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
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?