Carcassonne Outskirts, Liberated France - January 1944
The rain was particularly heavy that day. Despite it, the smell of smoke and blood still hung in the air—iron and ash, the signature scent of war that no amount of water could wash away.
Captain Wolfgang von Witzland stood in the barn doorway watching his men work, not participating, just observing. The kind of detachment he'd learned somewhere between Ostalia and here, between the officer he'd been trained to be and the man this war had made him. The catch of the day was valuable—an SS Lieutenant Colonel named Gustav Weber, architect of atrocities, bureaucrat of murder.
SS Lieutenant Colonel Gustav Weber hung from the rafters by his wrists, toes barely touching the ground. The Butcher of Carcassonne. Five hundred civilians executed under his command—methodically, efficiently, with precision applied to mass murder. Wolfgang's mathematics had become brutally simple over the past three years: five hundred lives reduced to one life suspended from rope, and somehow the equation still refused to balance.
"Sir." Corporal Kurt—Ravaran-born, Hanseatic by adoption, his village ash now—didn't quite look at Wolfgang as he spoke. "We could make this quick." A pause. "Or we could make it fair."
Fair. The word almost made Wolfgang laugh, though nothing about the sound would have been mirthful. Nothing about this war had been fair since they'd crossed the border into France to liberate it from the Reich's iron grip. He wouldn't be here at all if Germany hadn't been so hell-bent on conquest and expansion, if the Führer's ambitions hadn't finally forced even neutral Hansa to choose sides.
He definitely wouldn't be here if he hadn't stood over Viviane's body in a Carcassonne alley three months ago, reading an SS execution report like it was a mundane document. Resistance sympathizer. Summarily executed. Heil Hitler!
This man had signed that report with a flourish that suggested pride in work well done.
"Captain von Witzland." Gustav Weber's voice trembled, and blood streaked his face—courtesy of the men who'd captured him, who perhaps hadn't been as restrained during the arrest as regulations required. "The Geneva Conventions—"
"Don't apply to SS formations," Wolfgang cut him off quietly, his voice carrying the exhaustion of a thousand similar conversations with men who suddenly discovered principles when facing consequences. "You declared yourselves outside its protection when you started executing civilians. And Germany never ratified the Conventions anyway. I'm merely following your own jurisprudence, Lieutenant Colonel."
The fear was visible in the prisoner's eyes now. Real fear, perhaps the first genuine emotion Weber had felt in years of reducing human lives to paperwork and statistics.
Wolfgang should stop this. He knew it with the clarity that comes from good training and good breeding. An intelligence captain was already en route from Theodosia—Kylian, probably, with his measured questions and his careful documentation, his belief that even war could be conducted with honor intact. The prisoner was valuable. Command had been explicit: secure and transfer for interrogation.
But Kurt's village had been burned to foundations when the Germans occupied it. Sergeant Dietrich's fiancée had been shot in the town square, along with Private Hans's entire family—mother, father, three younger brothers—executed because someone had cut a telegraph wire and the SS needed to demonstrate consequences.
Five hundred people. This man had reduced them to statistics in reports filed in triplicate. An entire community liquidated with administrative efficiency, every name checked off a list with the same care one might use for inventory. And this was just one village, one operation. How many others had Weber overseen? How many more reports had he signed?
"Killing me won't change anything, von Witzland," Weber said, voice tight with pain and desperate calculation. "The Hanseatic Empire has treaties with the Reich. Postwar settlements depend on—"
"On what?" Wolfgang interrupted, and his voice sounded strange even to himself. Distant. Like it belonged to someone else entirely, someone he used to know. "On pretending this didn't happen? On processing you through proper channels so some tribunal can give you five years in a comfortable prison before you're quietly released for 'good behavior'?" He paused, watching Weber's expression shift as the man recognized that Wolfgang understood exactly how these things worked. "Or on making sure the people who did this understand there are consequences? Real consequences, not paperwork."
Corporal Kurt had picked up a knife from the workbench. Not threatening with it yet. Just holding it. Waiting for the order that wouldn't come, for the permission that would be granted through silence.
Three years ago, Wolfgang von Witzland had been a different person. Cheerful. Idealistic. The kind of officer who believed in honor and discipline and doing things the right way. He'd read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and imagined himself as one of the heroic generals—loyal, brave, incorruptible, fighting for something larger than himself.
Then he'd seen what empires actually did. Not in books but in burning villages and mass graves and reports that described murder in the sanitized language of bureaucracy. He'd learned that "strategic necessity" was how you spelled atrocity in official documents.
He'd met Viviane during the chaos of the German invasion of Ravara—that Hanseatic exclave squeezed between France and Spain, four hundred kilometers of mountains and ancient fortifications that hadn't been enough to stop the Wehrmacht. She'd been an art student who'd spent two years running supply lines for the Resistance, who spoke six languages and could recite Verlaine from memory, who had survived the occupation through equal parts courage and luck.
They'd had three months together. Three months of pretending the war might end well, that liberation meant something, that love could exist in a world this fundamentally broken.
Weber had taken those three months and reduced them to a line in a file. Resistance sympathizer. Summarily executed. Clinical. Final. Another statistic for his reports.
"Sir?" Kurt's voice was careful, professional, giving Wolfgang the out he needed if he wanted to take it. "Intelligence is expecting him in six hours."
Six hours. Wolfgang could stop this. He could order his men to stand down, could place Weber under proper guard, could file the correct paperwork and let Kylian extract whatever strategic information made the prisoner valuable enough to keep alive.
That was what officers did. What von Witzlands did. Three generations of military service, a duchy in Ostalia, a family name that meant something throughout the empire. He could live up to that legacy. Be the officer his father trained him to be, the son his mother believed in, the friend Kylian thought he still was.
Or he could turn around and walk out of this barn.
Outside, winter rain had started falling harder—the same cold rain that had been falling the day they'd found Viviane. Wolfgang remembered kneeling in that alley, holding her hand while medics worked pointlessly, watching rainwater dilute the blood pooling on ancient cobblestones. He'd read the SS report later, obtained through channels that weren't entirely legal. Professional. Thorough. Signed by Gustav Weber with that same flourish, that same pride.
Five hundred people. Viviane was just one number in that accounting, one line item in Weber's efficient cataloging of murder.
"I need some air," Wolfgang said finally, his voice flat. "I'll be checking the perimeter. Make sure the prisoner is... secure."
He didn't look at Kurt's face. Didn't need to. They both understood what "secure" meant when your captain walked out of the room and closed the door behind him, when he gave you time and privacy and plausible deniability.
The rain was cold against his face. Wolfgang stood in the muddy farmyard and listened to the sounds from the barn—low voices in Hanseatic, then Weber's voice rising in German, the words indistinct but the tone unmistakable. Bargaining. Pleading. The tone of a man who had sent five hundred people to their deaths with a signature and now couldn't understand why the same efficiency was being applied to him.
Then a gunshot. Single. Final.
The sound echoed across the empty fields and died in the rain. Weber was dead now. No doubt about it. Quick. Clean. More mercy than he'd shown Viviane, more mercy than he'd shown any of the five hundred names in his reports.
Wolfgang told himself that mattered. That the speed of it made a difference. That there was a meaningful distinction between execution and murder, between justice and revenge, between what he'd allowed and what he would have done himself.
He wasn't sure he believed it anymore
Wolfgang should have stopped it. He was the officer. He had the authority. One order and his men would have stood down, would have secured the prisoner properly, would have preserved the intelligence asset that High Command needed for the broader strategic picture.
Instead, Wolfgang walked the perimeter. Slowly. Methodically. The way a good officer should, checking sightlines and approach vectors and all the practical things that mattered when you were pretending this was about security rather than deliberately giving your men time to finish what they'd started.
Somewhere in Theodosia, Kylian was probably preparing for whatever social function required attendance tonight—those embassy receptions where the Chinese princess played her guqin and everyone pretended politics and romance didn't intersect in ways that could destroy careers and dynasties. Wolfgang had attended one such event on his last leave, had watched his best friend stand at careful protocol distance from Princess Changning, maintaining every proper form while obviously consumed by feelings he couldn't acknowledge publicly. Wolfgang had marveled at how Kylian still believed in doing things properly, in following rules that were designed to make impossible situations bearable.
He understood why Kylian clung to those protocols now. His friend was in love with someone he could never publicly have. He'd seen the truth in the way Kylian's rigid posture softened for a fraction of a second when the Princess entered a room, in the coded messages passed off as official correspondence. Their torture was a shared one, hidden behind embassy walls and court etiquette, but it was a torture built on a foundation of something real. At least Kylian had that—the secret certainty that the love was mutual, however impossible their situation. At least Kylian's torture was clean, civilized, contained within embassy walls and court etiquette. At least he had hope, however slim, that somehow circumstances might change, that love might find a way.
Wolfgang had nothing but rain and mud and the knowledge that Viviane was never coming back, that no amount of revenge would change that fundamental fact.
Maybe that was the difference between intelligence work and combat. Kylian's moral compromises happened in clean rooms with paperwork and careful negotiations. Wolfgang's happened in barns where rain drummed on tin roofs and drowned out sounds that courts-martial were built to prosecute.
The barn had gone quiet by the time Wolfgang completed his circuit of the perimeter. He didn't go back inside. Kurt emerged twenty minutes later, face carefully blank, uniform spattered with what might have been rain or might have been something else.
"Prisoner attempted escape, sir," Kurt reported in the flat tone of a man reciting lines from a script they'd both memorized. "We were forced to use necessary force to prevent his departure. Unfortunately, the situation escalated beyond our control."
The lie was perfunctory, pro forma. They both knew it. So would the inquiry board when they convened, though Wolfgang's family name and his father's connections would ensure the investigation concluded with appropriately vague findings. Self-defense. Tragic but justified use of force. The kind of language that made murder sound like policy, that transformed revenge into acceptable military conduct.
"Understood," Wolfgang said, his voice empty. "File the report. I'll countersign it."
There would be consequences, of course. An inquiry, probably a court-martial for form's sake. His father would intervene, as fathers of great houses always did, leveraging centuries of family service and political capital. Wolfgang would receive a reprimand, possibly a transfer to a less combat-focused posting, nothing that would truly end his career or permanently stain the von Witzland name.
The system protected its own. That was the whole problem, really—the system always protected its own, whether that meant SS officers filing reports about murdered civilians or Hanseatic captains who looked away while their men took revenge in muddy barns. Different uniforms, different flags, same fundamental truth: the powerful made rules that never seemed to apply when inconvenient.
Three years ago, Wolfgang had believed the difference between liberation and occupation was obvious, that one side fought for freedom while the other brought only tyranny. Now he understood they were just different words for the same violence, distinguished only by which flag you flew while committing it and which language you used to justify the atrocities.
Intelligence would be furious about losing Weber. Kylian would probably be the one to file the official complaint—professional, measured, explaining exactly how much strategic value had been sacrificed for revenge that changed nothing and helped no one. He'd be right, too. Weber's death wouldn't bring back five hundred civilians. Wouldn't bring back Viviane. Wouldn't change the course of the war or make the peace any cleaner or prevent the next Weber from signing the next set of execution orders.
All it changed was Wolfgang's ability to look at himself in a mirror without flinching.
But he'd already lost that ability somewhere between here and Carcassonne, between the idealistic officer who'd arrived in Beijing three years ago and the man who now stood in French rain, complicit in murder.
The rain fell harder. Wolfgang stood in it, letting water soak through his uniform, and tried to remember what honor felt like. Tried to remember the cheerful young captain who'd gone fishing in moonlit Chinese streams, who'd laughed about the absurdity of ducal responsibilities, who'd believed wars were fought to defend the innocent rather than to create new categories of victim.
That person was dead. Gustav Weber had helped kill him, though not directly—just through accumulation. One atrocity, one report, one murdered innocent at a time, until the weight of it crushed whatever had been decent and left only this hollow thing that looked like an officer but felt like a ghost.
Somewhere in this broken continent, diplomats were negotiating the peace. Drawing new borders. Establishing buffer states and zones of influence. Creating the postwar order that would pretend none of this had happened, that would bury the bodies under treaties and reparations and carefully worded acknowledgments of "regrettable excesses." Burgundy would become a kingdom, occupied France would become liberated France, and men like Wolfgang would transition from liberators to administrators of empire.
Viviane would still be dead. Weber would still be dead. And Wolfgang would still be standing in the rain, trying to wash away the knowledge that he'd become exactly what this war needed him to be—not a hero, not even really a soldier anymore, just another man capable of turning away while violence happened in barns.
In a few months, the war would probably be over, maybe it will take a few more years but that wasn't his concern. In a month, his father would successfully quash the court-martial through connections and influence. In six months, Wolfgang would be promoted, because the system rewarded useful men, and he had learned how to be very useful indeed.
He just wished it didn't feel so much like drowning.
The rain continued. Inside the barn, Weber's body hung from the rafters, and somewhere far away, Kylian stood in a palace ballroom, maintaining a fiction of distance from the woman he loved. One man was dying from the violence he had allowed; the other was being eroded by the love he had to conceal. Two different kinds of torture, two different kinds of slow death.
At least Kylian's left him human.
Wolfgang wasn't sure he could say the same anymore.