Zelda sat in her room with Charlotte, the two women sharing a tense silence in front of the fireplace. The flickering flames cast long shadows across the room, dancing on the ornate wallpaper and reflecting off the dark wooden furniture. Zelda thought there were too many fireplaces in this house, each one an ostentatious display of wealth. Thankfully the chairs were comfortable, their plush cushions a small comfort in an otherwise stultifying atmosphere.
She sipped her tea, the cup jittering slightly in her hand as she tried to sound normal. “Did you know that the Reich actually charges the family of the condemned for his execution? And I do mean for the entire cost, including printing out an itemized bill.”
Charlotte sat stiffly, her back ramrod straight and her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Pallid to begin with, exhaustion had sapped her of what color remained until she looked almost corpselike. Her face was drawn with pain and, Zelda worried, what might be disgust. “We’re not going to talk about that right now,” she warned, her gaze sharpening.
“With you,” Zelda groused, “there’s never a good time to discuss serious things.”
Charlotte’s snort held the faintest hint of amusement. “Pot, meet kettle.”
The part of Zelda that wasn’t a toddler knew she should take the olive branch. But her heart twisted at the sight of her sister’s distress and, in her mind, there was one man to blame. He was downstairs with August, the rest of this so-called dinner party having wisely cleared out. She couldn’t shake the image of Charlotte being crushed under Klaus’s boot, her individuality snuffed out. The specter of her own relationship with August, already fraught with differences, brought a lump to her throat that she couldn’t swallow down. If she and August struggled so much, what chance did Charlotte have with a man who openly didn’t respect her?
So, against her better judgment, Zelda put her cup and saucer down on the ottoman and leaned forward. “You’re living in La La Land,” she insisted, her eyes searching her sister’s. “And that is relevant, because you want me to do the same.” Except, in her mind’s eye, Zelda didn’t see some kingdom of imagination but The Masque of the Red Death. Everyone waltzed in circles, their costumes hiding the suppurating sores of plague. “You can’t just weld the door shut and hope for the best! Reality will intrude, eventually, whatever you and your prince tell yourselves.”
Charlotte flinched like she’d been struck. “Reality intruded, when I was attacked.”
Zelda opened her mouth, then shut it again, her eyes widening in horrified realization. She averted her gaze, her fingers twisting nervously the edge of her sleeve, as if hoping to find solutions in its scalloped edge. “You’re right,” she sighed, her guilt pressing the exhalation from her chest. “I didn’t mean that how it came out, I just….” She trailed off, the words catching in her throat. Klaus was insecure and controlling, and that was when he behaved! “I’m just scared,” she mouthed, scalding tears carving tracks down her cheeks.
Charlotte’s tiny smile was like the briefest glimmer of sunlight through a thunderhead. “Hormones?”
Zelda dropped her head, her shoulders slumping. “Life is the worst.”
Reaching across the space between them, her sister took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Sometimes,” she allowed, her voice a soothing balm. “But not all surprises are bad, even the ones that seem bad at first.” Her gaze grew distant, as her smile deepened. “When I met Klaus, I thought it really was the end of the world. No pestilence could compete with the one who’d materialized in front of me, in uniform.” She issued a soft, self-deprecating chuckle. “You remember.”
“You always did want to be Cinderella,” Zelda agreed, the tension easing slightly.
“No one ever thinks to ask what Prince Charming does for a day job,” Charlotte pointed out. There was a teasing edge to her assertion and that, of course, was the miraculous thing about her: no matter how bad things got, she never lost her sense of humor. Klaus hadn’t cowed her into submission, nor was she as blind to his faults as Zelda feared, merely forgiving of them. She was just that good. Maybe, Zelda reasoned, she needed someone who wasn’t.
Even so, this whole situation was for the birds. “Snow White married her stalker, too!” Zelda shook her head. “No one understood that, either, which would make me feel pretty alone in your position, but I’d be an even worse sister if I high-fived you for taking up with an amoral zealot who stands for everything you were raised to despise. His literal job is that he eradicates enemies of the state, with no due process or civil rights. Meaning that what Bill was executed for, he does every day. You might not have seen him mowing hapless civilians into ditches, but you know he’s bad news.”
Charlotte’s expression clouded as she absorbed Zelda’s censure. “And he’s my person.” That simple, quiet statement carried a world of resignation. “I can’t help who I love.”
Throwing herself back into her chair, Zelda stared at the ceiling, her mind racing with the day’s events. “I know,” she conceded, wishing that Charlotte’s obsession with Klaus bewildered her more than it did. “But you didn’t sit there in those stands, listening to your future father-in-law use your engagement as an excuse for barbarism. Then I watched a man lose his head, and felt like I’d time-warped back to the Middle Ages.” Her fingers drummed on the armrest, each tap echoing her frustration. “Bill deserved to die, I get that. But most of the people this state executes aren’t guilty, not of more than asking the wrong questions.”
Charlotte didn’t respond, her gaze still locked on the dancing flames. The silence between them stretched, filled only by the soft crackling of the fire and the weight of unspoken words. “I know,” she conceded finally, the bone-deep weariness in her words matching Zelda’s own.
And Zelda’s wisdom in forcing this issue was, again, debatable—but she’d inexorably arrived at what she thought of as the time of truth, which meant no more tiptoeing through this minefield of inconvenient realities that neither sister wished to discuss. “Of all the men in the world,” she challenged, her voice tinged with desperation, “what makes him so special? He’s hot enough, if you’re into evil Ken dolls, but….” She turned her head, searching Charlotte’s face. “Talking to him feels like balancing my checkbook.”
More laughter bubbled up from Charlotte, who clutched at her stomach and winced.
A giggle escaped from Zelda, too, before her expression once again turned grave. “And he is rich, but….” The sister Zelda knew was a hippie; before the invasion, she’d turned men down for being too materialistic. “You’re making a life with a war criminal. Whatever mental gymnastics you engage in, to overlook that, people are going to assume that you agree with him—with what he believes, and with what he does. Are you prepared for that?”
“I’ve had to face a lot of things I wasn’t prepared for,” Charlotte responded, her gaze steady. “I wasn’t given a choice. But whatever’s wrong with me, and with my love life, at least I’ve been honest.” Her lips compressed into a thin line. “You’ve refused to admit that August was even a friend, although anyone who saw how he looked at you could see something was going on—and how you looked at him!” She groaned, the sound filled with weariness and regret. “Maybe I should’ve pressed the issue, but….” Letting the rest of her thought dwindle into nothing, she shook her head. “I’ve had a lot going on. And I assumed that, if this crush developed into more, you’d tell me. Because,” she added dispiritedly, “we’re best friends.”
Zelda’s gaze dropped to the floor. “I don’t know what happened.”
Charlotte fixed her with a flat look. “Your panties fell off in the archives?”
“There,” Zelda agreed reluctantly, “and in the janitorial closet, and on his desk a bunch of times. And in the bathroom at Burdick’s, in the sorting room at the post office, in the parish office at St. Paul’s when he was arranging Constance’s funeral….” Her face alight with shame, she bit her lip, the taste of regret bitter on her tongue. “I was sad, I needed a distraction!”
Her brows knitting together, Charlotte absorbed this statement, incredulity warring with concern. “Which one of you was too stupid to use birth control?”
“I don’t know!” Zelda threw her hands up, chafing at so much curiosity.
Charlotte arched an eyebrow. “Then what did you think was going to happen?”
“I didn’t think!” The words tumbled out before Zelda could stop them, almost joined by a protestation that her panties hadn’t actually fallen off, anyway not at the café; August had cut them off, with a knife, then wadded them into her mouth. He’d bought her an espresso after, informing her that he was teaching her how to drink grown-up drinks. Later that same week and with—she had to admit—her enthusiastic consent, he’d worked her over with a riding crop.
She’d convinced herself that babies came from couples undulating to Luther Vandross, not things that required the hardware store. Thankfully, the mind-altering substances had been only on his end; he, unlike that self-important banshee Marie-France, would never pressure her into anything. Other than domestic bliss, came the disheartening thought. Was she supposed to play the perfect, happy housewife before or after he suspended her from the ceiling?
Somewhere deep within the fire, a knot blew.
Her and her sister’s positions should be reversed. The so-called children Zelda had dreamed of birthing had been her own fashion designs; she’d never wanted actual flesh and blood offspring at all. Charlotte was the one who’d hosted tea parties for her dolls, while she was off recreating the Oregon Trail, and who was marrying the first man who’d successfully unbuttoned her shirt. Klaus, whose idea of living dangerously was misplacing an instruction manual, had grown up dreaming of the same large family—and now the one thing Charlotte wanted, that would truly make her happy, he couldn’t give her. Charlotte seemed to be making peace with the situation and had spoken hopefully about adoption, which somehow only made Zelda’s guilt worse.
Studying her sister’s face, she reached for her tea. “What will Klaus be like as a father?”
Charlotte’s expression warmed. “Interesting.”
The door opened a moment later, and Klaus himself appeared.
Sitting down on the ottoman, he Zelda with a tight-lipped expression. Then he leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, fingers steepled. “I just spent the last hour with August.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened in alarm. “Is he also still alive?”
“He is,” Klaus replied, although somewhat regretfully. “The experience was profoundly humiliating for me, no doubt to his lasting satisfaction. We spoke in the living room,” he added, as though the words themselves left a sour taste in his mouth. “Or rather I told him what I thought of him while he chain smoked and stared at me, sphinxlike.”
At that mental image, Zelda couldn’t help but snicker.
Klaus’s gaze shifted, turning searchingly intense. “Of all the men in the Reich, in the world, you had to choose him?” Before she had a chance to respond, he waved his hand, his frustration evident in the curt gesture. “Never mind. I think—but of course, it doesn’t matter what I think, does it? I have as little control over what happens in my own home as I do over the weather, and that includes protecting the women I’m responsible for from predators!” His voice rose with each word, anger buoyed on the tide of his own impotence.
Zelda wanted to ask him how he liked this little role reversal, and didn’t.
“I doubt,” Charlotte replied carefully, her voice strained, “that either of them intentionally upset you.”
Klaus addressed his fiancée without turning, his tone tersely dismissive. “Zelda never does anything intentionally, Lottie. And August always does.” He treated her like one of his underlings, someone to be ordered around rather than engaged with. “Not that a man has to be in his thirties, or a doctor, to know how children are conceived—or what a woman’s options are, then.”
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Charlotte shifted uneasily, her eyes darting between Klaus and Zelda, seeking to diffuse the tension. Zelda clenched her fists, her knuckles whitening, as she fought the urge to tell that sanctimonious prick where he could shove his lectures. The only thing worse than his arrogance was his ignorance; he didn’t know the first thing about love or compassion. How her sister put up with his dictatorial bull, she didn’t know, but she wasn’t about to start. She leaned forward, her voice low and venomous. “Women decide what their own options are,” she grated, each syllable clipped.
Klaus’s lips firmed into a flat line. “You think you know everything, don’t you, Zelda?” His voice was a sibilant hiss. “Always so quick to pronounce judgment on the rest of the world, so quick to rebel against whatever rules you don’t understand and that are therefore pointless. Maybe if you spent half as much time thinking about the consequences of your actions as you do on your self-righteous tirades, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Charlotte’s nervous cough broke the silence like a dish shattering on the floor.
With a deep breath, Klaus steadied himself, though the strain showed in his clenched jaw and rigid posture. “August also informed me, in no uncertain terms, that you and he are both consenting adults and whatever relationship you have—or don’t—is none of my business. Somewhere in there, he might’ve called me a Prussian prig and the Führer’s footstool. Nevertheless, from what little constructive conversation we did manage, I gather that the problem is you. He proposed and you declined.” His eyes bore into hers, searching for answers. “Is that, in fact, what happened?”
Zelda hesitated, then deflated. “Yes.”
Klaus blinked, his incomprehension evident. “You want to have a child with August, but not marry him?”
“This was an accident,” Zelda reminded him, somewhat reproachfully.
“We are past that!” Klaus snapped, his scowl deepening.
“I don’t want him marrying me,” Zelda shot back, her voice rising with irritation, “because he feels obligated.”
Klaus's mouth dropped open in disbelief. “Men are supposed to feel obligated!”
Zelda crossed her arms defensively, her chin jutting out. “Is that how you feel about my sister?”
Something malevolent flickered across his face, like a shadow in the firelight—but it vanished as quickly as it appeared, leaving his features deceptively calm. “So this is what you find romantic,” he mused, his tone cold, “a man who cares about nothing and who treats women like disposable objects. That August wants to do his duty is the only positive thing I have to say about someone who has grossly, grossly abused his authority as your employer. It’s bad enough that he’s twice your age, Zelda, this is what other adult men call grooming.”
“Marriage is a relic, regardless,” Zelda insisted, searching for some scrap of logic that’d save her.
“Marriage celebrates the couple’s spiritual bond to their families and to nature,” Klaus countered, his tone firm. “As well as honors the gods. But that’s neither here nor there.” He twisted his stupid death’s head ring on his finger, the same one August wore, which to August signified an act of rebellion and to Klaus represented his entire being. His eyes narrowed, suspicion creeping into his gaze. “Certain other…claims were made. You and I are going to go through them, one by one. And you are going to tell me, and this is vital, whether or not he was telling the truth.” Klaus’s eyes held hers, unyielding, letting his words sink in. “Are we clear?”
She nodded, feeling a cold knot of dread forming in her stomach.
“First.” Klaus’s expression was stern. “This was consensual.”
Zelda blinked, taken aback by the fact that he’d care, but she nodded again. “Yes.”
His suspicion, however, didn’t abate. “From the beginning?”
Drawing her knees to her chest, she wrapped her arms around them protectively. “Yes,” she repeated, her voice steady.
Klaus still didn’t look convinced, but he seemed willing to take her at her word. “You feel…something for each other, however misguided. August calls it love.” His pause was meaningful, although his mouth twisted faintly as he forced himself to continue. “August also informs me that you understand and accept his…interests. And, to some degree, share them.”
Zelda’s face felt hot enough to fry eggs on. She swallowed hard, her throat rasping like sandpaper. “Yes,” she admitted, the single syllable barely audible as she forced it through her lips.
Charlotte’s eyes widened fractionally. “You mean—you’re into that?”
Meeting her sister’s gaze, Zelda didn’t know whether to scream or to sob. “I guess so,” she deadpanned, trying to mask the confusion and humiliation churning within. She’d overheard Charlotte asking Klaus about the rumors, only some of which were true, along with Ingrid’s airy assertions that there were just as many rumors about Klaus.
Klaus lapsed into introspection again, his brow furrowing as he wrestled with his concerns. The air in the room had grown thick, and when another knot blew in the fire, Charlotte jumped. After a decade or so, he seemed to reach some internal conclusion, his expression grave as he stood and walked over to the mantel. Resting his hand on its broad ledge, he stared at the hearth. “August Voight is not well,” he began reluctantly. “Although my father thinks highly of him.”
The slump of Klaus’s shoulders radiated resignation, and he didn’t turn as Charlotte’s gaze flickered to Zelda, brimming with all the questions and admonishments and assurances she couldn’t raise. “You’re far too young to be in this position,” he finished. “Or to truly grasp what being in the power of a creature like him can mean.”
Was that… regret she heard in his voice?
Straightening abruptly, Klaus began to pace the room. His movements were sharp and decisive, his footsteps echoing against the hardwood, each one a testament to his agitation. “Degenerate doesn’t begin to describe the man, or his failings. He’s a loose cannon, dissolute and lecherous, without the slightest allegiance to what I or any sane person would call morals. Nevertheless!” He stopped, turned, and faced her. “August comes from a good family and stands to inherit a sizeable sum, on top of the income he now receives from a trust. He informs me that he can and will support you, and about that much I believe him.”
Zelda knew all about the trust and didn’t care; financial support was the absolute last of her concerns. Klaus struggled to comprehend that women had concerns at all, and Charlotte certainly wouldn’t relate to them, so she sat there making herself as small as possible while she felt more isolated than ever. “Meaning that if a man’s sufficiently rich,” she sneered acidly, “his little foibles don’t matter. Which sums up your family perfectly, doesn’t it?”
“If a man’s sufficiently rich,” Klaus retorted, “that he’s a slave to his vices won’t put his wife out on the street. Which, once again, is not the issue! You have to marry him, which would be my answer regardless of his economic situation. He has a job, praise Odin, which at minimum entitles him to certain support—as well as keeps him within certain boundaries. We’ll all have to hope that that’s enough,” he informed them, as he started pacing again. “We have no choice.”
“I can’t,” Zelda insisted, her voice quavering slightly.
“I sympathize with your doubts,” Klaus responded, more moderately this time, although his tone was still grim. “Even so, I have to find the good in this situation. We all do.”
Charlotte laid a hand on Zelda’s forearm. “Do you love him?”
Zelda’s lower lip started trembling. “Yes.”
Her sister’s confusion was evident in her furrowed brow and tilted head. “Then what’s the problem?”
Zelda’s chest tightened. She didn’t want to lose herself, to become an automaton living a life dictated by the Reich. A future with August felt like surrendering her individuality, her mind, her soul. She fought back the tears threatening to spill over, but her voice cracked as she replied, “I don’t want to be his property!” She hid her face in a pillow, her body shaking with silent sobs.
Charlotte’s hand remained where it was, offering silent comfort, but Zelda could feel the chasm between them widening. To Charlotte, love was the highest form of the law, a bond that transcended all else. But for Zelda, the price of that bond was too steep. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing herself, of becoming yet another mindless automaton, a Stepford Wife who played at pioneer with a damn churn while her husband did God knew what.
“We can’t refuse to live our lives because we don’t like how things are,” Charlotte counseled, her tone unbearably patient and uncomfortably reminiscent of August. “Besides, the Reich’s paternalism is only an issue if your husband is horrible. He decides who he is, as both a man and as a husband and father, not the Führer and not anyone else. The world can’t compel him to be an ass any more than it can compel him to be a decent human being. I mean….”
“What?” Zelda prompted, surprising herself with her own harshness.
“Look at Alex,” Charlotte concluded. “And the choices he’s made.”
Zelda scoffed, her eyes flashing with indignation. “Some of us want more from our lives than being glorified slaves, no matter how well our masters treat us.” She was only eighteen, and the idea that the course of her future had been decided for her by one mistake was unbearable. Feelings could change—August’s or hers—and that would mean a lifetime of misery.
Charlotte burst into tears, next, and Klaus looked like she’d been stabbed all over again.
Returning to the ottoman, he steeled himself for the next question, his voice deceptively calm and measured. “How badly do you want to keep this child?”
“I don’t think,” Charlotte ventured, her voice choked with emotion, “that—
“Please, Lottie,” Klaus murmured, but this time he had the decency to look ashamed of his own impatience.
Zelda’s glare intensified. “I fail to grasp how what I want for my life is any of your business.”
Rubbing the back of his neck, Klaus contemplated her accusation. “Because you think you know the law,” he explained eventually. “And you do—American law. But our law is different, especially on this issue, which August knows. He also knows exactly how much power he wields as a senior officer in the SS, as well as in the Gestapo, a fearsome force in its own right. I meant what I said earlier; he’s a devious and conniving fiend who’s maneuvered you into a situation where survival means accepting one of two choices: marrying him and raising this child together, or entering a Lebensborn clinic and giving it up for adoption.”
“What?” Zelda pressed herself into the chair, in a vain attempt to escape this pronouncement. “No!”
Klaus continued on, ignoring her outburst, his tone mechanical. “August, as the father, will have some rights. He can claim paternity and gain custody, or he can give the child into the custody of the SS. You, however, will have no rights. Is this unjust? I can’t answer that question, nor can I change the law.” He looked exhausted in that moment, his face etched with fatigue. “What I can tell you is that you’re not married, you’re not widowed, and you have no stable home other than what I and Charlotte choose to give you. In the Reich’s eyes, you’re not a fit mother.”
“Go to Hell!” she shouted, her voice cracking with rage and despair.
“In my eyes, as well,” he added quietly, his tone almost apologetic, “this wouldn’t be right—for either you or a child.”
“I’m not going to some clinic!” she wailed, throwing the pillow at his head.
Dodging it, his expression remained stoic, although his eyes reflected a mixture of pity and sufferance even more grating than his earlier exasperation. Zelda had ruined her own life and she was coming perilously close to ruining her sister’s, which she’d been too naïve to see. Charlotte cared about how Zelda’s choices affected Klaus, and Klaus cared about how how Zelda’s choices affected himself; the only person who cared about her for her, really, was undoubtedly in some dungeon right now in one of the seedier corners of Boston—if he was conscious at all.
Klaus placed the pillow on the floor with a deliberate slowness. “There might be adoptive parents,” he mused aloud, his voice almost detached. “Or there might not. Assuming that August isn’t up to being a single parent, which I very much doubt. They might be decent people, or they might be incredibly cruel.” And he’d know, given his own background, which made what he revealed next even more jarring. “More likely, this child will reach adulthood as a ward of the state, raised with the sole aim of furthering our policies in some selected occupation zone.”
Zelda’s mouth dropped open in horror. “That’s insane!”
“To be clear,” Klaus pressed on, his voice taking on a steely edge, “these are your choices: accept August’s proposal, or say goodbye to him and to this child.” His tone softened, as he stole a glance at Charlotte; however false this veneer of compassion toward Zelda might be, his desire to protect his fiancée wasn’t. “I can use my connections to find you a different husband, Zelda, but one thing I will never use them for is helping you to endanger us all.”
“You’re just terrified of scandal,” Zelda accused.
“I’m not,” Klaus corrected her, his tone matter of fact. “Skipping off into the sunset, doing what you want—it all sounds romantic in theory, but you are talking about breaking the law. I can’t, both as the son of a count and as the son of the Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, act like such peasants’ concerns are beneath me. Moreover, even if I were willing to court that kind of scandal….” His expression darkened, the burden of his position pressing down on him. “I can’t violate my oath to the SS. Whatever my personal inclinations.”
“Violate your oath?” Zelda echoed, her voice tinged with disbelief.
“Of brotherhood,” he clarified. “To August. Aiding and abetting in committing a crime, because I didn’t like him, would be betraying a fellow SS man for personal gain. I wouldn’t need to worry about my reputation, and neither would you, because my tattoos would be burned off with a brand before I was put up against a wall and shot. After which point, you and Lottie would be next.”