Chapter 11 INGA
I didn't know what to say to him. Gideon stood there like some impossible pillar of strength in a world made of dust and broken edges.
His jaw was tight, his eyes dark and burning with something that wasn't anger alone.
Something heavier. Something that made my stomach twist in a way I didn't understand.
"Show me," he'd declared.
Not asked.
Declared.
For the first time in a long while, something shifted inside me, something that whispered I don't have to do everything alone. I wasn't sure if that scared me or relieved me.
I swallowed hard, nodded, and motioned for Klaus and Axel to follow. "Kommt."—Come—I said in German.
The boys obeyed instantly. Axel's limp was more pronounced than usual, and I suspected he hadn't told us quite the truth about how he had liberated Klaus's chocolate. Klaus stuck close to Gideon, glancing up at him with those wide, hero-worshipping eyes. He'd never looked at anyone that way before.
Our Papa had been gone before Klaus could have formed any lasting memories of him.
The party hadn't wanted to give him a job, but he was good enough to be cannon fodder.
There weren't many men around, at least not under seventy.
It hurt me to think that not only had Klaus been lacking male influence, but that he would never know his father.
With everything I had been worrying about, this had never crossed my mind until now.
At least I had some memories of our parents; Klaus had none.
Not even a picture. The day they took my mom, our apartment had been bombed too.
There had been nothing left but ash and smoke.
The ruins swallowed us as we walked, once-apartments now reduced to jagged silhouettes, rooms with no walls, walls with no roofs, doors that opened into nothing. The air smelled of damp stone and old smoke, and every few steps my boots crunched over broken glass.
"This way," I murmured, stepping carefully over a collapsed beam.
Gideon was behind me, his strides sure, his presence too large for the narrow path we walked. I felt him even when I didn't look back; his heat was a strange comfort I didn't want but couldn't shake.
We slipped into what had once been our building's courtyard.
Nothing was recognizable anymore. Just heaps of rubble where flowerbeds had been, a staircase still standing on one side, its steps choked with bricks and ash, leading nowhere.
An old bathtub lay overturned in the dirt, its white enamel cracked and blistered from the heat of explosions, like the skeleton of a domestic life no one remembered how to use anymore.
My throat tightened. "This… is where we live."
Gideon stopped short. His breath left him in a sharp, wounded sound. "You sleep here?"
I nodded. "Inside that."
I pointed toward what had once been the laundry room.
Three walls remained, stubborn as teeth.
The roof was a patchwork of scavenged boards, cardboard, and a torn tarp someone had discarded.
It leaked when it rained, but not as badly as you'd think.
I hadn't been ashamed of it before. It was shelter.
It kept Klaus dry. It kept us alive. But now I saw it through Gideon's eyes, and for the first time, the shame crept in, quiet and poisonous.
"This place," I said quickly, before he could speak, before he could ask why, "it's hidden. People don't come here."
That was the truth of it. The intact buildings were dangerous. Everyone wanted them. Squatters fought over rooms with locks on the doors. Men noticed girls. Russian patrols noticed movement. Anything that looked livable drew attention, and attention got people hurt, or worse.
The ruins were different. The well-meaning stayed away. The predators didn't bother. No one wanted a place that might collapse in the night.
"I tried other places," I added, softer now.
"Basements. Shared rooms. But they were crowded.
Loud. And Klaus…" My voice caught. "He was so little.
He cried at night. People don't like crying children.
" I swallowed. "Here, no one listens. No one looks.
" I turned to Gideon then, forcing myself to meet his gaze.
"I can leave him alone here when I work nights.
No one ever comes, only the Trümmerkinder. Not once. That's why we stayed."
Because in a city of broken walls, sometimes the most ruined place was the safest.
For a moment, he didn't say anything. He just stood there, staring at the remains of my careful, fragile world, at the place where I'd taught my brother to sleep without fear.
He didn't speak. But he went very, very still.
Suddenly, I knew. He wasn't judging me. He was grieving.
And that somehow hurt more.
Klaus tugged my sleeve. "They came from there," he whispered in German, pointing toward a narrow gap between two collapsed floors, a slanted, jagged passage that once might've been a hallway. Now it was a hiding place, the kind only kids small enough to slip through would think to use.
I felt Gideon move closer behind me, the heat of him brushing my shoulder. "They hide there?" he asked quietly.
"Yes." My voice shook despite me. "The Trümmerkinder. They slip through the ruins like rats. They know every tunnel, every crawlspace, every cellar. They can get in places I can't."
"And they came through here?" he asked Klaus.
Klaus nodded. "Bastian said… said we were lucky to have walls. He said they deserved it more. He took my chocolate. And… and he spit on our bed."
Gideon cursed under his breath, an American word I didn't want to translate, one that made me blush. A word I shouldn't have even known, but when you work in a bar… you learn quickly.
Axel flinched at the sound.
Gideon noticed. "I'm not angry at you," he said gently, kneeling to the boy's level. "I'm angry at them."
Axel blinked, confused. Nobody ever talked to him like that. He stood a little straighter. I wasn't sure he understood what Gideon said, but he understood the tone. I watched the exchange, and something warm curled low in my chest. Too warm. Too dangerous.
Gideon rose again. "Where are they now?"
Klaus shrugged. "They run. Fast."
"Show me where they hide," Gideon ordered.
I touched his arm, my fingers barely brushing the worn fabric of his jacket, but he froze as if it shocked him. "Gideon… don't hurt them."
"Why not?" His voice came out low, rough.
"Because they're children," I whispered.
He looked down at me, the shadows caught in his blue eyes until they turned almost black. "Children don't do this, Inga."
"They're hungry," I whispered. "Lost. Angry. They don't have any parents, no adults. They're homeless, and they know no rules but theirs. They're soldiers too, in their own way. Soldiers without anyone to tell them the war is over or who the enemy is."
He stared at me for a long moment, breathing hard, chest rising and falling like he was wrestling with something inside him. Something big. Something with claws.
Finally, he nodded once, jerkily. "Fine. I won't hurt them." But he added under his breath, so quiet I almost missed it, "Not unless they make me."
I didn't know why that sent a shiver down my spine.
"Come on then," I said softly, leading the way toward the broken hallway where the boys had slipped in earlier. "They stash food and blankets in the cellar beneath this section."
Gideon stepped right beside me, close enough that our arms brushed as we squeezed between two leaning walls. He didn't pull away, and neither did I.
The deeper we went, the darker it grew. Klaus clung to my fingers. Axel walked ahead like he knew every crack in the floor. Gideon's voice came from just behind me, low and steady. "If they hurt you… or Klaus…"
"I'm fine," I whispered.
"You're not," he said. "I've seen fine. This isn't it."
I didn't answer.
I couldn't.
Then Axel stopped suddenly. "Hier," he whispered, pointing at a narrow gap leading into a pitch-black cellar where the air smelled of damp earth and old fear. Gideon's hand brushed my back as he leaned forward.
I had no idea how he could possibly know it, but he snarled, "They're close."
The sound that came out of him didn't belong in a human throat.
It wasn't loud—nothing that would echo or give us away—but it vibrated through the air between us, low and warning, like the growl of a cornered animal.
My breath hitched. I didn't know what to think, only that something inside me reacted to it in a way that was equal parts fear and…
something else. Something warm. Something that made my knees go weak.
How did he know they were close? How could he sense it? Before I could ask, he stepped in front of me, blocking the narrow gap with his body.
"Stay behind me," he murmured.
His voice was different, rough gravel instead of words. I found myself obeying without thinking. Axel nodded anxiously, his thin shoulders trembling. Klaus clutched my hand, squeezing tight. I felt him shaking too.
Gideon crouched, studying the dark opening the way a wolf studies a den, calculating, listening, waiting. The cellar was nothing but a jagged slit between fallen beams and cracked concrete, barely wide enough for a small child. Definitely not big enough for a grown man.
"Do they come out through here?" Gideon asked, eyes fixed on the dark.
I translated for Axel, who nodded vigorously. "They fit. You don't."
"It's how they disappear," Klaus whispered to me in German.
I translated for Gideon, and he swore under his breath.
The air inside the cellar was damp and cold, carrying the faintest whisper of breath, small, uneven, like someone holding very still.
My skin crawled. I hated cellars. Too many bad memories.
Too many things the Soviets had dragged into darkness, never to walk out again.
Gideon leaned closer, one hand braced against the wall. "There are at least three," he said softly. "One breathing hard. One whispering. One trying not to make noise."
I stared.
"H-how can you hear that?" I whispered.
He didn't answer. His jaw flexed. His nostrils flared slightly. And for one impossible second—a heartbeat so fast I nearly doubted it—I thought I saw something flare in his eyes. A glint of gold. Hot. Alive.
He blinked, and it was gone.
Before I could process it, a faint scuffling came from the dark. A shuffle of shoes on stone. A muttered curse.
"They're coming," Axel hissed.
Gideon lifted a hand toward me without turning. It wasn't a command. It was a barrier. A shield. He didn't have to say a word; I knew he meant stay back.
My pulse thundered in my ears.
Klaus squeezed my fingers. "Inga," he whispered, "warum—"
"Shh," I breathed in German. "Stay close."
Gideon shifted his weight, his muscles coiling tight beneath his jacket. He looked like he belonged in this darkness more than the boys did. Like the shadows recognized him.
A lanky figure squeezed through the gap first, thirteen, maybe fourteen, face smeared with grime, eyes sharp with suspicion and hunger. Then another. And behind them—barely visible—a smaller boy, hiding, watching.
I locked eyes with the one in front.
Bastian.
I knew it immediately.
The posture.
The coldness.
The way the other boys hovered behind him like he was their general.
His gaze flicked to Axel. Then to Klaus. Then to me.
Then, finally, to Gideon.
His jaw tightened.
"What do you want?" he spat in rough German.
Gideon didn't speak the language, but he understood the tone. He stepped forward, calm but impossibly imposing, nearly blocking the entire entryway with his body.
I swallowed and quickly translated. Bastian's eyes narrowed. He stood taller, shoulders lifting, trying to seem bigger than he was. Trying to seem like someone fearsome and important.
"You stole my brother's chocolate," I said quietly. "You broke our things. You frightened him."
Bastian shrugged, careless. "We need it more."
"You took it from a six-year-old," I snapped before I could stop myself.
Gideon's hand twitched, as if he were holding something inside with sheer force.
"Then he shouldn't have had it," Bastian said. "Kids like him don't get sweets unless they're willing to—"
He didn't finish. Because Gideon moved. Not fast. Not violent. Just… forward. One. A single step.
And every boy froze.
It wasn't strength that stopped them. Or size. It was something else, something in the air, heavy and electric. Like the space around him had changed, thickened, become charged with a pressure I could feel in my teeth.
Bastian swallowed.
"I don't want trouble," he muttered.
I knew Gideon didn't understand, yet he answered, low, each word steady as stone. "Then don't make any."
I translated, voice shaking.
Bastian's glare flicked between us, calculating. Then he spat to the side and jerked his head.
"Come on," he snapped at the others.
They slipped past us, vanishing into another tunnel of rubble like ghosts in the night. When they were gone, the tension snapped like a rope. I let out a breath I'd been holding.
Gideon straightened slowly, rolling his shoulders, breathing deeper than normal, forcing himself to calm down. Almost as if he were dragging a fierce beast back into its cage. I stared at him, unable to look away.
"What… what was that?" I whispered.
He didn't answer right away. Instead, he looked at Axel, then at Klaus, his gaze moving over them with a strange intensity, checking every scratch, every tremble, as if cataloging the harm done and the harm he would never allow again.
Then he straightened slowly, like he'd been holding his breath too long.
His hand rose halfway, as if to rake through his hair, but stopped, clenching instead.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. For a heartbeat, he didn't look like a pilot. Or a soldier. Or the man who'd walked me home.
There was something feral in the edges of him—a heat, a tension, a coiled readiness that made the space around us hum.
His eyes weren't just blue now. They were burning. Focused.
Like he was seeing more than any normal man could.
It stole my breath.
I didn't know what scared me more, the boys hiding in the rubble
or the way Gideon seemed built to face a much darker enemy.
"Inga…" he said, his voice was rough, barely steady.
He wasn't angry now.
He wasn't even furious.
He was shaken.
And somehow, that terrified me more.
He dragged in a breath and finally met my eyes fully. "It's not okay," he said quietly. "Any of this."
His voice cracked something inside me. And I nodded, because it was all I could do.
"Let's get you all out of here," he murmured. "Before it gets more dangerous."
I didn't ask how he knew it was about to get more dangerous.
I just followed him—and walked through the ruins without fear for the first time in years.