Prologue
LATE FEBRUARY 1918
SOMEWHERE IN THE FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE
He could see it all so clearly. As the renewed rocking of the train lulled his fellow passengers to sleep, Zivon Marin watched the pattern of their movements. The shrug of one shoulder, the stretch of two different legs, the shifting of heads. One’s cough jerked another from the edge of slumber, the jerking causing a repositioning of someone else. Cause and effect. Ripples. Patterns that played out with such consistency he could predict who would fall asleep first and who last.
The door at the end of the car opened, both the wind and Evgeni blustering in. Pulling tired eyes open. Igniting French grumbles.
Zivon’s hand fisted around the ruby ring he wore—would always wear—on his right ring finger. This was what he could never anticipate with accuracy. The sudden interference to the pattern. His brother entering a train car . . . Lenin uniting those disorganized Bolsheviks.
The bullet to Alyona’s head.
Zivon’s eyes slammed shut. No rest came with closed eyes, not for him. Every time he blinked too long, he saw her again. Crumpled on his doorstep. A warning. An accusation.
“Are you going to let me in or keep those long legs of yours blocking my path?” Out of the politeness Matushka had drilled into them both, Evgeni spoke in French.
With his eyes closed, Zivon heard more clearly what had been needling him in his brother’s voice for weeks. He’d first called it resentment—Evgeni hadn’t wanted to flee Russia. It had also reminded him of petulance—his little brother had never been one to let Zivon take the lead without arguing, no matter how many times he’d proven his decisions wise.
But there was something else in his voice Zivon hadn’t detected before. Perhaps it was new. Or perhaps it had only now worked its way through the fog of his devastation.
It didn’t sound like resentment or petulance. It sounded like . . . satisfaction.
Slowly, Zivon opened his eyes and looked at his brother. He tried to see him not as Evgeni—his brother for whom he’d do anything, sacrifice anything, whom he hadn’t been able to imagine leaving home without—but as just another person obeying his own patterns.
The angle of his head—cocky. The gleam in his eyes—knowing. The way he moved—more energized than he ought to be at midnight in third class on a train taking him ever farther away from the home he hadn’t wanted to leave.
The hand hovering too near the pocket of his trench coat.
Zivon moved his legs out of the way. “You were gone a long time, Zhenya.”
Evgeni chuckled. “I wasn’t quite eager to fold myself back into this sardine can.”
Joviality that masked . . . something. He didn’t know what. And didn’t want to waste time dissecting it. He had to remain focused. Get to Paris, find a room for a few days, get messages to the codebreaking divisions of the French and British governments. One or the other would hire him. They had to. It was Russia’s best hope.
Evgeni settled back in his seat with a grunt, reaching for the bag stuffed under his seat. Zivon narrowed his eyes as his brother opened it, unable to think why he’d find it necessary to get his satchel out now.
Another grunt, and Evgeni shoved the bag at him. That, at least, was easy to understand. He’d pulled out Zivon’s bag, not his own. There, right on top, was the photo album he hadn’t let out of arm’s reach in weeks. Sentimentality, everyone would think. They’d be partly right.
He rested a hand on the smooth leather cover, stared at it, through it, without really thinking about either the photos within or the encrypted message he’d stored behind the portrait of Batya and Matushka. He was still watching his brother.
Watching as Evgeni, humming as though all was right with the world, settled his own bag in his lap. Watching as he drew from his pocket the identification papers he’d managed to procure for them—with false names. Watching as he slid the passport into the bag.
But not just the passport. The edge of another paper peeked out.
Fast as a snake, Zivon shot out his arm and grabbed the bag’s strap before Evgeni could shove it down to the floor again. Slow as a tiger’s crouch, he lifted his eyes to his brother’s.
They didn’t look alike. Not really. But they had the same eyes. Batya’s eyes. And Evgeni’s burned now with the same temper that had made their father a noted fist-fighter . . . but an officer who never advanced as far as he should have in the Imperial Army. His brother growled, “What are you doing, Zivon?”
He switched his words to Russian. “What are you doing, Zhenya? Where were you when the train stopped to take on water?”
It couldn’t be anything big. Anything important. Perhaps he’d found a girl to charm—he always did. It couldn’t be anything real.
But Zivon was keenly aware of that encrypted message under his own hand. Of the knowledge that somewhere in this region, German officers were rumbling about mutiny. And somewhere, a Prussian soldier sympathetic to the Bolsheviks had told Lenin about them.
Evgeni snorted a laugh in that way he always did when he was trying to put Zivon off the scent of something. He opened his mouth.
But no words came out. Or if they did, they were lost under the sudden screeching of metal on metal.
The floor beneath them bucked. The car pitched. The soft snores from two seats behind them turned to screams. His own joined them. Screams to God. Screams for his brother. Screams of pain.
Then darkness swallowed the train whole.
1
THURSDAY, 28 MARCH 1918
MAYFAIR, LONDON, ENGLAND
Lilian Blackwell held her breath and inched along the wall, praying with every footfall that Mama wouldn’t look up. That the hurried explanation she’d offered the housekeeper would suffice. That she’d be able to slip out the door without the need for any more lies to slip past her lips. She put a hand over the camera in her pocket to keep it from banging against her leg—Mama had ears as sensitive as a rabbit’s—and prepared for the most dangerous part of her escape: darting past the open drawing room doorway.
As she edged a little closer, she caught her sister’s gaze inside the room. Ivy, blue eyes twinkling, pressed her lips against a smile and turned to their mother. “So, who’s coming for dinner tonight, Mama? Officers, gentlemen, or both?”
Bless her. Lily waited until her mother dipped her brush into her oils and began to answer, then dashed by. She made it two whole steps past the door too. Then, “Lily! Is that you?”
Blast. Lily let the pumps she’d been carrying drop to the floor and slid her feet into them before moving to the door. Not through it, though. She didn’t have much time. “Yes, Mama.”
Her mother looked away from her painting with a smile as bright as the spring sunshine, though it froze and her brows arched when she saw Lily’s uniform, complete with kerchief pinned over her hair. “I thought you weren’t working today, my love. That you and Ivy had both taken the morning off.”
She wasn’t. Not at the hospital, at least. But she’d known she might be stopped, so the uniform had seemed like her best option. Especially given the note that had arrived an hour ago. “I wasn’t, but Ara just sent word that they’re shorthanded and asked if I could come in.”
Those were, in fact, the words on the note that she’d left resting on the entryway table for her mother to find later. But Arabelle Denler, her friend and newly reinstated matron of their ward at Charing Cross Hospital, hadn’t been the one to pen them.