The days that followed blurred together in a haze of smoke, command briefings, and the constant thud of artillery in the distance. Stalingrad groaned under the weight of war, its streets a graveyard of rubble and steel, its air a choking soup of ash and frost.
Christian moved through it all like a man haunted. Every echo of boots, every flicker of a shadow in a doorway, carried Müller's voice: I know where your heart is.
At night, Christian lay on a cot in the quarters assigned to him, sleep coming only in fractured bursts.
He saw Kristina's face in dreams, pale and flickering like a candle on the verge of dying. He saw, his father barking orders at young German soldiers, his mother's worn hands and Katia's quiet smile. He would wake in a sweat, heart hammering, certain someone had whispered his name from the darkness.
By day, he was paraded through Stalingrad's hidden nerve centers and rooms tucked beneath shattered factories, tunnels carved into the earth itself where officers bent over maps. He was the returning ghost, the man who had walked into the Kremlin and lived. Their eyes weighed him with both awe and suspicion.
Canaris kept him close, though always at arm's length. The Admiral's questions came like pinpricks, casual but precise, probing for truths Christian dared not speak. Müller, of course, was never far. Always watching. Always silent until his words could wound the deepest.
One evening, Canaris summoned him again. The Admiral was hunched over a map table, the lamplight painting his features in hard relief. His finger traced the Volga like a surgeon examining a wound.
"The Soviets are preparing for something. You can feel it in the air." His eyes flicked to Christian. "Tell me, did you notice any indication of an offensive? A great push?"
Christian hesitated. He had noticed the tightening of Moscow's machinery, the whispers among the people of a counterstrike.
But to reveal it was to confirm that he had indeed seen more, heard more, than he claimed. He chose his words carefully. "I saw the paranoia of a man preparing for storms. That is all."
Canaris regarded him for a long moment. The Admiral's gaze was softer than Müller's, but far more dangerous, because it carried understanding. "Storms," he repeated quietly. "Yes. That is the Russian way." Müller, leaning against the far wall, finally spoke.
"Storms do not matter. Only the man at their center. Stalin is alive, and until he falls, nothing changes. Tell me, Christian, did you have the chance to kill him?"
The question dropped like a blade. Christian's pulse spiked. He forced his voice steady.
"No. I was intercepted before I could get to him."
Müller's lips curved into something not quite a smile. "Intercepted before. Curious words." The tension thickened until Canaris lifted his hand, cutting it off.
"The Reich will need your services in the coming days. Go and make yourself ready." Dismissed, Christian stepped into the freezing night. Snow fell in fine, silent sheets, softening the jagged ruins. He stood in the street for a long time, the cold biting into his skin, the city around him nothing but rubble and ghosts.
He was trapped between worlds: Stalin's quiet smile, Müller's veiled threat, Canaris' silent calculations. Each demanded a loyalty he could not give. Each held the power to break him.
And in the distance, across the Volga, he heard the thunder of Soviet guns rolling closer.