The Huntress. Кейт Куинн

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

       Prologue

      Autumn 1945

      Altaussee, Austria

      She was not used to being hunted.

      The lake stretched slate blue, glittering. The woman gazed over it, hands lying loose in her lap. A folded newspaper sat beside her on the bench. The headlines all trumpeted arrests, deaths, forthcoming trials. The trials would be held in Nuremberg, it seemed. She had never been to Nuremberg, but she knew the men who would be tried there. Some she knew by name only, others had touched champagne flutes to hers in friendship. They were all doomed. Crimes against peace. Crimes against humanity. War crimes.

      By what law? she wanted to scream, beating her fists against the injustice of it. By what right? But the war was over, and the victors had won the right to decide what was a crime and what was not. What was humanity, and what was not.

      It was humanity, she thought, what I did. It was mercy. But the victors would never accept that. They would pass judgment at Nuremberg and forever after, decreeing what acts committed in a lawful past would put a man’s head in a noose.

      Or a woman’s.

      She touched her own throat.

      Run, she thought. If they find you, if they realize what you’ve done, they will lay a rope around your neck.

      But where was there to go in this world that had taken everything she loved? This world of hunting wolves. She used to be the hunter, and now she was the prey.

      So hide, she thought. Hide in the shadows until they pass you by.

      She rose, walking aimlessly along the lake. It reminded her painfully of Lake Rusalka, her haven in Poland, now ruined and lost to her. She made herself keep moving, putting one foot after the other. She did not know where she was going, only that she refused to huddle here paralyzed by fear until she was scooped onto the scales of their false justice. Step by step the resolve hardened inside her.

      Run.

      Hide.

      Or die.

       THE HUNTRESS

       BY IAN GRAHAM

       APRIL 1946

      SIX SHOTS.

      She fired six times on the shore of Lake Rusalka, not attempting to hide what she did. Why would she? Hitler’s dream of empire had yet to crumble and send her fleeing for the shadows. That night under a Polish moon, she could do whatever she wanted—and she murdered six souls in cold blood.

      Six shots, six bullets, six bodies falling into the dark water of the lake.

      They had been hiding by the water, shivering, eyes huge with fear—escapees from one of the eastbound trains, perhaps, or survivors fleeing one of the region’s periodic purges. The dark-haired woman found them, comforted them, told them they were safe. She took them into her house by the lake and fed them a meal, smiling.

      Then she led them back outside—and killed them.

      Perhaps she lingered there, admiring the moon on the water, smelling gun smoke.

      That nighttime slaughter of six at the height of the war was only one of her crimes. There were others. The hunting of Polish laborers through dense woods as a party game. The murder, near the war’s end, of a young English prisoner of war escaped from his stalag. Who knows what other crimes lie on her conscience?

      They called her die Jägerin—the Huntress. She was the young mistress of an SS officer in German-occupied Poland, the hostess of grand parties on the lake, a keen shot. Perhaps she was the rusalka the lake was named for—a lethal, malevolent water spirit.

      I think of her as I sit among the ranks of journalists in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, watching the war crimes trials grind on. The wheel of justice turns; the gray-faced men in the defendants’ box will fall beneath it. But what about the smaller fish, who escape into the shadows as we aim our brilliant lights on this courtroom? What about the Huntress? She vanished at the war’s end. She was not worth pursuing—a woman with the blood of only a dozen or so on her hands, when there were the murderers of millions to be found. There were many like her—small fish, not worth catching.

      Where will they go?

      Where did she go?

      And will anyone take up the hunt?

PART I

       Chapter 1