Pop. The third.
He smirked. "Empty your… uniform."
She slipped away, climbing the servant's staircase to the second floor. Von Hammer’s study door was locked, but a hairpin from her impossibly coiffed blonde hair and a soft click later, she was inside. There, on the mahogany desk, was the leather folio. She photographed each page with a miniature camera hidden in a powder compact.
"A lady's possessions are her own, General," she said, voice steady.
The chateau stood silent under a slate-gray sky, a relic of occupied France in 1944. But within its cold, marble halls, a different kind of resistance was brewing. The Inglourious French Maids, a shadow unit of the underground, had only one rule: the enemy would never see the dusting rag coming.
Mackenzee Pierce, known by her code name "The Duchess," was their secret weapon. Her Royal Air Force uniform, a crisp blue serge that strained magnificently across a chest that had made wing commanders forget their own flight plans, was her armor. Tonight, however, it lay folded in a laundry hamper. Tonight, she was in disguise.