“I have part of what you want. I won’t receive the location of the other half until I arrive across the river, alive,” I say, making this up on the fly. “And just so you know, I haven’t seen the entire document. So I don’t know what’s on the rest.”

She steps closer. She’s a few inches taller than I am and peers down at me. “So audacious,” she inhales, as though with strange wonder. “So fearless. I see her there in your eyes.”

I recall the empty circle in the succession of Historians, drawn with crisp, new ink.

“You wouldn’t know since you came to this job after Nikola killed her,” I say, lips curled back from my teeth.

“Clever girl,” she says and holds out her hand.

I pull the folded paper from my pocket. Slap it into her palm.

She doesn’t even bother looking at it but walks directly to the candelabra and holds it over the nearest taper. I gasp and lunge for it, but Nikola is on me in an instant.

“Where’s Ana?” I hiss.

“I’m sure she’ll turn up. Somewhere,” he says, the electronic voice sinister. And even though I squeeze my eyes shut, I can’t block out the vision of her floating, like a pale Ophelia, in an eddy of the Danube.

I lash out with an elbow, crack him hard across the chin. His head snaps back, the mask slips up his face.

I falter at the sight of that nose, the unremarkable mouth. The line of that jaw.

I don’t need to see his eyes to recognize his face.

Goran. The monk from Cres island.

Ivan’s death. The monastery where the monks came from to retrieve whatever items Ivan left beneath the statue of Saint Anthony . . . the key to the box only I could open. Each thought slots into place in quick succession as Nikola pins me to the ground.

Never mind that he’s got sixty pounds on me; the breath got knocked from me before I found myself cheek to cheek with the floor.

“Is anything you said to me the truth?” The story about my mother? The rain—her regret and her love for me?

But my mind has already raced both back and ahead at once. Is prepared to hate him for stripping the one memory anyone has ever given me of my mother. And to believe it anyway, even if he laughs in my face.

“Did you know,” he says hotly against my ear, “that these caves once served as the prison of Vlad Tepesh—from whom Ferenc, our early father, learned the art of impaling his enemies?”

“History lessons from you? That’s torture.”

He twists my arm so far around I actually wait to hear it snap. “History teaches us who we are.”

“If the past is all you are, you better hope to God you never lose your memory!”