To the Reich, Paris had been conquered and subdued, but, it had become a stage of masks.
By day, German flags fluttered from balconies and patrols marched with arrogant precision through the boulevards. By night, whispers spread through the veins of the city hidden presses, coded notes, sabotage in shadows.
Christian had been ordered to remain when Müller dispatched other agents to London. "You are needed here. London is noise, but Paris is rot. Find the roots of this resistance and tear them out."
And so he stayed, walking the city like a surgeon with a scalpel.
He interrogated innkeepers and railway clerks. He raided cellars where pamphlets were printed on stolen ink. He pulled information from frightened mouths with bribes and threats alike.
Still, the resistance was like smoke in his hands. Each time he thought he had cornered it, it dissolved, reshaping itself elsewhere. Paris breathed rebellion, quiet but relentless.
And in the still hours of night, when the river whispered beneath the bridges, Christian felt the weight of futility. For all his precision, all his training, he was not hunting men; he was hunting a shadow. And shadows did not die so easily.
It was in such a night, cold with autumn winds, that the message reached him. Delivered not by courier but left where only he could find it—slipped beneath the door of his rented flat, pressed in handwriting he knew but could hardly believe.
"Come to the Chapel of Saint-Séverin alone. Midnight. — S"
Christian stared at the parchment for a long time.
Sébastien. Always Sébastien. He had become more than an enemy he was a phantom voice in Christian's mind, a rival yet strangely a conscience.
But this, this carried something different.
Something personal. And though reason warned against it, Christian went.
The church of Saint-Séverin lay hunched in the Latin Quarter, its Gothic arches like ribs of a sleeping beast. Inside, the candles flickered against stone walls, their light trembling like fragile hope.
Sébastien stood near the altar, half-shrouded in shadow, his posture calm but watchful. Christian's hand hovered near his pistol. "If this is a trap…"
"It isn't," Sébastien interrupted softly. Then he stepped aside, his gesture almost reverent.
From the shadows emerged a figure. She moved slowly, but with a grace that struck him like a blade to the heart. Her hair, pale as wheat, caught the candlelight. Her eyes… yes, those eyes, unmistakable, haunting met his, and the world fell away.
Kristina.
For a long moment, neither spoke. Christian's throat tightened, words strangled before they could form. Finally, she broke the silence, her voice like music from another life. "Christian."
He took a step forward, unsteady. "I… thought you were gone."
"I was," she said simply. "But ashes remember the fire." The years between them vanished. He reached out, and she did not retreat. His hands found hers—cold, trembling but alive.
And then, slowly, Kristina opened her palm. Resting there, dull yet unmistakable, was a silver ring.
Christian's chest tightened. He knew it instantly, the band he had given her in that quiet spring before the world fell apart. The ring of his promise, once slipped onto her finger in a sunlit meadow beyond Königsberg.
"Do you remember?" she asked.
He did. Every detail. The smell of the grass, the warmth of her hand, the way she had laughed through her tears when he whispered the words of proposal.
I have nothing but my name, Kristina. But if you will have it, it will be yours until the end of all things.
"I kept it," she whispered now. "Even when I thought you dead. Even when I wanted to forget. It reminded me of who we were. Of who you were."
His eyes burned. He lifted the ring with trembling fingers, pressing it back against her hand. "And who are you now?"
Her gaze did not falter. "A woman who fights. For my family, for this city, for the freedom you've helped to chain."
Christian swallowed hard, forcing himself to ask the question he had dreaded. "Your family, what of them?"
Kristina's face tightened with grief. "Gone. My father was taken when the Germans first came. My mother followed, sickness in the winter. Only my brother remains, and he fights with the Marquis. Somewhere outside the city."
Her words were knives, and yet she spoke them with a strength that humbled him.
"Kristina…" He wanted to say he was sorry, that he carried guilt enough for all of them. But the words stuck in his throat.
She reached up, her fingertips brushing his cheek. "You're not the boy who promised me forever in that meadow. But he is still there, buried. I see him."
He could not resist her. He pulled her into his arms, and for the first time in years, he allowed himself to feel without calculation, without restraint.
Her warmth filled the void inside him, the cold walls of duty crumbling under the memory of love. "I thought I'd lost you," he murmured into her hair.
"You did," she answered softly. "But some things return. Not as they were, but as they must be."
When they pulled apart, Sébastien's voice drifted from the shadows. "Do not fool yourself, man from Berlin. This path ends in fire. She is resistance. You are Reich. One day, you will be asked to choose, and when that day comes…" He left the thought unfinished, but his eyes carried the weight of prophecy.
Christian ignored him. For once, the world beyond this chapel did not matter.
Kristina lifted her face, and Christian kissed her. It was not the kiss of innocent youth, nor of stolen passion; it was the kiss of survivors, did clinging to what little remain unbroken. It was grief and love and defiance bound into one desperate act.
When at last they parted, her lips trembled. "Promise me only one thing," she whispered. "Don't forget again who you are."
The bell tolled midnight. Kristina stepped back, her hand slipping from his. "Not tonight, Christian. Not yet. But soon." And then she was gone, vanishing into the shadows of Paris like a flame snuffed by wind.
Christian stood alone in the chapel, the candles burning low. His hand lingered on the ring she had shown him, the memory of her kiss still burning on his lips.
And he knew whatever war he had been fighting until now, it had changed.
Paris was no longer merely a battlefield. It was a crucible.