There was something oddly comforting about sitting in a pew and staring up at the anguished face on the cross. Ada wasn't a religious person, never had been and never would be. But looking up at a man who supposedly died to save all of them from their sins seemed fitting as the Nazi pressed a gun to her back.
Four men had the entire church population seated in the nave. Nuns, priests, and refugees alike. Crying was met with a butt of a gun and so shoulders silently shook around them as the officer and three of his soldiers patrolled the nave. Ada sat so still that Steve honestly thought she could have blended in with the statues that lined the pews. But her chest rose and fell quicker than normal and he reached over the two children in between them to grasp her hand.
"Why, Father Maurice, it seems we've discovered a nest of vermin in your church," the officer, Sturmbannführer Huber, announced. The same man who had checked their papers earlier that day. He had instantly clocked Ada's lie and must have tracked their steps.
The thing is, Ada could easily take out four Gestapo officers on her own. It was the fact that there were innocents seated all around them with guns drawn that made her hesitate. There was no way she could move without someone being killed.
Her hand was covered by Steve's larger, calloused palm. The rosary the nuns had presented them when they first came to the church was clasped between their skin. The beads dug into her skin as some sort of foreign weight that bit against her and reminded her that she wasn't supposed to be here. She was an outsider, an outcast, a ghost of the past.
Boots stopped right next to their pew and Ada shut her eyes for a brief moment before opening them once more. Her gaze fixed on the cross before her and at the man that she heard Steve pray to once or twice. She met him three years after the death of his mother. Sarah Rogers was a church-going Catholic, he told her. Prayed the rosary every day, went to confession once a week, and believed in God until her last breath.
Steve, on the other hand, only seemed to reach for his mother's faith when he was at his lowest. Ada remembered the priest coming by the house when Steve was sick. She stood in the corner of the room as they talked quietly, her worry for her ailing husband superseding her desire to bolt from the room in hopes that she would avoid the priest's reproachful eye. Sometimes he would pick up Sarah's rosary and whisper the words in his parent's tongue and sometimes...sometimes he would just stare at the cross that hung from the string and then turned away from it.
Ada desperately tried to remember the words he whispered on those darkened nights that they found themselves separated by the walls of their past. She would sit on one side of the room, her pale eyes locked onto the city cloaked in night while he sat on their bed and stared at the rosary hanging from the nail driven into the wall. She could see it even now, how he would gingerly pick it up off the wall and run his fingers over the beads and then speak the words in Gaeilge. Did he know how deep the ache in her chest ran hearing words spoken in a mother tongue? How she silently begged to feel that connection with her home? But her home was a barren warehouse in Siberia as a cane struck her shoulders and needles pierced her skin and the acrid taste of gunpowder and iron tainted her tongue.
How long had it been since she heard her mother sing Bayu Bayushki as she tucked her into bed?
A hand grabbed the bun that rested at the nape of her neck and yanked her head up, forcing her to stare at the ceiling where Mother Mary looked down upon her. She appeared to be weeping and Ada felt a similar sensation when she thought of the two children seated next to her.
"Up," Huber demanded. She rose without complaint, her hands curling around the beads in her hand as Steve pressed them into her hand. Ada clutched it to her chest as Huber forced her to walk towards the altar. He paused right before the stairs and then hit the back of her knees with the barrel of the rifle in his hands to force her to kneel. Gasps echoed through the nave as he raised the rifle to press against the base of her skull.
"These people are my parishioners!" Father Maurice cried.
"Then she should know the words to say. Go on, girl. Prove me wrong."
Ada blinked up at the crucifix and inhaled deeply, settling her shoulders in preparation. The face of Jesus looked down on her and she almost wanted to laugh. Apparently, He came to absolve them of their sins and here she was, the worst kind of sinner kneeling before Him. He was a Jew murdered by a mob, just like her own family. What would they say if they saw her now? Would they be proud of her? How had she honored their memory?
The gun pressed harder and she grimaced. One wrong move and either she was dead or the three other soldiers fire into a crowd of innocents. She racked her brain with a way to get out of this while saving the most people.
Maybe if Jesus was real He could send her a miracle. At the very least, He could send her the words to this prayer. If she knew it, this Nazi fucker would at least hesitate enough to give her some time.
Wait.
She didn't need time. She needed space. She needed to get him away from the others.
"I don't know the words," she admitted quietly.
The gun lifted off of her neck and Huber tsked. "Father Maurice, this is unacceptable."
"It's Christmas," the priest murmured. "Please."
"If you are going to kill me, sir, I ask that you do it outside. To not deface this church and the faith inside it. The Lord is watching," Ada spoke up. She tilted her head up to blink up at him with large, pleading eyes. Huber scoffed and reached down to yank her into a standing position. His hand had a bruising grip on her arm and he practically dragged her down the aisle. He paused and pointed to his right.
"You. Come. We'll deal with the two children later."
Steve slowly stood and joined them as one of the soldiers followed him with his gun trained on the super soldier's back.
"Father, you will be joining us as well," Huber quipped.
The three walked in silence to the door and out into the cold, flanked by two soldiers and led by the officer. Ada carefully held her hand out for Father Maurice to take the rosary from her hands before she stepped out onto the street. The night was completely still and darkness filled the streets thanks to mandatory blackouts.
"Kneel," Huber barked. "In a line."
Ada complied, sinking quickly onto the freezing cold stone of the street. Steve and Father Maurice settled onto the ground next to her. Ada reached out and surreptitiously tapped her pinky against Steve's hand twice before she pulled her hand away.
"If you are not Colette and Bernard Moreau, who are you truly?" Huber asked as he came to stand before them. "Perhaps if you tell me...give us some information...you might be free. I can grant you safety."
"Your name is Wolfgang Huber, you were born in Augsburg, you have a wife but she isn't aware of your two mistresses. In fact, mistress one isn't aware of mistress two. How does your son feel about that?" Ada purred. His smug grin dropped and she smirked. He stalked forward, raising a pistol to her forehead with a shaking hand.
"How do you know that? Who are you?!" he bellowed.
The blonde raised her hands to indicate her innocence and blinked up at him. "Why, I have plenty of names. Die maskierte Frau. Spitfire." His face paled at every name she conjured up. Ada leaned forward into the gun and grinned an awful, snarling smile.
"Le fantôme," she cooed.
One second she was kneeling on the ground and the next, she had one arm wrapped around Huber's neck and the other pointing a knife close to his throat. The soldiers raised their guns to point at her, but Huber was placed directly in between them.
"Tell me, does your God know what you are doing? To the children, the innocent, the women and men. Does He know? I think He does. Now, I don't know much about this stuff but I do know that you're going to burn in Hell. How does that sound?"
"No, please," he begged.
"Aw, you want me to have mercy? Have you been merciful?" Ada's voice was entirely void of emotion and every bit ice cold. Steve almost didn't want to look at her and see what he knew to be true. This was who she was. He had seen her kill plenty of times but that had always been on the battlefield. He had never seen this cat and mouse, calculated version of killing.
The air filled with the sickening gasp of someone taking their last breath. Ada finished drawing the blade across Huber's throat, exposing the still beating pulse in his fleshy neck as thick red blood poured out of the laceration. The blonde dropped the body onto the ground and turned, russet iron spatter clinging to her skin and dripping down into the collar of her shirt. She switched the knife in her right hand to her left and bent down to snatch up the pistol still held in the dead man's hand. With two quick shots between the eyes, the soldiers dropped to the ground and filled the silent night with sticky red blood.
"I'll be right back," she muttered before marching into the church. She emerged moments later with the final soldier in tow with his rifle in one hand and his shirt collar in the other. He barely had a chance to beg for mercy before she was burying a bullet in his head. The blonde tossed the gun down onto the road that was slick with blood and turned to face the two men.
"I wasn't going to deface your faith." Ada nodded towards the Father. "We'll move the bodies and, if I can impose on you once more and clean up, we'll take the children and get out of here."
Father Maurice looked down at the four men lying in the street and then up at the couple standing before him. He then looked back at his church and sighed.
"Yes, yes. But hurry."
Ada thanked the nuns once more and tucked her wet hair under the headscarf they had provided her. A new outfit and a quick wash made her look like a respectable woman once more who hadn't killed four men half an hour earlier. She entered the nave to find Steve seated and talking to Father Maurice. Cecilia and Maurice were curled up on the pews fast asleep and she paused for a second to take in all of the domesticity.
But this was just a fleeting moment in a never ending war.
"Father Maurice," she greeted before looking at her husband. "Are we ready?"
"I'll wake the kids up and get them ready." He brushed past her and then reached out to grasp her elbow. Steve pressed a kiss to her forehead and then continued on his trajectory, leaving her behind with Father Maurice. The aging priest patted the empty spot that Steve once inhabited to indicate for her to sit. Ada hesitantly lowered herself onto the dark wood and glanced at the cross.
"I was telling your husband that in war, things are different. If you hadn't killed them, they would have killed us. All the people we hide here would be sent east."
"I thought murder was a sin."
"In wartime, I guess that makes us all sinners."
Ada pursed her lips and then asked a question that plagued her mind. "Do I condemn him by loving him?"
Father Maurice reached out and covered her clasped hands with a gentle touch. "To love and to be loved is never a sin. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Your love for these people will save us all."
She turned her head to look at the man beside her and tilted her head down in a sign of thanks. He patted her hands and then stood, escorting her to the three people waiting for her. Ada held her hand out for Cecilia to take and faced Father Maurice once more.
"Thank you. The ring will be closing here. You'll be contacted by forgers within the week with new papers for the others and couriers will come every other week to get them to safety. Your help with the ring has been invaluable."
Father Maurice walked them to the door where a car sat waiting for them, driven by a Resistance member that Ada had called in due to him owing her "a big fucking favor".
"Steven told me who you two truly are. Know this, Ada Kennedy, that even your sins are forgiven." With that, the doors to the church shut, closing le cercle de le fantôme once and for all. Steve took her hand and squeezed it gently. She offered him a tired smile and stepped into the darkness once more.