Chapter 1
Will
Paris in January had a particular quality of light that was strangely soft and silver, filtering through clouds that never quite decided whether to snow or simply brood.
I stood at the window of our flat on the Rue de Varenne, watching the city settle into evening.
Neighboring rooftops wore crowns of frost, and the bare chestnut trees along the boulevard traced delicate shadows against walls that had witnessed revolutions, occupations, and liberations.
Somewhere below, a woman in a red coat walked a small dog with enormous ears.
A lamplighter made his rounds, trailing pools of amber warmth behind him.
An old man hurried past with a baguette tucked under his arm, collar turned up against the cold.
For once, the world wasn’t burning.
Behind me, Thomas moved through the kitchen with a quiet domesticity that still surprised me after all these years.
I heard the soft clink of a pot lid, the hiss of something simmering, and the rich perfume of onions caramelizing in butter.
He was making soup—French onion, if I wasn’t mistaken—because he knew I loved it and because Thomas showed affection through food the way other men showed it through words.
“You’re brooding,” he said without turning around.
“I’m contemplating. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being?”
“Brooding involves furrowed brows.” I turned from the window to watch him stir. “I’m far too handsome for furrowed brows.”
He laughed, that low, warm sound that never failed to unknot something in my chest, as he glanced over his shoulder and shook his head.
Thomas at the stove was a study in contradictions. His broad shoulders were relaxed beneath a worn cardigan, hands that could kill a man cradled a wooden spoon with absurd tenderness, and the hard line of his jaw was softened by concentration as he coaxed the onions toward perfection.
Thomas approached cooking the way he approached everything, with patience, precision, and a stubborn refusal to accept anything less than excellence.
“Come taste this,” he said. “Tell me if it needs more wine.”
“It always needs more wine. That’s the secret to French cooking.”
“The secret to French cooking is butter. Wine is the secret to surviving French cooking.”
I crossed the room and accepted the spoon he offered, letting my fingers brush against his. The soup was perfect, tasting rich and sweet, the onions melted into something approaching transcendence.
“Well?” he asked.
“Needs more wine.”
“Liar.” But he was smiling as he said it.
I leaned against the counter, watching him work.
This was what we had built between missions and crises, a life measured in quiet evenings and shared meals and the thousand small intimacies that came from loving someone completely.
Our flat was modest, the furniture secondhand and the radiators temperamental, but it was ours.
In a world that demanded we be weapons, it was the one place we could simply be men.
A knock jarred me out of my thoughts.
Three sharp raps, crisp and precise, like a conductor’s baton striking a music stand. It wasn’t the heavy thump of a telegram delivery or the tentative tap of a neighbor seeking sugar.
This knock had intention.
Thomas’s hand moved instinctively toward the drawer where we kept a Walther PPK wrapped in kitchen towels. I shook my head and moved toward the door.
“I know that knock.”
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
The moment I opened the door, she swept in like a winter storm wrapped in sapphire silk.
“William, darling!” The Baroness pressed cold-kissed cheeks to mine before I could utter a greeting.
The scent of her perfume—something expensive and French—enveloped me like an embrace.
She released me and descended upon Thomas with equal enthusiasm, holding him at arm’s length for inspection while avoiding his spoon lest she mar her spotless dress.
“My dear Thomas, stand still. Let me look at you both.” She tsked and shook her head sharply. “You look dreadful. Have you been sleeping? Eating? Thomas, you are too thin. William, your hair is doing something unfortunate. Honestly, how do you survive without me?”
“Good evening to you, too, Baroness,” Thomas said dryly, though I caught the warmth beneath his tone.
The Baroness Isabella von Hohenberg stood in the center of our modest Parisian flat as if she had inspected every corner and found it wanting.
Her fur-lined sable coat sparkled with snowflakes that were already melting in the heat of the room.
Beneath it, she wore a dress of midnight blue that probably cost more than our entire month’s rent.
Silver-blonde hair was swept up in an elaborate arrangement that defied both gravity and the evident haste of her journey.
She was, as always, magnificently, impossibly herself.
“Something smells divine.” She swept past us toward the kitchen, shedding her coat onto a chair.
“Thomas, you are cooking? How wonderful. How unexpected. How—” She peered into the pot and made a sound of theatrical despair.
“How utterly wrong. You are stirring too often. The onions need time to rest between disturbances. They are not children requiring constant attention.”
“They’re onions,” Thomas said.
“They are French onions. There is a difference.” She commandeered his wooden spoon with the efficient authority of a field marshal seizing a strategic position. “Sit down, both of you. You hover like anxious schoolboys, and it is making me nervous.”
Thomas and I exchanged a glance and sat.
The Baroness took command of the soup with brisk efficiency, adjusting the heat and adding a splash of wine from the bottle Thomas had been using. She tasted and adjusted again. All the while, she maintained a continuous stream of observations about the state of our accommodations.
“Your curtains are tragic, William. Where did you find them, a funeral home? And these spice jars—” She opened the cabinet above the stove and made a sound of profound disappointment.
“Nothing is alphabetized. Nothing is grouped by cuisine. The labels do not even face outward. How do you find anything? How do you live?”
“We manage,” I said.
“Barely, from the look of things.” She closed the cabinet with a decisive click. “I will reorganize this tomorrow. Tonight, we eat. You do have bread, I hope? Proper bread, not that sad excuse for a baguette I saw on your counter?”
“There’s a bakery on the corner,” Thomas offered.
“Then you will go there first thing in the morning. Before seven, when the bread is still warm.” She tasted the soup again and nodded with satisfaction. “There. You see? Patience. That is the secret.”
The Baroness carried the pot to the table and began ladling soup into bowls she had somehow located without being told where we kept them. She appeared utterly at ease and completely in control.
But as I watched her flit about our kitchen, I noticed things. I had spent too many years reading people in hostile territory not to.
The Baroness’s movements appeared fluid and practiced, but there was a tension beneath them, a tightness in her shoulders that her theatrical gestures couldn’t quite disguise.
Several times she paused mid-motion, her gaze drifting toward the window as if tracking something just beyond the glass.
And her fingers, when she wasn’t using them to gesture or stir, traced restless patterns against her thigh.
These were not the habits of a woman on holiday.
“Baroness,” I said carefully, “why are you here?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Can a woman not visit her favorite Americans without an interrogation? I was in Paris. I had a craving for decent conversation and competent soup. I thought of you both immediately.”
“You arrived without your driver,” Thomas said. “And without your secretary or so much as a telegram announcing your visit.”
“Spontaneity is good for the soul.”
“You don’t do spontaneous,” I replied.
The Baroness regarded me over the rim of the wine glass she had somehow acquired. Something flickered across her face. It wasn’t fear, exactly, but the wariness of a chess player who had just noticed an unexpected move on the board.
“You have become annoyingly observant, William. I am not sure I approve.”
“Blame our training,” I said.
She was silent for a moment, her finger tracing the rim of her glass. When she spoke again, the theatrical brightness had dimmed, replaced by something more genuine, more tired.
“I needed to get away,” she said quietly.
“For a few days. Bern has become . . . suffocating. There are too many eyes, too many ears, and too many people watching to see which way I will move.” She looked up at us, and I saw shadows beneath her eyes that powder hadn’t quite concealed.
“I find that I think more clearly in your company. You have a grounding effect, both of you. It is terribly inconvenient, but there it is.”
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“Nothing I wish to discuss before soup.” Her voice was firm but not unkind.
“Tomorrow, I will burden you with my troubles. I will tell you everything, and we will make plans. I will ask things of you that I have no right to ask. But tonight—” She lifted her glass in a toast. “Tonight, I simply wish to enjoy a meal with dear friends. I wish to pretend, for a few hours, that the world is not quite so complicated as it has become. Will you grant me that?”
There was something almost desperate in the request.
The Baroness did not ask for things. She demanded, commanded, expected.
But this was asking.
This was a woman who needed to pretend that everything was normal.
“Of course,” I said.
Thomas nodded his agreement.
The Baroness smiled, and some of the tension eased from her shoulders.
“Excellent. Now eat your soup before it gets cold. And Thomas, tomorrow you will tell me about that business in Vienna. The skylight incident. I want every detail.”
Thomas nearly choked on his soup. “How do you know about that?”