VIENNA, AUSTRIA
NOVEMBER 1938
Ernst entered Luzi’s apartment more than a week after they’d taken her father away, kicking down the broken front door, cornering her in the parlor.
The Nazis had stolen anything she could use to defend herself, and her Aryan friends had grown deaf to her pleas. The Jewish neighbors who remained were hidden in the fragile threads of their walls, powerless to help.
She wished for a cocoon to protect her tonight. Wished she could sprout wings and fly.
When Ernst forced himself on her, the world blackened, sending her to a place far from the shattered pieces of her home.
Color emerged again in her mind, bright and steady. She and Marta were together, playing in Max’s swan lake, laughing as they rolled in the meadows of wildflowers. The songbirds sang a beautiful melody, calling her and her sister far away from the lowlands of Austria, to a place high in the Alps where no man ever went.
They flew with the birds, Marta’s hand secured in hers. Instead of cigarette smoke, she could smell the blossoming jasmine in the breeze.
A sound ripped through the mountains, seared through her mind as the birds fluttered away. It was Ernst, zipping up his breeches. And her body felt as shattered as the glass around her feet.
“Max can have you now,” Ernst said. He towered over her with his knife, disgusted. As if she had driven him to do this.
Oh, Max. He could never find out what happened.
“Luzi?” Ernst sneered.
When she didn’t respond, he threw his dagger onto the couch and grabbed her by the throat, his fingers strangling her. She opened her mouth, trying to speak, but nothing came out.
Pain raked through her body again, everything within her collapsing.
And the music, even in her head, was gone.
Max rushed through the apartment’s open door, but the moment he saw Ernst clutching Luzi’s neck, he feared it was too late.
The sitting room was a wreck—legs of her family’s chairs hacked off, the sofa’s upholstery sliced, elegant drapes torn down. And Luzi’s face was the color of the cement floor in the basement of the Hotel Metropole, his residence for the past week.
“Let her go,” Max shouted.
Ernst released Luzi, and relief flooded through Max when she gasped for air. Thank God, Ernst hadn’t killed her... but what had he done to Luzi while Max was gone?
His mind reeled with possibilities, blurring his vision, and he struggled to regain focus. For almost two weeks he’d been imprisoned—first at the arena and then at the hotel. The lack of food and sleep had depleted every ounce of strength, but right now he had to concentrate the little energy the Gestapo had left him on freeing Luzi.
On the sofa was a dagger, and Ernst reached for it, his face flushed red. “Go home, Max.”
“I won’t leave,” he said, though without a weapon, he couldn’t fight this man.
Ernst held the knife in front of him, steady. “I told you that you’d have to choose.”
Max could see the etching on the silver blade.Alles für Deutschland.
Everything for Germany. Everything for might.
“I choose what is right,” Max said.
“Right or wrong, it’s irrelevant.”
“Not in my eyes.”
Luzi didn’t speak, as if Ernst had siphoned out the spirit, the music, that once breathed life inside her.
“Come with me now, Max, and I’ll leave her alone.” The words slid off the man’s tongue, like the serpent in the garden.
