Read Chapter 8: The Sister's Letter

The Frankfurt station clock read half past eleven. The crowds were thinner than Munich's had been—Frankfurt still wore the dazed expression of a city that had survived armistice but not yet learned to live again. Marchand stood at a news kiosk, pretending to study a map of the Rhine, while Pavel drifted along the platform edge like a man reading train schedules with genuine interest.

The performance was necessary. Ever since the farmhouse, Marchand had felt the invisible net tightening behind them. They'd bought third-class tickets for Strasbourg using the last of the forged marks LaRoche had provided. One train, one border, then France. Then Paris. Then the end of this.

Pavel paused at a timetable board near platform three. His hand moved across the glass, not quite touching, the way a man might check for smudges. Then he walked back toward Marchand, his face carefully neutral.

"There is a message," Pavel said, quiet enough that only Marchand could hear. "In the small print of the Strasbourg connection."

"I didn't see you write anything."

"I didn't." Pavel's eyes flicked toward the board. "It was already there. Anna's shorthand. She uses the arrival times. The extra minutes that don't match the actual schedule."

The cold knot in Marchand's stomach tightened. "She's here? In Frankfurt?"

"No. That's the problem." Pavel led him to a bench near the luggage office, positioning them so the kiosk blocked the view of anyone watching from the main entrance. "The message says she was supposed to meet us in Munich. She left early. The day before we arrived."

Marchand absorbed this. His instincts had been humming since the farmhouse, a low-frequency warning that something in the geometry of this mission had shifted. "The Hawk knew we were coming to Munich. If your sister was there..."

"She left before the attack. She's not captured." Pavel said it too quickly, with the defensive edge of a man trying to convince himself. "The message confirms she's alive. She's gone to Strasbourg. The rendezvous point is a bookshop near the cathedral. Saint Thomas Lane."

"That's your plan? We walk into a rendezvous your sister announced on a public timetable board?"

Pavel smiled, thin and tired. "She announced it using a code that only my family knows. The Hawk could read it, but he couldn't twist it. The numbers spell out the address only in our mother's method. It's meaningless to anyone else."

Marchand had heard that kind of confidence before. Men made grand declarations about unbreakable codes and impossible plans, and then the shells started falling, and the code meant nothing because the man carrying it was in pieces.

"If she was supposed to meet us in Munich," he said slowly, "why did she leave early?"

Pavel looked down at his hands. The question hung between them, and for a long moment, Marchand thought he wouldn't answer. Then Pavel spoke, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Because she received a warning. The message says her contact in the university—a professor who helped smuggle documents out of Petrograd—told her that her name was on a list. The same list that killed our father."

"The ledger."

"Yes." Pavel's hands tightened. "The Bolsheviks aren't just hunting for this book. They're hunting for everyone who knows it exists. Anna isn't just trying to meet us. She's in hiding. The message gives her location because she can't stay anywhere longer than three days. She needs us to arrive in Strasbourg before the next full moon."

Marchand did the calculation in his head. "That's four days. We can reach Strasbourg in two if the border holds."

"If the border holds," Pavel echoed. "If the trains run. If no one recognizes a French soldier who was supposed to be dead and a Russian aide who was supposed to be a prince."

The words landed with the precision of a surgeon's knife. Marchand had been so focused on the Hawk, on the immediate threat, that he'd almost forgotten the larger truth: the entire foundation of this journey was built on a lie Pavel had carefully constructed, brick by brick, until Marchand had unknowingly helped him build his own cage.

"You knew," Marchand said slowly. "Before Munich. Before the border. You knew your sister was in danger."

"I knew she was a target. I didn't know how close the Hawk was."

"And you didn't tell me."

Pavel's jaw tightened. "Would it have changed anything? Would you have turned back if you knew there was a woman hiding from the same men who killed my family?"

Marchand had no answer. That was the worst part. He'd been asking himself the same question since the farmhouse, and every time he reached the answer, he backed away from it like a man peering over a cliff edge.

He stood abruptly, adjusting the strap of his satchel. The compass pressed against his ribs, a small metal reminder of the promise he'd made. He'd meant to give it back to Pavel at the Munich safehouse, but the attack had rendered that conversation obsolete. Now it sat in his pocket like a question he couldn't put down.

"We go to Strasbourg," he said. "We find your sister. We deliver you both to Paris, and then my contract is complete."

Pavel looked at him with an expression Marchand couldn't quite read—gratitude, or calculation, or some mixture of both. "And what then? You return to your life as a courier?"

"That's the plan."

"There is no plan, Marchand. There's only what we do next." Pavel pushed himself up from the bench, brushing dust from his coat. "I learned that in the treasury. We thought we had a plan to hold Russia together. We had paper. We had procedures. We had nothing that mattered when the mobs came."

Marchand said nothing. He'd seen empires fall too—the French one had been crumbling his entire life, and he'd helped bury it along with a generation of his countrymen.

They moved toward platform four. The train to Strasbourg was already visible, a dark snaking shape at the far end of the tracks. Marchand did a final scan of the station—the fat man reading a newspaper near the bakery, the young officer buying cigarettes, the woman with two children wrestling a trunk toward the luggage office. None of them seemed interested in two travelers moving with deliberate casualness through the crowd.

But that was the problem with getting old in this profession. You learned to see threats everywhere, and you were usually right.

As they reached the platform edge, Marchand noticed the timetable board reflected in the window of the first-class carriage. His eyes caught something he'd missed before—a small mark in the corner of the Strasbourg listing, no bigger than a thumbnail. A pencil cross, drawn in the same tight hand that had added the phantom minutes to Pavel's schedule.

He was about to mention it when Pavel spoke.

"The cross. You see it?"

Marchand nodded.

"That's not Anna's."

A cold current ran through him. "The Hawk?"

"No." Pavel's voice had gone flat, stripped of its usual careful charm. "That's someone else. Someone who knows Anna's code. Who knows this station. Who knows we'd be here."

Pavel turned to face him, and for the first time since the farmhouse, Marchand saw true fear in the Russian's eyes.

"The professor who warned Anna. He was the only other person who knew this route." Pavel's voice dropped. "If he left that mark, it means he didn't betray us. It means he followed us here. It means he's the one who's been watching all along."

The train whistle screamed. Marchand felt the compass shift against his ribs, and the hairline crack he'd been carefully ignoring split a little wider.

"Your professor," he said. "What's his name?"

Pavel opened his mouth to answer, and the train thundered past, swallowing his words in a roar of iron and steam.