Alliance. Alliance above family. Alliance above comfort. Alliance above herself. Because she believed, down to her soul, that it wasthroughAlliance she would be able to reclaim those things. Through Alliance she’d give them all a world worth living in.
So he waited, like he’d done in the kitchen of the house in Vichy. On the seaside cliff outside the villa. In a bistro in Marseille. In his own mother’s kitchen. He waited to see where her heart would lead her.
He saw when she’d reached a decision but couldn’t read what it was, not even as she marched over to him, not even when she pulled his head down and pressed a short, hard kiss to his lips. Not even when she pulled away to look into his eyes.
“You’re not joining the Maquis, Marcel,” she said, somehow bothla patronneand his shooting star as she said it. “I need you here. With me. I need you challenging me and encouraging me and telling me what Ineed, not what I want. I need you playing the piano when I’m anxious and praying with me when I try to do everything myself. I need you here, beingyou, because I can’t be me anymore without you.”
“Ah,cher.” He shook his head, but his lips had no choice but to smile. “You were you before you met me. You’d be you no matter what. But if you want me by your side, then that’s exactly where I’ll be. There’s only one problem with your demands.”
She lifted her face toward his, undoing him with the gleam of moisture in her eyes. “What’s that?”
“There’s no piano here for me to play for you.”
Laughing, Zelie buried her face in his neck. “We’ll fix that.” And then she pressed her lips to the hollow at the base of his neck and said the words he’d always hoped but never dared to believe she’d say.“Je t’aime.”
Twenty-Four
28 SEPTEMBER 1942
Zelie blinked at Léon where he sat across from her, trying to wrap her mind around all he’d brought with him from his trip to London. He’d met with MI6, sat in on several meetings, and even gone to Algiers again before another Lysander had dropped him back off last night. “You’re certain?”
Léon nodded. “The invasion of North Africa is definitely going to happen. Sooner rather than later.”
Zelie let out a long breath through her lips. Part of her must have thought that this thing, this linchpin Navarre had always insisted would prove key, would fall through again. “Who do they want to lead the French troops? De Gaulle?” If so, Navarre would be rolling over in his grave.
But Léon shook his head. “Giraud.”
“Giraud?” she echoed, incredulous. Yes, General Giraud had escaped rather spectacularly from the Nazi prison he’d been held in since the start of the war, which had landed him in the public eye back when she first brought Marcel into Alliance. He’d settled with his wife in the Free Zone and was technically under housearrest. She’d had no trouble sneaking in to sound out whether he’d be open to working with the Allies on said proposed invasion before Léon went to London, telling herself that her first glimpse of him in Vichy, when he’d barked at her for being in his way, was just a fluke.
It clearly hadn’t been. And she’d rather thought Giraud’s response to her proposal—that he would work with the Americans but not the British, and only if they agreed to a simultaneous attack on French soil—would have been a nonstarter.
Léon shrugged, with his hands as much as his shoulders. “They insist he’s the only one all the French troops will rally to. Vichy doesn’t respect de Gaulle. And Giraud outranks him by two stars, as well you know.”
She paced to the window and looked out at the landscape. Autumn was creeping in. It would soon be a year since she took Marcel to meet her children, a year since they got the word that Navarre would be executed.
And he was only the first. Not the last. Every Alliance agent captured in occupied France met the same fate, while those held in Free France were left to rot in prisons.
Her stomach twisted. Another bit of news she’d received today said that, for some reason, Lucien Vallet had been transferred to an Abwehr facility in Paris. She didn’t know why, but when the German intelligence arm got involved, it couldn’t be good. She dreaded the news sure to come soon that he, too, had been executed.
Focus, Zelie. One problem at a time.She turned back to Léon, though she stayed beside the window. The light pouring through it spilled warm and comforting on her shoulders. “I grant their point in principle, but did you tell them everything he said when we met with him?”
Giraud was... she didn’t even have a word strong enough.Arrogantwas a start, but it couldn’t quite capture it. He honestlybelieved that he would singlehandedly lead the Allies to victory. Not only the French troops—allof them. Despite not having been in a battle since spring of 1940. Despite the soldiers out there now not having a clue who he was. Despite the fact that neither British nor American forces were likely to hand over so much control to any Frenchman at this point. She thought for sure they’d laugh him off and she’d have heard the last of his name.
Apparently not.
Léon nodded. “I did. They weren’t deterred, only determined toconvincehim they were agreeing with his requests—on the no-British stipulation, anyway. They insisted he’d see reason about the invasion once they got him to North Africa.”
Quite an assumption.
But it wasn’t her job to question the military minds, and according to MI6, this had come directly from all the brass in both England and the United States. “All right. They want Giraud. What’s our role in it?”
Léon’s expression said she wasn’t going to like the answer. “They’re tasking us with getting him to the submarine being sent to pick him up.”
She could only gape at him. In a way, it was exactly the sort of thing Navarre had wanted them to do—but not the sort of thing they knewhowto do, much as they hadn’t had the training to break their leader out of jail. “MI6 is aware, is it not, that we are intelligence gatherers? We’re not the Brits’ new commandos, specially trained for this sort of thing.”
“Well,” Léon said, unfolding his long legs from the chair and rising, “we’ve got less than six weeks to sort it out. They’re looking for an early November extraction.”
Her exhale sounded dangerously close to despair.
