The oxytocin high vanished in an instant, leaving behind the cold hangover of a biological malfunction.

Marek lay heavily on top of her. His piston seemed driven by an axial shaft. His hands spread her apart. While his hips rotated with athletic precision, his torso bore down on her, almost perfectly still. Marek did not look like a demon caught in the act. To Elena he looked more like an actor who had relied too heavily on his gift for improvisation—and who still found himself irresistible despite fluffing his lines.

"Did you love her," Elena whispered.

It was not a question. Hence, no question mark.

Marek smiled faintly. His mouth became a thin line of pity.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Backstory

It begins with a stumble in the script of intimacy. While making love beneath the reed roof of an old house in Ahrenshoop, Marek calls Elena by the name of her dead twin sister, Aline. She refuses the most plausible explanation, convincing herself she must have misheard—especially since the Doppler roar of a Eurofighter's afterburner igniting over the Bodden drapes the scene in a Rolling Thunder soundtrack, floating above them like a flying carpet of sound.

Marek plays dumb. He is brazen to the point of nausea, repaying openness with deceit. Elena has no idea. Her innocence—her failure of instinct and intuition, remarkable for a criminal investigator with profiler training—is like a heart attack that goes unnoticed.

Hearing her twin's name awakens a dormant pattern, inviting Elena back into a game she thought she had left behind with childhood. One of the sisters' favorite devilish pranks had been deliberate cases of mistaken identity.

Caught between shock and the comfort of an ancient, deeply familiar pattern, Elena imagines Aline taking her place. It is the dead twin who booked the writing workshop and who receives Marek's messages, at once seductive and strangely illuminating. It is Aline who sleeps with the bestselling novelist and creative writing coach. For this moment, she lives the reckless life Elena never allowed herself to live.

Aline had worked the streets of Frankfurt's red-light district before finally succumbing to addiction. Back home in Ederthal, no one wanted to imagine the details. To preserve appearances, the province had declared her dead long before her heart stopped beating. After her funeral, silence was buried with her.

According to everything Elena believed, Marek knew nothing about Aline. So how could he possibly have spoken that name?

Their old system of engineered mistaken identities lent itself to role-playing in countless variations. Even relatives could be fooled. The sisters delighted in the singularity of being twins. They teased admirers, only to recount those experiences later in intimate conversations that only the two of them could truly share.

Elena still possessed her sister's repertoire of playful impersonations. It went beyond mimicry. It was more than merely slipping into someone else's role. The sisters had always exploited the possibilities of duplication itself. One could not only look like the other; she could inhabit the other's emotional world, making it her own.

Almost against her will, Elena asked,

"She looked at you like that too, didn't she?"

Her voice lost the restrained timbre of the well-behaved, dutiful Steinbrenner daughter and took on the raw, unfiltered texture of the rebel.

Elena was no longer merely playing Aline. It was a metamorphosis—one that very nearly unsettled Marek. His sadistic impulse had ignited a charge he had never anticipated.

"I don't know what's gotten into you," he said, his composure beginning to fail.

"Say her name again," she breathed into his ear as she arched beneath him, harder now, finally without restraint, her police badge erased from her mind, her wedding ring tucked away in the bedside drawer. "Say it, Marek. Who's fucking you right now? Elena—or Aline?"

Marek did not answer at once. For a moment he lost his footing. Then he realized that Elena was nowhere near seeing through him. Like a sleepwalker, she had glimpsed the truth without remembering it upon waking. Her lovestruck somnambulism kept reason at bay.

The trickster understood that Elena had just handed him a new script.

It was better than the one he had written himself.

He caught the next thrust of her hips. The axial shaft spun back into motion as he pinned her beneath the sculpted relief of his torso.

"You want to be Aline?" he murmured. "Then take it like Aline."

He reclaimed the upper hand, and Elena surrendered to the liberating course of events.

Her perception differed radically from his. While Marek was busy containing the damage, uncertain whether he had narrowly escaped exposure, Elena dissolved completely into her other self. It was a surrender that yielded unexpected rewards. She slipped deeper and deeper into the erotic matrix of her dead sister.

The Setting

The scene unfolds in the four-hundred-year-old Skipperhus. Its timber frame and reed roof rank among the oldest surviving buildings on the Fischland-Darß-Zingst peninsula. Today it serves as an artists' residence, writers' retreat, gallery, and workshop for traditional Fischland pottery.

In one of the low-ceilinged rooms stands an alcove bed, often called a captain's bed. Built into the wall like a cupboard, such beds could be closed with wooden doors or curtains to preserve body heat. Sailors often slept in a half-seated position, believing that lying completely flat was unhealthy and invited death.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Baron von Tillwitz acquired the Skipperhus. One of his descendants now sponsors young artists. We have met him before. Waldemar von Tillwitz made his fortune in real estate and also works as a gallery owner and restaurateur. His wife, Carmen, runs the legendary Café Wiegand.

Needless to say, Elena and Marek do not sleep together in the captain's bed. That relic from the age of pine resin and whale oil offers little comfort. Instead, the trial couple explore one another in an expansive wrought-iron bed in the Gründerzeit style. It stands freely before a floor-to-ceiling studio window. Elisabeth von Eicken once slept there. Above the headboard hangs one of the painter's landscapes, depicting the primeval forest of the Darß in the melancholy light of late autumn—a quiet memento mori.

Meanwhile, in Ederthal

For a good five minutes, not another word has been added to the conversation around the table.

Expectation fades from the palate. Alisa swallows her disappointment.

The careless treatment of food reminds her of Peter, whom she had assisted in a hotel kitchen on Usedom five summers earlier.

Peter had struck her as a wanderer. His sense of spiritual superiority entitled him, in his own mind, to despise the morbidly obese guests in the dining room. The hotel catered almost exclusively to the elderly, advertising barrier-free accommodation. Many of them could no longer make it as far as the beach. They were scarcely older than Alisa's parents, yet already seemed halfway to the grave.

Peter could cook, but he preferred losing himself in volcanology and elaborate astrological theories that he approached with almost mathematical rigor. Whenever a dish came back from the dining room, he would "improve" it with whispered magic curses before sending it straight out again.

It worked almost every time.

Alisa and Peter were drawn into a current that encouraged ever greater risks. Pureeing worms—and even mice caught in the pantry traps—had not yet crossed the line for them.

Peter spat into the salad.

He claimed it was voodoo.

Plate after empty plate arrived at the pre-rinse station, accompanied by warm compliments from grateful diners.

"The old asshole couldn't stop raving about it," Akim said, slipping with theatrical ease into an imitation of the waiter.

He was a console addict from Braunschweig, sentimentally attached to his hometown—unless he felt slighted by Germans. Then he switched personas and spoke like a strategist of jihad.

"That one's split clean down the middle," Peter diagnosed.

Peter was drawn to extremes—fire and snow. He called volcanoes nature's blast furnaces. His photographs of fountains of lava and showers of incandescent slag were remarkable. He posted them on Facebook.

Alisa realized too late that Peter was incapable of holding on to anything. Everything slipped through his fingers.

By then, she was already involved with him.

Everyone had a signature stunt. Everyone had their own angle, their own mechanics of love.

For Alisa, an island flirtation and a summer romance always carried a particular emotional key. A subtle shift in perception was the first sign of falling in love. She would declare a song their favorite song, and felt a tiny heartbreak when Peter still couldn't remember her favorite flavor of ice cream.

A love affair needed a place on the beach that both of them could claim as uniquely beautiful.

Alisa tolerated neither mangled versions of her name nor cutesy nicknames. She demanded respect. She knew the entire social repertoire of kitchen assistants and chambermaids. She was familiar with the tiny annex apartment reserved for the housekeeper—the sort of hidden quarters provided by employers who preferred not to see their domestic staff.

Peter knew those little pearl chambers as well, where Eastern European women without residence permits often lived in near invisibility.

He bypassed Alisa's defenses.

He patrolled her borders.

Alisa danced to the summons of a drum on the beach at Usedom. Around her, people moved with growing abandon. They looked like the last surviving hippies—and, in many ways, lived like them. Yet their commune was a right-wing project, one that required a written application and a profession deemed useful to the community.

This is what Alisa Alsan recounts during the germination of her forbidden love.

Although their relationship exists under the irresistible pull of mutual attraction, after two weeks of silent reconnaissance the unspoken couple still cannot claim a single shared night.

Alisa's allure bursts into bloom like the Serengeti in spring.

Aslan's hand resting on her knee is enough to bring her to the edge of fainting.

He pronounces her name more beautifully than any man before him. Whenever he addresses her directly, the sound alone sends goosebumps over her skin.

There is no doubt in her mind: he is the man God created for her.

For that very reason, measured restraint no longer seems appropriate.

Alisa wonders how much longer the tension can be sustained before the last string of propriety snaps and, one way or another, they are forced to break the rules.

An hour later she relaxes once more in Aslan's arms. He has tasted the dew of her desire, caressed her tender buds, and transformed her from head to toe into a single erogenous landscape.

"Human beings were not created to be workers. There were no masters and no money in the gallery forests and savannas that still feel like home to us. Take a child into nature, and you'll see how completely it responds to the primal world. We are hunters, and our favorite hunt is one of endurance and intelligence."

Alisa and Aslan are training on a geological belch—a basalt escarpment.

For years the area has been left to itself as part of a rewilding project. Storm damage defines the landscape. Uprooted and splintered trunks form tangled barricades where foxes and hares might well bid each other goodnight.

After training, Alisa leads Aslan through a labyrinth of fir trees to the ruins overlooking the Achsen Gorge.

Two castles once crowned the heights of the same mountain.

Three noble families of common origin—two of which we already know, the Wolfens and the Groppes—represented the interests of Mainz until the thirteenth century, when Henry I of Hesse disarmed them and had their strongholds razed.

The destruction was so overwhelming that it gave rise to legends of a titanic feat. Once again, people claimed, a Hessian giant had been seen performing deeds worthy of fairy tales.

The chroniclers, however, recorded a far more mundane cause.

Else von Groppe, née von Salzmannshausen, had an affair with the lord of the neighboring castle.

Her husband was so enraged that he engineered his own downfall.

Secretly, the loyal vassal of Mainz breached the defenses of his own fortress, inviting the Hessian forces to storm and destroy it.

Alisa comes to a stop.

"Here," she says softly.

She pulls off her T-shirt and steps out of her shorts.

Aslan embraces her, unfastens her bra, and turns his attention to her breasts. He kisses her nipples, teasing them with the tip of his tongue. Then his tongue continues its slow journey, passing her navel before descending to the center of her body.