Chapter 20 Thomas
Thomas
Otto died on the second day. I was the one who found him.
I had been restless all morning, unable to sit still despite the wound in my shoulder that screamed every time I moved.
Will kept telling me to rest, to let my body heal, but resting felt like surrender or giving in to the fear that had been clawing at my chest since we’d crawled out of that drainage channel.
So I walked through the farmhouse from room to room, checking on everyone because it was the only thing I could think to do that felt like action.
The Baroness sat on the couch in the living room, a cup of untouched tea cooling on the end table.
Bisch was in his usual spot standing guard by the window, watching the road the way he’d been watching it for two days straight.
Will was asleep in the chair beside my bed, finally giving in to exhaustion after I’d insisted I was fine.
I told him I didn’t need watching and that he should get some rest, but he refused to climb into bed.
Otto was in the back room, hooked up to machines that beeped and hummed.
I stood in the doorway and listened for the steady rhythm of the machines.
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.
I held her tighter.
I thought about Otto telling us about his wife and daughter, about the camps, about the Baroness appearing in the chaos of an ambush and pulling him from the wreckage, about decades of devotion and service and love expressed through loyalty so absolute it had become its own kind of religion.
“She is the reason I am alive,” he had said.
And now he was dead.
Because he couldn’t bear to let her face her enemies alone.
“I should have been faster,” the Baroness whispered. “I should have fought harder. If I had not let them take me—”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“Then whose fault is it?” She pulled back and looked up at me, her good eye red and swollen and filled with a grief so vast it seemed to swallow everything. “He died for me, Thomas. He died because I was careless, because I walked into a trap, because I trusted the wrong people.”
“He died because evil men killed him. That’s whose fault it is—the people who built that fortress and filled it with horrors.” I gripped her shoulders, made her look at me. “Otto knew the risks. He chose to come anyway because that’s what love does. It makes us do stupid, brave, impossible things.”
She stared at me for a long moment, then something shifted in her face. The grief was still there, would probably always be there, but beneath it I saw something harder emerge.
Something colder.
“I want them dead, Thomas,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but there was steel in it now. “Every one of them—the Shadow, the ministers, whoever is behind this—I want them to pay for what they have taken from me.”
“They will.”
“Promise me.” Her hands found my arms and gripped with surprising strength. “Promise me, Thomas. Promise me you will help me make them pay.”
“I promise,” I said without hesitation. “Whatever it takes, however long it takes, I will help you burn them all to the ground.”
We buried Otto that evening.
There was no time for a proper funeral or a priest to say the words. There was no cemetery to receive him, just a grave in the woods behind the farmhouse dug by Bisch and Will while I kept watch and the Baroness sat inside staring out the window.
When the grave was deep enough, they wrapped Otto in a clean sheet and carried him out. The Baroness insisted on being there, leaning on me for support, her face pale and set like carved marble.
As we lowered him into the ground, the Baroness stepped forward, swaying slightly, and looked down at the white-wrapped shape that had been her friend, her protector, and her family.
“He saved my life in 1940,” she said, her voice barely audible.
“I pulled him from that truck, yes, but he saved me just as surely. He gave me something to fight for, someone to protect. Without him, I would have become . . .” She searched for the words.
“Cold and empty, little more than a machine in service of a cause with nothing human left inside.”
She kneeled—painfully, awkwardly, her injuries making every movement an ordeal—and placed her bandaged hand on the sheet.
“You were the best of us, old friend,” she whispered. “The kindest, the truest. Whatever comes after this life, I hope you find your wife and daughter there. I hope you find peace.” Her voice cracked. “I hope you know how much you were loved.”
She stayed like that for a long moment, her hand on his chest, her head bowed. Will helped her to her feet, and we began to fill in the grave.
The dirt fell like drumbeats, like a heart slowly stopping.
When it was done, Bisch found a stone—a large, flat rock from the edge of the woods—and carried it to the head of the grave. He didn’t carve a name or a date. There was no time, and besides, Otto deserved better than a hurried epitaph scratched into stone.
But Bisch did one thing.
He took off his coat and removed something from his inner pocket. It was a small photograph, creased and faded, of a woman and a young girl.
Otto’s wife and daughter. The family he had lost to the camps.
Bisch placed the photograph beneath the stone, weighing it down against the wind.
“Now they are together,” he said quietly. “As they should be.”
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.