Read Chapter 19: The Watch (Payoff)

The gorge wasn’t deep, but it was cruel—a jagged slash in the earth choked with ferns and slick moss, its floor a tumble of wet stone. Low cloud pressed down like a lid, muffling sound. It would mask them from the bridge’s watchers, but it would also mask the watchers from them.

Jack went first, one hand pressed to his shoulder where the blood had soaked through the field dressing again. He could feel the heat of infection spreading beneath the skin, a dull throb that had settled into his bones. Behind him, Henri moved with the silence of a man who had spent his life hunting things that didn’t want to be found. Claire came last, her eyes scanning the ridgeline above, the captured German uniforms bundled under her arm.

The trail hugged the gorge wall, a narrow ledge of packed earth no wider than a boot. Below, a stream gnashed its way over rocks. Jack tested each step, his good arm reaching for handholds in the exposed roots that clung to the cliff face. The gash in his shoulder screamed every time he stretched.

He was halfway across when his boot slipped.

The moss betrayed him—a patch of green velvet over nothing. His weight shifted, his wounded arm shot out instinctively to catch a root, and the pain lanced through him like a hot wire. His fingers closed on nothing. He went down hard, chest-first, sliding toward the lip of the ledge.

His left hand caught a root—thick, gnarled, alive—but his momentum was too much. The root held for half a second, then tore free. He was falling, the gorge floor rushing up, when something snagged in his jacket, a hard, wrenching tug that stopped him cold.

He swung, suspended, one arm numb, his boots kicking against empty air. The stream growled below, close enough to hear the individual stones rattling in its bed.

“Jack!” Henri’s voice, a hiss. Above him, the Frenchman was lying flat on the ledge, reaching down. “Your hand. Take my hand.”

Jack tried to reach up. His shoulder exploded with white-hot fire. He couldn’t lift his arm.

“I can’t—” he gritted, the words torn out of him.

Henri’s face was taut. “You must. I cannot climb down to you. The ledge will not take us both.”

Jack’s free hand scrambled against the cliff face, finding nothing but slick stone and wet moss. He looked down. The drop was fifteen feet, maybe more. The rocks below were sharp, unforgiving. He’d land wrong, and that would be it. The mission. The bridge. Émile.

All of it, over because of a patch of moss.

He felt the strain in his jacket, in the pocket where his father’s watch had rested for fifteen years. The root that had snagged him was wrapped around his collar, threaded through the strap of the watch case. He could feel it digging into his chest, the old brass case pressed hard against his ribs.

“Jack!” Henri’s voice cracked. “Now!”

Claire’s face appeared beside Henri’s, her eyes wide with terror.

And then, with a sound like a twig snapping in a winter wood, the strap gave way.

Jack fell.

But Henri’s hand caught his wrist—a desperate, lunging grab that pulled his own shoulder halfway out of its socket. Henri grunted, his teeth bared, his legs wrapped around a sapling rooted in the ledge. Claire grabbed Henri’s belt, anchoring him.

For a moment, they were frozen—a chain of flesh and bone against the void.

Then Henri pulled. Inch by inch, Jack came up, his boots finding purchase on a root, then a rock, until he was sprawled on the ledge, gasping, his chest heaving.

He lay there for a long moment, rain ticking against his face. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out the watch.

The case was bent, the crystal shattered. The face was a wreck of cracked enamel and twisted hands. He hadn’t wound it in days, and now he would never wind it again.

He stared at it, his father’s voice in his ears. *A soldier moves when he’s ordered. He doesn’t count the minutes.*

The watch had always been his anchor to the man his father had been—steady, precise, never late. It had carried his promise across an ocean. It had counted out every minute of the war.

Now it was a dead thing in his palm.

Henri was watching him, silent. He didn’t offer words. He didn’t reach for the watch. He just waited.

Jack closed his fingers around the broken case. For a moment, it was heavy—heavy as all the years it had weighed on him. Then, slowly, he opened his hand.

He let the watch drop.

It clattered against the rocks below, once, twice, and then was gone, swallowed by the stream.

Jack looked at Henri. “It was my father’s,” he said. His voice was rough, raw. “I promised him I’d bring it home.”

Henri nodded slowly. “And now?”

Jack’s jaw tightened. He pushed himself to his feet, his shoulder screaming, his hand finding the worn stock of his rifle. The weight of the broken watch was gone from his pocket—and with it, the weight of fifteen years of looking backward.

“Now,” he said, turning toward the far side of the gorge, where the bridge hummed in the mist like a drawn wire, “we finish what we started.”

He didn’t look back at the stream. There was nothing left down there for him to carry.