The Huntress. Kate Quinn
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Graham so she could get to England as soon as she was released.
“I doubt our landlady will be too keen on you staying under this roof,” Tony was saying. “I rent a room two blocks down from a nice little hausfrau. I’ll walk you over, see if I can get you into her spare room.”
Nina nodded, sauntering toward the door. For all her crumb scattering and sprawling limbs, she moved absolutely soundlessly—that too Ian remembered from five years ago; how his bride even while shaky with weakness had moved over a hospital floor silent as a winter fox.
Tony held the door for her, the speculative gleam back in his eye. “So tell me,” he began as the door closed.
Ian turned, contemplating his office. One short visit had turned it to chaos: muddy footprints, rings of drying tea on the files, a sticky spoon staining the blotter. Ian shook his head, half irritated and half amused. This is what you get for putting off the divorce paperwork, Graham. The entire marriage should have been over within a year of the vows—he and Nina had agreed, in a combination of English, Polish, and hand gestures on the way back from the registry office, on a divorce as soon as her British citizenship was finalized. But that had taken so long, and he’d been heading out with the war crime investigation units, and Nina had been struggling to get used to ration-locked postwar England, and time had passed. Every six months or so Ian telegrammed to ask if she needed anything—he might not know his wife, but he’d felt a certain responsibility to make sure the frail woman he’d got out of Poland wasn’t utterly lost in her new country. Yet she always refused help, and most of the time he forgot he was married at all. He certainly had no woman in his life with designs on Nina’s place.
He had cleaned up the mess and gone back to his files by the time Tony returned. “You have an interesting wife,” he said without preamble. “Please tell me you’re aware she’s not Polish.”
Ian blinked. “What?”
“She’s no native speaker. Her grammar’s terrible and her accent’s worse. Didn’t you notice she swapped back to English the minute she could?”
Ian leaned back, hooking an elbow around the back of his chair and reevaluating everything all over again. How many surprises was this day going to lob at him? “If she isn’t Polish, what is she?”
Tony looked ruminative. “You know how many grandmothers and great-aunts I had whacking me with wooden spoons when I was growing up? All these old ladies in shawls nagging their daughters and quarreling over goulash recipes?”
“Will you get to the point?”
“Hundreds, because the women in my family all live forever, and when you add in the godparents and in-laws—not just the Rodomovskys but the Rolskas and the Popas and the Nagys and all the rest—they came off the boat from everywhere east of the Rhine. There was one particularly mean old cow, my grandmother’s cousin by marriage, who talked about winter in Novosibirsk and put jam in her tea …” Tony shook his head. “I don’t know what else your wife is lying about, but if she’s from Poland, I’m a Red Sox fan. I know a Russian when I hear one.”
Ian felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Russian?”
“Da, tovarische.”
Silence fell. Ian turned a pen over slowly between two fingers. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” he said more to himself than his partner. “She was a refugee when I met her in Poznań, and refugees are rarely fleeing happy pasts. I doubt her story is any prettier for starting in the Soviet Union than in Poland.”
“Do you even know what her story is?”
“Not really.” The language barrier had made it so difficult to exchange more than basic information, and besides, Nina hadn’t been a source he’d been interrogating to get a story. She’d been a woman in trouble. “She was desperate, and I owed her a debt. It was that simple.”
“What debt?” Tony asked. “You’d never met her before; how could you owe her anything?”
Ian took a long breath. “When I came to the Polish Red Cross, I was looking for someone else. His name was Sebastian.” A boy in an ill-fitting uniform, seventeen the last time Ian had seen him. I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! Even now, that memory made Ian catch his breath in pain. “Seb had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk, held at the stalag near Poznań. I didn’t find him, but I found Nina—she had his tags, his jacket. She knew him. She was able to tell me how he died.”
“How do you know she told the truth about that?” Tony asked quietly. “She lied about being Soviet. She could have lied about anything else. Everything else.”
Ian turned the pen over again. “I think I need to have a chat with my wife,” he said at last.
Tony nodded. “After Altaussee?”
“Altaussee first.” The witness, the hunt, die Jägerin. Nothing came before that.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Tony said eventually. “What debt did you owe Nina that you married her without a second’s hesitation to get her to England?”
“Seb had promised to get her there. I kept his promise for him.” Ian looked at his partner. “He was my little brother. The only family I had left. And Nina watched die Jägerin murder him at Lake Rusalka.”
But the poisonous doubt had crept in. If she had lied about one thing, why not this? That night when Ian sat awake in his dark bedroom with his mind consumed by a woman, it wasn’t the huntress. He leaned on his windowsill with a half-smoked cigarette, looking out over moonlit Vienna and wondering, Who the hell did I marry?
May 1937
Lake Baikal, Siberia
Nina broke the rabbit’s neck with a fast twist, feeling the last tremor of its heart under her fingertips. Spring had come to the lake, the air alive with the squeal and groan of ice as the lake’s surface broke apart into rainbow shards. Icicles dripped and water lapped on the shore as the air warmed, but ice floes still drifted in the farther depths. The Old Man had control of the seasons here, and he kept a long grip on winter.
Nina reset the rabbit snare under the trees. She was nineteen now, her blue eyes wary under a shapeless rabbit-fur cap, razor never far from her hand. Her father was too drunk much of the time now to set snares or to stalk game, so Nina did it. The rabbit in her hand would go into the stewpot, and the pelt could line a pair of gloves or be traded. Hunting let her make a living without a man, but Nina still glowered restlessly across the lake. It had been three years since she lay gasping on the ice with her eyelashes freezing together, looking up into the vast sky thinking Get out of here. Three years of waking up with the choking feeling of cold water closing over her head, the terrible drowning sensation. But where was there for a girl like her to go, little and wolverine-mad and knowing nothing except how to stalk and kill and move without a sound?
She didn’t know, but she had to find it, or else she would die here. Stay, and Nina knew the lake would take her in the end.
She stood swinging the dead rabbit by the ears and pondering her useless questions as she’d done for so many mornings, and the day might have ended as so many did: with her stamping back to the house, and skirting her father as he lay snoring. But today, Nina heard a rumble from the sky.
The gornaya? she wondered—but it was too early in the year for the mountain-bred wind that could whirl out of the northwest from a warm sky, whipping the lake into a frenzy and hurling waves three times the height of a man across the shores. Besides, this was a droning mechanical sound that seemed to rise from everywhere. Nina shaded her eyes, hunting for the strange buzz, and her jaw dropped as a shape rose sleek and dark from the