Setting: 1941 | Aÿ, France

The heavy thud of jackboots on the parquet floors of the Bollinger estate was a sound that made the very air feel filthy. For Lily Bollinger, the Occupation was not a political abstract; it was a physical infestation of her home. Her husband, Jacques, the man who had steered the Bollinger empire through the Great War and the Depression, was gone. He had left her a widow in a world turned gray, standing alone against a tide of field-gray uniforms.

Behind the enemy lines of her own house, Nazi soldiers had seized the west wing. They brought with them a suffocating stench that no amount of ventilation could scrub away: the smell of cheap tobacco, stale grease, and the chemical sting of petroleum jelly used to buff their boots. But the true face of the threat arrived in the form of Herr Otto Klaebisch, the Weinführer.

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