Kate Quinn - The Huntress

IAN Chapter 5: Ian Chapter 6: Nina Chapter 7: Jordan Chapter 8: Ian Chapter 9: Nina Chapter 10: Jordan Chapter 11: Ian Chapter 12: Nina Chapter 13: Jordan Chapter 14: Ian Chapter 15: Nina Chapter 16: Jordan Chapter 17: Ian Chapter 18: Nina Chapter 19: Jordan Chapter 20: Ian Part II Chapter 21: Nina Chapter 22: Jordan Chapter 23: Ian Chapter 24: Nina Chapter 25: Jordan Chapter 26: Ian Chapter 27: Nina Chapter 28: Jordan Chapter 29: Ian Chapter 30: Nina Chapter 31: Jordan Chapter 32: Ian Chapter 33: Jordan Chapter 34: Nina Chapter 35: Ian Chapter 36: Jordan Chapter 37: Ian Chapter 38: Nina Chapter 39: Jordan Chapter 40: Ian Chapter 41: Nina Chapter 42: Jordan Chapter 43: Ian Chapter 44: Nina Chapter 45: Jordan Chapter 46: Ian Chapter 47: Jordan Chapter 48: Ian Part III Chapter 49: Jordan Chapter 50: Ian Chapter 51: Jordan Chapter 52: Ian Chapter 53: Nina Chapter 54: Ian Chapter 55: Jordan Chapter 56: Nina Chapter 57: Ian Chapter 58: Jordan Chapter 59: Ian Epilogue: Nina Author’s Note Reading Group Questions Further Reading About the Author Also by Kate Quinn About the Publisher

April 1950

Vienna

You have a wife?” Tony dragged Ian into the corner for a quick, hissed discussion. “Since when?”

Ian contemplated the woman now sitting at his desk, boots propped on the blotter, crunching down biscuits straight from the tin. “It’s complicated,” he said eventually.

“No, it isn’t. At some point you and this woman stood up together and said a lot of stuff about to have and to hold , and there was an I do . It’s pretty definitive. And why didn’t you tell me four days ago when I said she was coming here? Did you just forget ?”

“Call it a sadly misplaced impulse to have a joke at your expense.”

Tony glowered. “Was the part about her being such a fragile flower a joke too?”

No, that turned out to be a joke on me. Ian remembered Nina stumbling over the foreign words of the marriage service, swaying on her feet from weakness. The entire wedding had taken less than ten minutes: Ian had rushed through his own vows, pushed his signet ring onto Nina’s fourth finger where it hung like a hoop, taken her back to her hospital bed, and promptly headed off to fill out paperwork and finish a column on the occupation of Poznań. Now, five years later, he watched Nina suck biscuit crumbs off her fingertip and saw she was still wearing the ring. It fit much better. “I came across Nina in Poznań after the German retreat,” Ian said, realizing his partner was waiting for answers. “The Polish Red Cross picked her up half dead from double pneumonia. She’d been living rough in the woods after her run-in with die Jägerin . She looked like a stiff breeze would kill her.”

It hadn’t just been her physical state either. Her eyes had been so haunted, she looked a step from shattering altogether. Logically, Ian understood she would have changed in five years, but he couldn’t stop trying to reconcile the woman in his office with the frail girl of his memory.

Tony still looked unbelieving. “You fell in love at first sight with our Nazi huntress’s only surviving victim?”

“I didn’t—” Ian raked a hand through his hair, wondering where to begin. “I’ve seen Nina exactly four times. The day I found her, the day I proposed, the day we married, and the day I put her on a train toward England. She had nothing to her name and she was desperate to get as far from the war zone as she could.” They’d hardly been able to communicate, but her desperation had needed no translator. It had tugged at Ian’s heart despite himself. “The region was an utter mess, she had no identification, there were only so many strings I could pull to get her out of the limbo she was in. So I married her.”

Tony eyed him. “Chivalrous of you.”

“I owed her a debt. Besides, we intended to divorce once her British citizenship came through.”

“So why didn’t you? And how is it we’ve worked together several years, yet this is the first I’m hearing about a wife?”

“I said it was complicated.”

“Whisper, whisper,” Nina interrupted. “You’re done?”

“Yes.” Ian threw himself down in the chair opposite and looked her over, his wife. Mrs. Ian Graham. Bloody hell. “I thought you were working in Manchester,” he said at last. Their last exchange of telegrams had been four months ago.

“Whoever do you work for?” Tony added, getting Nina a cup of tea. He still looked flummoxed, and Ian would have enjoyed that if he hadn’t shared the feeling.

“I work for English pilot. He comes out of RAF, starts a little airfield. I help.” Nina stirred her tea. “You have jam?” She wasn’t precisely rude, Ian decided, just abrupt. She had to be what, thirty-two now?

Her eyes flicked at him. The blue eyes, he thought— those hadn’t changed. Very, very watchful.

“Why are you here?” he asked quietly.

“The message.” She tilted her head at Tony. “He asks me to help find your huntress. I help.”

“You dropped everything and caught the nearest train across half Europe, all because you heard we might have a lead on die Jägerin ?”

His wife looked at him as though he were an idiot. “Yes.”

Tony fetched the jam pot, then leaned back against the desk. “I hope you’ll tell me more about yourself, Mrs. Graham. Your devoted husband has not exactly been forthcoming.”

“Just Nina. Mrs. Graham is only for passport.”

“‘Nina,’ that’s a pretty name. You’re Polish?”

He switched languages, asking something. Nina answered, then switched back. “I do English now. Who are you again? I forget to write name down.”

“Anton Rodomovsky.” Tony took her hand that didn’t have a teacup in it and bowed, all his charm coming to the fore. “Formerly Sergeant Rodomovsky of the United States Army, but both me and the US of A thought that was a failed experiment. Now I’m just Tony: interpreter, paper pusher, all around dogsbody.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Interpreter?”

“Grow up in Queens with as many babushka s as I did, you pick up a few languages.” Lazily. “Polish, German, Hungarian, French. Some Czech, Russian, Romanian …”

Nina transferred her gaze to Ian. “Interpreter,” she said as if Tony wasn’t there. “Is useful. When do we leave?”

“Pardon?” Ian was transfixed by the way she was dropping heaping spoons of strawberry jam into her teacup. He’d never seen anyone do that to an innocent cup of tea in his life. Bloody hell, it was barbaric.

“I help look for the bitch,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “When do we leave, and where do we go?”

“There’s a witness in Altaussee who might have information on where die Jägerin went after the war,” Tony said.

Nina drank off her jam-clotted tea in three long gulps, then rose and stretched like an untidy little alley cat. Ian rose too, feeling enormous; she barely came up to his shoulder. “We leave tomorrow,” she said. “Where can I sleep?”

“Your husband lives upstairs,” Tony said. “Shall I take up your things?” Ian shot him a withering look. “What, no passionate reunion?” he remarked, innocent.

“Very funny,” Ian said, unamused. It had been the hardest thing to communicate to Nina five years ago when he proposed marriage—that he expected nothing from her, that he was honoring a debt and not looking to collect payment in return. The mere idea of pressing physical attentions on an illness-weakened, war-ravaged woman made him feel like a debaucher out of a Dickens novel. Nina had spent her wedding night in a hospital cot, and he’d spent his filling out paperwork in the name of Nina Graham so she could get to England as soon as she was released.