The Huntress. Кейт Куинн
to answer your question. I studied English there and met my husband.” A smile. “Now you know something more about me, so shall we make our purchase and look for a dress for Ruth? There’s a children’s boutique not far away.”
Jordan’s cheeks stayed hot as they left the shop with their parcels. I am a worm, she thought, kicking herself, but Anneliese seemed to hold no grudge, swinging her handbag and tilting her nose up to the breeze. “My former husband would say this is hunting weather,” she exclaimed, reminiscent. “I’m no good at hunting, but I always did like heading to the woods on such days. Spring breezes bringing every scent right to your nose …”
Jordan wondered why her stomach had tightened again, when Anneliese was chatting away in a perfectly forthcoming fashion. Because you’re jealous, she told herself witheringly. Because you don’t want to share your father, and you resent her for it. That’s a mean, nasty little feeling to have, Jordan McBride. And you’re going to get over it, right now.
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 babushkas 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