The cold seeped through the thin soles of Anya’s boots as she stood just inside the command tent, snowflakes still melting into the collar of her coat. Her fingers, pale from the chill, clutched a worn leather notebook, the pencil between them steady despite the low tremble in her limbs. The air inside the tent was marginally warmer than outside, but stifling in a different way, thick with the scent of damp wool, diesel, and the ever-present tobacco smoke curling from the SS officer's half-burnt cigarette.

She did not need to look at Guest to know he was there, she felt it. The weight of him, seated calmly behind the table, in his immaculate uniform, voice like ice over steel as he dictated the latest report. His German was precise, mechanical, without flourish. She translated automatically, the words were familiar: troop positions, partisan sightings, requisitions. The language of war, spoken like routine.

Anya had become routine, too.

Her voice, when she spoke, betrayed nothing. Not the exhaustion. Not the quiet shame. Not the way her skin still remembered the heat of his hands from the night before, even as her breath misted in the frigid air. That, too, had become part of the job, just another unspoken duty, just another way to buy her own safety. He never forced her, but she knew better than to pretend she had a real choice.

The first time, he had said nothing at all. He had simply looked at her, for too long, too carefully. And when he turned away, she had followed. She remembered the cold sheets under her back, the creaking of the bed, the silence after. No promises. No affection. Just control. She had come back to him the next night.

And then the one after that, and again and again.

There was no affection in it. Not for her. But there was a strange courtesy, as if he preferred her obedience to be quiet and willing, rather than any forced and fake passion. It was cleaner that way. Efficient. Like everything else about him.

Anya knew she was already a traitor to her country by helping the Germans, but she was now also a traitor to her husband, who despite lying dead in a trench somewhere along the front lines, would have preferred her dead then to what she did each night to this officer.

Anya tried not to think about Sergei and what he would think of her if he were alive, or her brother Alexander, who was at that moment in the Red Army, fighting the very Germans she was collaborating with.

Instead, she thought of her sister-in-law Irina and her two children, a young boy and girl, Ivan and Maya, who needed food that Anya could get from this officer.

Even now as she stood to the side of Guest's desk, she could feel his gaze on her face. Behind the stillness of his cigarette and reports, he always watched her like he was reading something written in the margins of her face.

Anya’s fingers tightened slightly on the notebook, the only sign of tension she allowed herself. She raised her eyes for just a moment, meeting his across the table. There was no expression in hers, and none in his, only that sharp flicker of awareness, like the pause before a trap closes.

Then she lowered her gaze again and said flatly, “Shall I include the notes about the partisans near the river?”