MY HEART SLAMMED against my ribs.This could not be! Could not , could not.

I ran to her cell and pressed against the bars, straining to distinguish her features amid the shadows.

Nothing could ever have prepared me for what I saw.... Not the sight of Nico plunging from my grasp. Or poor Robert gazing at his own body as it was hacked in two. Not even the Turk looming over me, his blade raised in the air.

I was staring at my wife.

Sophie... ? I whispered, the word catching in my throat.

She did not move or speak.

Sophie! I called, feeling my heart start to crumble. Part of me prayed she would not turn.

Then she tilted her face toward me.

Sophie, is that you?

She lay huddled in shadow and I still could not tell for certain if it was her. The scant light from a nearby torch traced her bony face. Her hair, which once had smelled like honey, hung wildly from her head, pulled out in spots, and white. Her sunken eyes, glazed and distant, were runny with yellow pus. Yet the nose... the soft line of her chin as it met her delicate neck... they were the same, unmistakably, though she cowered before me as a fevered wretch, pocked with sores.

It was her! I was sure of it.

Sophie? I cried, my hands reaching desperately through the bars.

She finally turned toward the sound, sallow light spreading across her face. I simply could not believe what I was seeing! How could she be here? How could she be alive after all this time?

Grateful tears welled in my eyes. I reached for her, her emaciated bones covered with a filthy rag. I tried to speak, but I was too overcome.It was Sophie. She was not dead. At last I knew that much for sure.

Sophie...look...It's me,Hugh.

Slowly she lifted her face fully into the light. She was like an artist's disfigured re-creation of the beautiful image I held in my mind: gaunt, ghostly, covered in sores. Her eyes flickered at the sound of my voice. I could see that she was sick, that she barely clung to this rotting existence. I wasn't sure she knew who I was.

We have to give it back to them, she finally said. Please, I beg you. Give them back what's theirs.

Sophie, I was shout............