The scar still burned on Christian's cheek, though it had scabbed over. Every time he caught sight of himself in the mirror, he saw Sébastien's smirk. The Frenchman had left his mark not only on his face, but deep in his pride.
Herr Müller's voice still hissed in his mind: "Berlin is watching."
Failure was not permitted and so Christian swore he would not fail again.
He would turn Paris into a Cage
The crackdown began quietly. Lists were drawn up, compiled from whispers, informants, and the unfortunate courier who had not escaped Christian's reach after all. Torture had loosened his tongue. Addresses, names, meeting places of the underground all spilled in a river of blood and broken teeth.
At first the Gestapo men in Paris thought Christian was overreaching. But his precision stunned them. He struck safe houses one after another, raiding apartments at dawn, dragging men and women screaming into the street.
By nightfall, the streets of Paris smelled of sweat and urine from the cells filled to bursting.
Yet Sébastien remained a shadow.
But the Gestapo got a tip-off. Rue des Martyrs housed some resistance fighters.
Christian led the raid himself, storming an apartment said to house an underground printer. The Abwehr men kicked in the door, shots fired into the ceiling to scatter resistance.
Inside, two young men tried to burn leaflets before they were seized. Christian smashed one of them across the face with his pistol. Blood spattered against the wall, a smear across a poster of Marianne; France's liberty personified, now smeared in red.
"Where is Sébastien?" Christian hissed in French.
They spat at him, even with blood filling their mouths. One laughed, even as he was dragged away. Christian ordered both executed in the stairwell. Their bodies tumbled down the stone steps, thudding like broken dolls.
When the Christian began to burn the network, the city felt it. One by one, nodes of the resistance network fell silent. Messengers did not return. Meeting places were already compromised. Christian's cruelty worked like poison, the underground began to wither from fear.
But Christian wasn't satisfied. It was not Sébastien.
Every night he returned to the same thought: He's watching. He's laughing. He's waiting. And so Christian pushed further.
Paris still clung to its cafés, even under German boots. In Montmartre, Christian walked into one such café without disguise, pistol under his coat. The patrons froze as the Abwehr entered behind him.
Christian scanned the room, and then his gaze locked onto a young woman with ink-stained fingers. She froze.
Without a word, Christian dragged her by the hair into the street. He demanded names, demanded locations. When she refused, he ordered her throat cut in front of the gathering crowd. The blood pooled on the cobblestones, steaming in the autumn air. The café emptied silently, its windows shuttered.
Paris was learning: no whisper, no poem, no pamphlet was worth the risk.
Herr Müller sent a coded message of approval: "Excellent. The people must fear. But remember, fear alone does not kill. Find Sébastien. End this."
Christian read the message again and again. Müller was right. These raids, these killings, were only sharpening the city into silence. But the shadow he hunted remained. And it gnawed at Christian's sanity.
One night, as he returned to his quarters, he found a folded paper tucked beneath his door. No seal. No signature. Just a few words written in French:
"I am still here man from Berlin. – S"
Christian's hand shook as he crushed the note.
The bloodbath, the arrests, the executions all of it meant nothing. Sébastien was not only alive, but taunting him, slipping through the cracks like smoke.
The game was no longer espionage.
It was obsession. Christian swore to himself then: If Paris had to burn, he would burn it, so long as Sébastien burned with it.