My life, right now, is at least precious to them. But if Nikola suspects for a minute what he is, Luka will never step foot outside this court alive.

I force myself to ignore the television screens. Tibor and Nikola, I know, are waiting for an answer from me. The right one. Never mind that I have no way of finding what they want aside from a key that could open anything from a mailbox to a pair of fur-lined handcuffs. I need to get the others out alive, but Luka and I will never escape Europe without new passports.

Tibor sits, stone still, against the wall, his eyes sliding this way and that. But his gaze is very, very lucid as it darts between Nikola and me.

Is it possible he had no idea that Nikola killed my mother?

“So you’ll protect us if I give you what you want.”

“Yes.”

“And kill me before you’ll let a hunter take me if I fail.”

“If it comes to it.”

“But kill my friends if I refuse.”

Nikola is silent.

“How can I do what you’re asking when you haven’t been completely honest with me? You say you care about Utod survival. But all you really want is power.”

Nikola actually laughs. “You’re young. You know nothing about power or the decisions that go with it. The consequences. I tried to convince Amerie to terminate you in the womb. You made her vulnerable. But she would not be dissuaded. When you were born, she took you to a foundling box in a Budapest hospital where women with unwanted children or, in her case, children they could not raise for obvious reasons could be left anonymously. She knew you would be cared for, adopted out to a good home. And that, God willing, one day you would find your way to her again.

“But everything she did from that point on . . . it wasn’t for any of us. It was for you. The hope of you. You were her ruin. And she was nearly ours. When you found us the first time, a whole generation reared on whispers of her believed themselves inspired. And they were! They would end this war. I thought, here at last is the fulfillment of everything Amerie fought for. I was willing to accept I had been wrong. Then you disappeared, and the underground shattered in your wake. Do you think I reveled in being right?”

“Ivan believed in her,” I say, daring to glance at Tibor.

“Ivan has always needed something greater than himself to believe in. God. The universe—these, I will grant him. But I have never understood his blind faith in you,” Nikola says. “It killed him in the end. Yes, I ended Amerie to save us all. I will answer to God with full knowledge. But you killed Ivan in ignorance. Tell me, which of us is worse?”