Kate Quinn - The Huntress

Of what? Jordan thought, staring at Anneliese as her father opened the cab door. By itself, it’s not proof of anything.

Except that this woman was hiding something.

Ruth opened her bag of rice, flinging grains everywhere. A final flurry of hugs, and Jordan’s father and his new wife slid into their taxi. Guests cheered as they rolled away, as confusion and horror swept over Jordan.

Dad , she thought, oh, Dad, what have you brought into our family?

April 1950

Altaussee

Nina was not happy to be left behind in Vienna. “No. I go with you.”

“I have to sweet-talk a girl in Altaussee,” Tony said with his most persuasive smile. “How’s it going to look if I’ve got another girl with me already?”

Nina shrugged. She had been filled in on most aspects of the chase ahead and was clearly eager to begin. Ian put his oar in the water. “We need someone to look after the office.”

“You get to chase the huntress and I get to answer phone?” Nina said ominously. “Is horseshit.”

“Yes,” Ian stated. “But I am having a blunt conversation with you before I bring you along on the most important chase of my life, Nina, and since we don’t have time for that conversation right now, you’re staying in the bloody office.”

Her blue eyes narrowed. He stared back unblinking, impatience pulsing through him. The train left in an hour.

“Okay,” Nina finally said, still glowering. “I stay this time. Next time, you take me.”

“Try not to burn down the building while we’re gone.” Ian seized his battered fedora, ignoring Nina’s dirty look, and a moment later he and Tony were speeding down the Mariahilferstrasse in a cab. Vienna slid past outside, war raked but still lovely. A beautiful city , Ian thought, but not home . He hadn’t really had a home since Sebastian died. Home wasn’t merely an address.

“Well,” Tony said, speaking English so the driver wouldn’t understand. “Another day, another hunt.”

“This one is different,” Ian said, still thinking of his little brother. Scabby-kneed, earnest, eleven years younger—with such an age difference they shouldn’t have been close, yet they had been. Perhaps because their mother had died so soon after Seb was born, and the house had become such a mausoleum, their father interested in nothing but long lunches at the club and acting as if the Graham family still had money. “You’re the only thing good about coming home for hols,” the thirteen-year-old Seb had said frankly, back from school one summer. “You’re the only reason I bother coming home for hols,” Ian had replied, twenty-four himself, long moved out from under his father’s roof. “Let’s get out for some fishing before the old man starts going on about how I’d better not go to Spain and muck around with Reds and Dagos.”

Ian had headed to Barcelona not long after that, packing a notebook and a typewriter to cover Franco’s uprising, but even when he came back, sunburned and half a stone lighter, there had been time for his little brother. Teaching Seb to skip stones on a pond, Seb showing him bird calls. The two of them talking about the rumblings in Germany …

Sebastian dead in Poland, never to see the end of the war.

“This chase is different,” Ian said again, and his yearning to catch die Jägerin was a hunger so vast it could have swallowed the world.

Tony flipped through the file on their target as the cab rumbled along. “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky?” Ian looked at him. “My brother would be about your age now if he’d lived, but he didn’t. I don’t have a brother, Tony. That Nazi bitch took him away.”

“You have a single person to blame. One.” Tony looked Ian in the eye, meeting the flare of anger he could probably see there. “Lots of us don’t have that.”

“Us?”

“My mother had family in Kraków, whole flotillas of Jewish cousins and aunts and uncles who didn’t emigrate when her parents did,” Tony said. “I’d never met them in my life, but I promised my mother I’d look them up if I was ever in Poland. When I was demobbed, I went looking …” He blew out a long breath. “Gone. All of them.”

Ian’s flash of anger faded. “I see.” He already knew Tony’s background, of course; his partner had flung that at him the day they started working together. I may be a born-and-raised Catholic boy from Queens, but my mother’s side is Polish Jew. Is that going to be a problem, Graham? “No,” Ian had replied, and that was that. He’d always wondered if Tony lost family in the horror of the camps, but he had never asked. You didn’t ask for information like that. You just listened, if someone decided to tell you. “I’m sorry,” he said simply.

“The maw took them—the machine. There’s no one person to find and accuse. All I can do is go after all of them, the thousands who staffed the machine, and there’s no such thing as catching all the bastards.” Tony smiled faintly. “But you, you’re lucky. You know exactly who killed your brother. One person. And we have a lead where she is.”

“You’re right,” Ian said. “That is lucky.”

They fell into silence until the cab pulled up before the train station. A busy throng crowded the steps: Austrian businessmen in homburgs, mothers towing children in dirndls and lederhosen. And us , Ian thought, on the trail of a murderess . As much as he tried to avoid undue optimism, he was suddenly, absolutely certain. They were going to find her. Sebastian might be gone, but his story would be told within the passionless confines of a courtroom—his story, and the story of the children die Jägerin had murdered before she ever crossed Seb’s path.