The truth hits me like the flash of a strobe. They’ve let me come to court just long enough to taste safety. But they never intended to let me stay. And now they won’t hide me unless I resume whatever mission they thought I was on.

They don’t want me. They want my mother. But if I was ever like her before, I definitely am not now.

I’m shaking so hard that it’s an effort to merely sit still.

“Ivan himself said that if I had found the diary I wouldn’t have stopped until I ended this,” I say through clenched teeth. “And unless there’s something someone hasn’t told me, that’s the only hope there is!”

“Is it?” Nikola says strangely.

“What more can there be?” I demand.

“That . . . is what we would like to know.”

“What makes you think I found anything at all?” I say. “Maybe I was tired of this game. This whole life. Maybe I just wanted to live. Did you consider that? Wanting to actually live?”

“No. It was the last thing you cared about. Just living.” Nikola says it like the word is dirty. “Tell her.”

“Tell me what?”

“Something happened before you disappeared,” Tibor says, giving up his pretense at madness altogether. His entire voice changes, dropping in tenor. “For more than a year, you were fanatical. Obsessed. You wanted to know everything about your mother. Anyone who knew her. Wanted anything that was hers. It was unsafe for you and Nikola to meet, though you visited court in Budapest on several occasions with Katia and Andre.” He looks down, seems sad at the mention of their names.

He shrugs. “Not because you were in love with life at court, or because you wanted safety. But because it was your mother’s life, or so you thought. But then something happened. Two months before you disappeared, you began to change. I thought that the Utod way of life had begun to wear on you. Some of us do go crazy, you know,” he says wryly, looking up. “You began to stay away more and more. You became secretive. You were gone for weeks at a time without a word. When I saw you, you were exhausted. Preoccupied. I could see it in your eyes. You were on a holy quest.”

“Don’t pretend you knew anything about me,” I say. But I’m calculating. By the time frame he’s talking about, I knew what Luka was.

“Oh, but I did know you,” Tibor says intensely. For the first time I realize that his eyes are a turbulent gray glittering with intelligence. That there is something wounded about his expression.

No. If he says we were involved, I think I’ll actually vomit.