Page 107 of Shadowfox

They must have found out.

Someone had leaked it—that I’d finished my work, that the machine,mymachine, was no longer theoretical.

I had crossed the line from thinking to knowing.

They knew and were there to clean up the loose end: the man who had built something that could break every cipher they’d ever trusted—the man they no longer needed.

Had this always been their plan? Keep me docile, keep me working, then put me in a ditch once they had what they needed?

Had Eszter’s safety only ever been a leash?

I imagined two men with dull eyes and angry pistols standing at the end of my bed.

I imagined the click of a safety.

I heard the silence of the shot fired through cloth.

My heart roared in my ears.

I pushed my back against the headboard and opened my mouth to scream—

As a voice sliced through the dark.

Hervoice. It was soft, oddly familiar, clearly urgent.

“Ne bougez pas, Docteur.”

Don’t move, Doctor.

I did anyway, recoiling against the headboard, my breath rasping and spine locking up as though it expected bullets.

“C’est nous,” she said again. “Nous sommes ici pour vous sortir de là.”

They were here to get me out? In the middle of the night? With Soviet guards everywhere?

My mouth opened, then closed.

A pulse throbbed in my ears, drowning out the rest of the world. The pair’s silhouettes were darker than the darkness itself.

But they were real.

They were actually there.

“I . . . I do not believe you,” I whispered, my French as broken as my voice. “For all I know, you are Soviets, testing me.”

“Of course, they would test you,” the woman said. “But they would not know the phrase.”

I squinted, heart hammering against my ribs like it wanted out. “The phrase?”

“The last word of your message,” she said. “You used it to test us when Lark first approached you. Do you remember? A single letter misplaced in the cipher. You thought we wouldn’t notice, but our people did.”

My throat tightened. My fingers curled into the bedsheet.

“What . . . what was it?”

The woman stepped forward, just enough for the moonlight to catch her cheekbone, her jaw. Recognition landed like a fist to my chest.

She smiled, a small, patient thing, almost sad.

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