Read Chapter 28: The Lie Exposed

The hospital corridor smelled of carbolic soap and stale blood. Evelyn’s boots echoed against the linoleum as she followed the night sister to the private room at the end of the ward. Her hands were steady now, though they hadn’t been an hour ago, when she’d pried Ashworth’s letter from the pocket of his bloodied coat and read the single line he’d managed to scrawl before collapsing.

*Ask Thomas about the Marne.*

She hadn’t understood it then. She thought she understood now, and the understanding made her feel like she was walking toward her own execution.

The sister paused at the door. “He’s awake. Doctor says the fever’s broken, but he’s weak. Five minutes, no more.”

Evelyn nodded and stepped inside.

Thomas lay propped against pillows, his face thinner than she remembered, the sharp angles of his jaw more pronounced. His left arm was bandaged to the elbow. His eyes—those pale grey eyes she’d once mapped like territory—found her immediately, and something flickered in them. Not relief. Recognition, yes. But also fear.

“Eve.” His voice was a rasp. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I know.” She closed the door behind her and stood at the foot of the bed. “I’m not here as your fiancée. I’m here as an officer of Room 40.”

He blinked. “That’s… that’s not the woman I knew.”

“The woman you knew believed you were dead.” She took a breath. “Then she believed you were a prisoner. Now I’m told to believe you were a prisoner who talked.” She pulled the photograph from her pocket—the one Ashworth had pressed into her hand before losing consciousness. Thomas’s face stared up at her from a German intelligence file, taken at Le Touquet, dated three weeks before his supposed capture. “This says otherwise.”

Thomas’s gaze dropped to the photograph, and something went out of him. His shoulders sagged. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, older. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Tell me what that means.”

“Your Ashworth—” He stopped, corrected himself. “Captain Ashworth. He figured it out, didn’t he? The Marne.” He laughed, a dry, broken sound. “God. I thought I’d buried that deep enough.”

Evelyn waited.

Thomas pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Le Touquet wasn’t a capture. It was a meeting. I went there to meet a man named Fischer—German intelligence, mid-level, thought he could be turned. I’d been cultivating him for months. That photograph was supposed to be proof of my loyalty to them.” He dropped his hands. “Except Fischer was loyal to Berlin after all. He reported me. Edward found out.”

“Your brother.”

“My handler.” Thomas’s jaw tightened. “Or so he pretended to be. Edward was never my brother, Eve. He was a German agent who spent years building that fiction. Our parents, the family home, the letters from the front—all crafted to give him a permanent place inside my life. Inside your life.”

The breath left Evelyn’s lungs. She gripped the iron footboard to steady herself. “Everything with Edward was false?”

“Not the affection. I think a part of him believed it, too.” Thomas looked away. “But when he discovered what I’d done, he had me taken. Not tortured, not beaten—at least, not the way I let you believe. He offered me a choice. Watch the woman I planned to marry be targeted by the network’s remaining operatives, or work for him. Operate inside the ring. Be his spy within Room 40.”

“You agreed.”

“I agreed to keep you alive.”

The words hung between them, sharp as splinters. Evelyn felt the room tilt. “You let me believe you were chained to a wall, Thomas. I sat in the dark and listened to your confession, watched them wheel you out half-conscious, and every word you said was a performance.”

“Not every word.” His voice cracked. “The ones I said about you were true. That I loved you. That I never stopped.” He swallowed hard. “But the imprisonment—yes. That was manufactured. By me. For you.”

“Why?” The word came out jagged. “Why show me that? Why drag me through that basement at all?”

“Because I needed you to believe it. For the network to believe it. Edward planted me back in your path—his idea, not mine. He wanted me close to you, close to Ashworth. He wanted—” Thomas stopped, pain flickering across his face. “He wanted me to find out everything you knew. And I did. I fed him information, Eve. Real information, because nothing else would have been convincing. Ashworth’s convoy routes. Agent placements. Details that would have been harmless if hedged but lethal if confirmed.”

Evelyn’s hands were shaking. She forced them flat against her sides. “You told me you were tortured.”

“I told you what a man who’d been tortured would say.” He held her gaze. “I was trying to protect you from the truth. That I’d turned. That I’d compromised everything you and Ashworth had built. That I’d do it all again to keep you breathing.”

She stared at him for a long moment. The man in that bed was a stranger wearing her fiancé’s face. Every conversation, every shared silence in the years they’d known each other, now felt like a rehearsal for this betrayal.

But beneath the devastation, a colder current moved.

She thought of Ashworth’s letter—the single line that had sent her here. *Ask Thomas about the Marne.* If he’d known about the Marne, then he’d known part of this already. He’d sent her to extract the truth because he couldn’t do it himself.

“Alistair,” she said. “Edward’s clerk. He’s the real mastermind.”

Thomas blinked. “What?”

“He fled with the list. Forty-seven agents. Two days ago.” She watched his face carefully. “If you were truly operating inside the ring as Edward’s man, you’d know who Alistair reported to. Who his contact was in Berlin.”

Thomas’s silence stretched. Evelyn counted her heartbeats.

“He doesn’t report to Berlin,” Thomas finally said. “He reports to London.”

The words were lead in her stomach.

“Who?”

Thomas looked at her then, and for the first time, she saw nothing performative in his eyes. Only a terrible, exhausted honesty.

“Weaver. The assistant deputy director. He’s the one who recruited Alistair. He’s the one who’s been selling our agents since nineteen fourteen.”

Evelyn’s breath stopped.

Weaver.

The man who had signed her transfer to Room 40. Who had shaken her hand on her first day. Who had told her, two weeks ago, that her work was “a credit to her sex.”

“You have evidence?”

“I have proof.” Thomas’s voice was barely a whisper. “I kept it for nights like this—nights when I wondered if any of my choices meant anything at all. It’s hidden. I’ll give you the location.”

He reached out, hand trembling, and Evelyn did not take it.

“But you’ll have to decide first, Eve.” He let his hand fall. “Whether the woman who left me standing at Victoria Station in 1914 still believes in second chances. Or whether she believes in justice.”