He froze at her voice, his nerves jangling like a trill between joy and anxiety. When he turned from the back door he’d been approaching, he saw Zelie standing on the stairs, halfway down, hand resting on the railing.
René motioned toward the door. “I’ll wait outside. Too hot in here.”
“I don’t imagine I’ll be long,” he muttered toward his musician. He turned toward the stairs, more than a little surprised when Zelie pivoted and climbed back up them rather than tell him whatever she needed to tell him there in the public space.
But she led him to the third floor—the heat rising with every step, despite the transoms open to allow air to flow—and into one of the rooms.
Office, not bedroom. Whatever furniture had once been in the chamber had been replaced with desks, tables, a corkboard, and filing cupboards.
He expected her now to motion him toward the bare wooden chair shoved against the wall, but again she surprised him. She closed the door behind them, moved to stand in front of him... and wrapped her arms around his middle, pressing her cheek to his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Because his arms always had a life of their own where she was concerned, they closed around her, even as his mind scrambled to make sense of it—the embrace, her words, something.
No such luck. “Ah... tell you what?”
She tilted her head back to meet his gaze. One note of amusement sang out its high melody in her eyes, but beneath it was a chord low and somber. “Gabriel.”
Reality crashed through the momentary haze of perfection. He saw again Anne’s form, shaking with sobs in the corner booth of a bistro he’d never visited before, where neither of them would be known. The newspaper clipping she’d passed his way, proclaiming that the “traitorous opera singer” had been executed. He heard her quiet agony. The recriminations in his own mind.
The sound of his best friend’s laugh, his voice calling out a tease to a pretty girl or going deep with a line of music.Gabriel.Perhaps the most talented baritone of their generation. Gone.
Gone because Marcel had involved him in this fight. Gone because Marcel’s cousin had chosen himself over the rest of them. Gone because they hadn’t known how to free him from the Gestapo prison in Paris. Gone, because that was what happened to spies caught by the Nazis.
Marcel’s hands flexed against Zelie’s back, his gaze sweepingto the side and dropping. “I did tell you.” In the report he’d given Rivière when he’d returned from Paris. Via a letter, exactly like she’d told him to do with all his news.
She pounded a fist softly against his chest but didn’t step away. “You think I wouldn’t want to hearthatin person?”
Resentment flared momentarily. Then it banked into the all-too-familiar sorrow. He met her gaze again. “Zelie, if every loss was given to you in person, you’d have a constant stream of agents in this room, and you’d be so devastated you wouldn’t be able to function.”
She had to insulate herself.Hadto, because none of them could afford for her to be out of commission. And successful as Alliance was recently, their numbers soaring over a thousand with the new structure that letanyonebring in other agents, there werealwaysarrests. Always raids on one location or another. Always news coming of someone being caught or killed.
Her eyes sparked. “This isn’t just one more loss, Marcel.”
“Because you met him? Or because he’s the first to be executed because of Emile?”
Now she pushed away, out of his arms. She paced two steps before running into her desk chair and then spun back, eyes blazing now. “Because he’s your best friend!”
Does that even matter to you?He didn’t say the words, not aloud. But she must have read them on his face. Must have answeredYes, because she strode right back over and embraced him again.
Taking comfort or giving it? Or were the two so intertwined it was a useless distinction?
He rested his cheek against the top of her head and accepted the offering, prayed that giving it was a solace for her.
She cared. Even if not like he wanted her to, she cared. She mourned with him, not because of what Gabriel’s loss meant to Alliance but because of what it meant tohim. “He used to infuriate the conductors at the conservatory,” he whispered into herhair. “They placed him in the baritone section because it was his strength, but he could sing tenor and bass as easily. Such a range! He’d always lower some lines by an octave. Or raise others. Just to see them glower at him.”
What was that little breath? Laughter, tears? Or was that another useless distinction? “I wish I’d been there with you. Accepted the offer to come. I wish I’d known him longer, met you then, before...”
Before she’d met Jacques and given up her dreams for the ones he told her she should dream instead? Marcel stroked a hand over her hair. “I wish you could have been too, but still somehow turned out exactly as you are now, complete with those two amazing children. With this role. You were born for more than a music career,mon amour. For more than me. You were born forthis.”
Her fingers bunched in his shirt. “Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Loveme?” She pressed her face into his shoulder, hiding it from him. “I don’t deserve it.”
“Oh,mon étoile.None of us deserves love—not until love has already done its work in us. It’s why we must rely on the blessing, the mercy of God loving us first.”
She shook her head, but at least she lifted it again so he could see her face. “You deserve better than me. And yet I selfishly want to keep you close, because you make me better.”
