Aurélie frowned at him. “Is that a threat?”
“Not a threat. A promise. We protect each other, you and I.”
“Even though we’re on opposite sides?” Without meaning to, Aurélie found herself leaning into his warmth, resting her head against his shoulder. Max’s arm curled around her, supporting her, warming her. In a small voice, she said, “I wish we were on your island.”
Max’s sigh ruffled her hair. “So do I. So do I.” He nuzzled the top of her head. “But soon. Soon. I mean it, you know. I don’t care what the rest of the war brings, I don’t care who wins or loses, so long as we can be together after.”
Aurélie rubbed her head against his shoulder. “That’s treason, you know.”
“Would I prefer that my country win? Certainly. But after this . . . ah well. There are monsters anywhere. Aren’t there?” He sounded as though he were trying to convince himself. “We’ll need papers for you.”
Reluctantly, Aurélie said, “I know someone who might be able to acquire them.”
He didn’t ask who or how. It was, Aurélie realized, safer for them both that he not know. They were skirting the edges of dishonor. “Good. When you have them, tell me what name you will be going under. I will add it to the list.”
“I don’t recall agreeing to go.” Had she? She was beginning to suspect that Max’s unassuming ways hid a very strong will. He would never force her, not in anything, that she knew for sure. But, somehow, he had a way of winning an argument.
“Think about it. Please?”
“I’ll think about it.” Aurélie turned toward him without thinking, her bare breasts brushing against his chest. “I’ll think about going.”
“But please.” Max made a strangled sound deep in his throat, half groan, half chuckle. In the darkness, his lips found hers. “Don’t go yet.”
A loud noise woke her, reverberating through her ears. Aurélie’s first thought was that Suzanne had dropped a pot down below in the kitchen, and she tried to bury her head back under her pillow. But the pillow was thinner than hers, the sheets coarser, and when she rolled over, she nearly fell off the edge of the bed.
Aurélie sat up abruptly, realizing she was also not wearing any clothes, and remembering, in vivid detail, why.
Clutching the blanket to her chest with one hand, she wiped the sleep out of her eyes with the other. “Was that—”
“A pistol.” Max was already in his uniform trousers, pulling the braces up over his shoulders. “Is there a way you can leave without being seen?”
“Through the storerooms.” That was enough to wake her up with a vengeance. Aurélie began feeling around for her discarded garments, which appeared to have migrated to all the corners of the room.
Shrugging into his coat, Max said, “I’ll go see what’s happened out there. You wait a few minutes and then go the other way.”
“All right,” said Aurélie, feeling blowsy and bleary. She struggled to reach the buttons at the back of her dress.
With swift efficiency, Max did them up for her. And then, to her surprise, he knelt before her. Possessing himself of both her hands, he pressed a kiss to each. “Soon,” he said. “Soon, we will be together properly.”
“On your island on the lake,” murmured Aurélie, looking down at his shining golden head. Her chest felt tight.
There was shouting outside and the sound of booted feet. Max gave her hands one last, firm squeeze. “Soon.” He pressed a hard kiss to her lips. “Soon.”
And he snatched up his hat and was gone.
Aurélie hastily pinned up her hair with whatever pins she could glean from the worn boards of the floor, wrinkled her nose at herself in Max’s scrap of a shaving mirror—did she look as though she’d been thoroughly tumbled?—and hurried down the stairs, taking the long route back through the storerooms to the kitchen of the new wing, from which she hurried across the courtyard as though she had only just been roused from bed. From her own bed.
There was a confusion of people in the courtyard, but at the center of it, Aurélie could make out a cluster of German uniforms: Hoffmeister, flanked by Dreier on one side and Kraus’s flaming red head on the other. Across from them stood her father. They were all staring at something on the ground.
Aurélie pushed and wiggled her way through, elbowing Suzanne and stepping on Victor’s foot.
“Pardon me, excuse me. . . . What’s this?” She arrived breathless at her father’s side.
“What do you think it is, mademoiselle?” clipped Hoffmeister, and Aurélie finally looked down and saw what they had all been staring at.
A pigeon.
A dead pigeon, lying in a welter of blood-stained feathers.
“It’s a bird,” she said dumbly.
Behind Hoffmeister, she could see Max, looking so very official and German again in his uniform and cap.
“Not just any bird. A pigeon. Well?” Hoffmeister demanded, so suddenly and so loudly that everyone jumped. “Whose is this? Who was keeping this pigeon?”
No one spoke.
Hoffmeister’s face was white with fury—but also a strange, furtive satisfaction. “I will find out. I don’t care who you are, or what you think you are, I will find out, and the miscreant will be shot.”
The count’s hand tightened on his wolfhound’s collar as Clovis snarled at Hoffmeister.
“Have you considered that it might have been passing through?” He sounded thoroughly bored, but Aurélie could see how white his knuckles were against Clovis’s graying fur.
Hoffmeister raised his pistol, training it on Aurélie’s father. “You do know,” the major said, in a dangerously conversational tone, “that to keep a pigeon is death.”
“There was a time,” said the count blandly, rubbing the area between Clovis’s ears, “when to keep a pigeon was dinner.”
“You will not joke about this. You are lord here? Good. Then you take responsibility for your people. Any pigeons I find are your pigeons.”
Max put a hand on Hoffmeister’s arm. “Sir, with respect . . .”
“Enough! You want your—what do you call it?—your noblesse oblige? You take the consequences. If I find another pigeon, Monsieur le Comte, it does not matter where or how I find it. You will die for it. Do you not think I mean it?”
The only response was the shuffling of feet in the courtyard, the lowering of eyes.
Hoffmeister’s lips pressed tightly together. His gun was pointing at Aurélie’s father still, shaking slightly with the force of his rage.
“This,” he said tightly, “this will be your fate if I find another one of these cursed birds.”
He lowered the gun and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the report hammered against Aurélie’s ears, broken by an agonized yelp that turned into a low howl.
“Clovis!” He was lying on the flagstones; there was blood on his fur. Aurélie flung herself down beside him, her hands moving desperately over his coat, trying to find the wound. “Clovis, Clovis.”
At her voice, the old wolfhound struggled to rise, but his legs folded beneath him. His tongue lolled out of his mouth.