“You don’t even know, do you? He didn’t tell you.” A soft laugh. “My brother—my true brother—was your adoptive sibling. Your protector. You and I were family,” he says.

“What?”

“You don’t even know who I’m talking about, do you?” he says, sounding suddenly disgusted.

I glance from him to Nikola.

But then I do know.

“Ivan,” I whisper.

“You broke his heart!” Tibor shouts. “What right did you have to leave as you did? To let him think you were dead?”

And the answer is: I don’t know.

My mind is reeling, tilting like a madhouse. Why would I do that—to Ivan, a sibling sworn to protect me?

“He defended you,” Tibor says. “To the court, to me. He never stopped protecting you. Saying you could only have good reason, that you were shielding us all even as you disappeared. I called him a fool and worse. Ivan died without ever knowing what your disappearance was for!”

I feel sick, hearing those words. Amped as I am, it’s all I can do not to lean over and vomit.

“You have two great objectives at this moment,” Nikola says. “The first is to stay alive. The second is to recover what you knew. For your own survival. For ours. The Utod cannot survive another generation in this age of digital surveillance, of DNA genealogy. This generation will end it—all of this, once and for all . . . or die. You are the key to that. You always were.”

I reel away, tug on the obi around my waist, trying to breathe.

I cannot do what they are asking. Even if I wanted to, what do I have to work with? A single key, a cryptic line. And while my bond with Ivan is a revelation to me, it does not come as a surprise. His contact was the only fail-safe I left myself. Now that he’s gone, anything he might have known about me or my so-called mission is in the Historian’s possession along with the rest of his memory.

Ivan tried to warn me before he died. And I chose not to listen.

Sick guilt washes over me again. Not just for his murder, but for what I must have put him through with my disappearance, the news of my death—the phone call out of the blue announcing my resurrection just a week ago.

And what have I been doing ever since? Dressing up and raving myself into a stupor each night and making love to my former hunter.

And the sad truth is this: I might even be able to give Nikola what he is asking for now, had I defended Ivan half as well as he defended me.

“Recover what you knew,” Nikola says, “and we will keep you and your common sibling alive.”

But I hear his implied inverse much more clearly: Fail and both will die.