The Baroness made a pained sound and turned away. Will went after her, his arm around her shoulders, guiding her back toward the farmhouse.
I stayed.
I stood at the foot of Otto’s grave as the winter light faded, as the cold crept into my bones, as the rage inside me crystallized into something sharp and permanent.
They had taken so much from us. Weber, Hoffmann, Maurer, Aldric . . . and now Otto.
They thought they could break us.
They were wrong.
I looked down at the fresh-turned earth, at the stone that marked where a good man lay, and I made a silent vow.
We will stop them. Whatever it costs. Whatever we have to become. And when it’s over, I will find the Shadow. I will find him, and I will kill him, and I will make sure he knows exactly why he’s dying.
For you, Otto. For all of them.
21
Will
Ifound a phone booth in the village three kilometers from the farmhouse. It was a risk, leaving. Bisch had warned against it. He’d argued that every trip outside increased our exposure and gave the enemy another chance to spot us, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. Manakin needed to know what had happened and what we had learned.
The walk took forty minutes through frozen fields and bare-branched woods. I kept to the tree line where I could, watching for vehicles or for anything that might suggest pursuit. The cold bit through my coat, but I barely felt it. My mind was elsewhere—rehearsing what I would say, how I would say it, and how Manakin would react.
We had disobeyed direct orders.
We had assaulted a fortified installation.
We had engaged hostile forces, killed enemy combatants, and extracted a foreign national.
We had done every single thing he had explicitly told us not to do.
And Thomas had nearly died doing it.
The village was small, little more than a church, a handful of houses, and a general store that looked like it hadn’t changed since the previous century. The phone booth stood at the edge of the square, a wooden box with glass panels fogged by the cold.
I stepped inside, fed coins into the slot, and dialed the number.
After a series of clicks and chirps, a voice I didn’t recognize said, “Code?”
“Nightingale. Priority.”
A pause. More clicking sounds. Then: “Hold.”
As the line hummed with transatlantic static, I watched the village square through the fogged glass.
An old woman emerged from the general store, a basket over her arm.
A dog trotted past, nose to the ground.
Ordinary life continued as if the world wasn’t tilting toward catastrophe.
“Manakin.”
“Manakin, Emu.”
“Where the hell have you been?”
