Chapter One
The salt-stung wind carried more than seaweed's scent it carried ghosts of her father's stories, whispered in fractured English during lean years when bread was luxury and hope rationed like sugar. Dr. Kate Allegra pressed her boots into Normandy's coarse sand, watching waves retreat and advance with artillery fire's mechanical persistence. Each foam-capped surge mocked the careful order she'd imposed on chaos, washing away neat lines drawn by retreating boots and tank treads.
The makeshift field hospital tent flapped behind her like a battle flag. Through the open flap, she heard wounded men's low murmur some calling for mothers in unrecognizable languages, others maintaining silence common as morphine shortages. The familiar cocktail of antiseptic, blood, and unwashed bodies drifted toward her, but twenty yards from the medical station, she could almost pretend war was distant thunder beyond the horizon.
Kate pulled her father's silver pocket watch with trembling fingers not from cold, but from three cups of bitter coffee that had been breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her hands, once soft and manicured during residency, now bore work's telltale signs: nails bitten to the quick during difficult cases, a thin scar across her left knuckle from a slipped scalpel, persistent ink stains from patient notes written in dim light.
Her coat bore her father's careful stitching, reinforced with patches from his old work shirts. It hung loose now; she'd lost weight during months in France, irregular meals and stress carving hollows beneath her cheekbones, making her look older than twenty-four. Her mother always said she had good bones, but now they seemed too prominent, skin stretched tight and translucent from hours in medical tents and too few in sunlight. A cold sore at her mouth's corner stress and poor nutrition making her susceptible to every ailment sweeping through camp. She'd covered it with lipstick, a small vanity that seemed absurd in this place of mud and blood.
In Brussels, Papa would be closing his small tailor shop about now if the shop still existed, if Papa still existed. When had she last received a letter? Three months? Four? Mail was unreliable, and silence could mean anything: censorship, lost ships, or silence that came with graves.
She ached for her father's careful handwriting, those weekly letters arriving like clockwork during residency, filled with neighborhood gossip and work descriptions. He'd signed them "Your devoted Papa," and she'd treasured them more than admitted, saving them like love letters.
Now silence from home felt like a physical wound. She missed those letters' predictability, how they'd anchored her to a sensible world where the biggest crisis was missed fabric delivery or a customer who couldn't pay. She missed Sunday dinners, her father humming Belgian folk songs while pressing suits, his pipe tobacco mixing with mother's lavender water. She missed being Kate Allegra the promising doctor instead of Dr. Allegra the shell-shocked psychiatrist who jumped at sudden noises and hadn't slept fully in months.
The beach stretched endlessly, littered with war's debris: splintered wooden crates, rusted wire coils, metal fragments from landing craft or helmets. Dog tags scattered in sand. Seagulls picked through wreckage with scavengers' indifferent efficiency, their cries sharp against waves' percussion.
She'd chosen psychiatry because minds, unlike bodies, left no visible scars or so she'd believed during residency, when the worst trauma was a stockbroker's nervous breakdown after Black Tuesday. The Depression taught her about want, about hollow-eyed desperation from empty pantries and eviction notices, but hadn't prepared her for boys waking up screaming about friends disappearing in red mist, soldiers flinching at mess kit sounds because they resembled machine gun fire.
Wind tugged at her stethoscope, sending it dancing like a pendulum counting toward inevitable reckoning. In the distance, supply ships dotted the gray horizon, smokestacks trailing black ribbons across pewter sky. Closer, smaller craft bobbed like corks, ferrying men and materiel in endless organized chaos.
The sand wasn't Atlantic City's golden powder but something coarser, darker-ground down by countless boots, treads, and history's weight. She knelt, letting handfuls sift through fingers, each grain a witness to invasion that turned this quiet Norman coast into a doorway between the old world and whatever came next.
As sun descended toward water, painting sky in amber and rust, Kate realized she wasn't alone. A figure approached from the communications tent, moving with purposeful stride crisp military bearing, shoulders squared against wind. Another soldier, another story, another mind needing healing in a world determined to break them all.
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Three hundred miles to the east…
2nd Lieutenant Gavriil Milen crouched in ruins of what had been an orthodox church in Prussian countryside, breath forming clouds as he studied the map across his knees. The church had been magnificent once carved stone angels still clung to partial columns, wings chipped and faces worn by weather and shrapnel. The 22nd Battalion had pushed west six weeks, leaving shattered German positions and their own dead. At twenty-two , Gavriil read war's landscape like a farmer reads sky for rain.
Gothic windows blown out weeks ago left jagged stained glass teeth around empty frames. Where an altar once stood, someone had stacked ammunition crates, stenciled Cyrillic letters stark against rubble. His grandmother had lit candles to those same angels, whispering prayers for his safe return. Wrapped around his left hand was her rosary for luck; a farm boy who knew every cow's name and could predict weather by his grandfather's war wounds' ache. That boy had been unmarked, with clear green eyes reflecting summer skies and calloused hands knowing only honest work.
Now Gavriil's hands knew a revolver's weight better than a plow handle, his body bearing war's map carved in flesh. A jagged scar ran from left temple to jaw, souvenir from battle, leaving his face permanently asymmetrical. His left shoulder sat higher where a German bullet shattered his collarbone six months ago healed crooked despite field medic efforts, uniform hanging awkwardly on his lean frame.
But his hands told the real story. Across right-hand knuckles, carved with his own bayonet during nights when grief threatened madness, were three names: Anya, Mikhail, Svetlana. His wife and children, aged twenty-four, six, and four, murdered by Russian bombs while shopping for bread on a Tuesday morning that had dawned clear and ordinary. The scars healed poorly, infected twice, leaving letters raised and angry like brands marking him as belonging to the dead.
Through the largest window, he saw his men digging foxholes in frozen ground, entrenching tools ringing against iron-hard earth. Most were older, siege veterans earned in hellish street fighting. They called him "mladshiy leytenant" with proper respect, but he caught their measuring glances wondering if this boy-officer would kill them with inexperience or save them with caution.
The map was German, captured three days ago, its neat lines and annotations telling a stomach-clenching story. Red pencil marks showed German defensive positions stretching like spider webs across Berlin approaches, while blue arrows indicated Soviet routes funneling his battalion into killing fields. Someone far above decided the 22nd would help crack the Nazi machine, but hammers sometimes shattered striking anvils.
A runner appeared, uniform mud-caked, young face hollow-eyed from sleepless nights. "Lieutenant Milen, Major Petrov requests your presence at command post."
Gavriil folded the map, tucking it alongside his father's last letter three pages describing their collective farm's rebuilding, normal life's slow return, hope his son would come home for spring planting. Two months old, Gavriil wondered if there would be spring, home, anything left when this war bled dry.
Stepping into late afternoon light, wind cut through wool uniform like a blade, carrying cordite's acrid smell and decay's sweeter, disturbing scent. Distant tank rumble German or Soviet, impossible to tell had become constant as his heartbeat, mechanical pulse marking time where yesterday's positions were today's graveyards.
War moved west toward inevitable collision with eastward forces, and somewhere between, Gavriil Milen learned that survival and death's space was often no wider than the split second deciding whether footsteps behind belonged to friend or enemy