand. My brain couldn’t process what that silence meant. I just stood there, staring at the still figure on the bed, at the flat line on the monitor and the chest that wasn’t rising anymore.
Then it sank in.
“Dr. Müller!” My voice came out raw, broken. “Doctor, get in here!”
Müller appeared within seconds, moving faster than I’d seen him move since we’d arrived. He pushed past me, checked Otto’s pulse, checked the machines, checked everything he could check while I stood there uselessly with my heart in my throat.
After a long moment, the doctor straightened, and his head bowed.
His face told me everything before he opened his mouth.
“He is gone,” he said quietly. “The damage was too severe. His heart simply . . . stopped.”
“You have to do something, please,” I pleaded.
“There is nothing to do. He has been gone for several minutes, perhaps longer.” Müller pulled the sheet up over Otto’s face with the practiced gentleness of a man who had done this many times before. “I am sorry.”
I stared at the shape under the sheet, at the outline of that massive frame, all of it still and silent and wrong.
“Someone has to tell her,” I said.
“Yes.” Müller’s voice was heavy, his gaze filled with a suggestion I didn’t want to hear. “Someone does.”
I found the Baroness where I’d left her, on the couch, staring at nothing.
She looked up when I entered. Something in my face must have told her. I watched the knowledge arrive, watched it move across her features like a shadow, darkening everything it touched.
“No,” she whispered.
“Baroness—”
“No.” She stood, her ruined hands pressing against her mouth. “No, he was stable. The doctor said he was stable. He said—”
“His heart stopped. Müller couldn’t bring him back.”
She stared at me.
For a long moment, she didn’t move or speak or breathe.
She just stood there, frozen, as if by staying perfectly still she could stop time itself and undo what had already been done.
Then she broke.
It wasn’t dramatic or loud.
She simply . . . crumpled. Her legs gave out, and she sank to the floor. A sound came out of her that I had never heard before. It was a keening wail, ancient and primal, the sound of something being torn apart at its roots.
I caught her before she hit the ground and held her as she sobbed. Her face pressed against my chest, her bandaged hands clutching at my shirt. She shook—great, wracking tremors that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than muscle or bone.
“He came for me,” she gasped between sobs. “He came alone. I told him . . . I told him not to follow, and he—”
“He loved you.”
“He was all I had left.” The words came out broken, jagged. “My husband died in the war. I never had children. I gave that up for this work. Otto—Otto was—”
She couldn’t finish. The sobs overtook her again. She buried her face in my shoulder and wept.
