Rolan said the same before I saw any of this, and I laughed in his face.

“With what army? Do you even know who the new Historian is? Her name? Anything?”

“No. Not yet.”

I look around me with growing despair. Even if I took all of this back with me now—what would that do? How do you prosecute, let alone police or convict, a cabal? What did my mother, anyone—I most of all—expect to do?

And then it hits me. No wonder I gave all this up. Chose to forget it. To have it removed from my life as effectively as I removed myself from this one.

To live.

Because this will never stop.

“There is one thing more you must see,” Daniel says. “I have sent to Dubrovnik, but it is not yet here. We will eat something first.”

But how am I supposed to eat when every hour I sit here is one hour Luka gets closer to death?

Daniel locks up the archive and the corridor behind us. Emerging into the courtyard, I’m stunned to realize it’s late afternoon.

One more day gone.

I pick at my food and then give up the charade of eating altogether. Making some excuse about a restroom, I stride out of the dining hall, needing air, unable to breathe. But unlike earlier, the courtyard is now occupied by a nun tending several young children.

I decide to visit the chapel instead, but just as I turn, I catch sight of the nun’s face.

And she has caught sight of me. She gazes across the courtyard, unmoving, and I know her hair is blond beneath that habit, the same way I know the angle of her brows.

And that her name is Clare.

She is balancing a baby only a few months old in her arms. My heart begins to hammer; I have seen that face before, in the pile of my things. She is the twin image of the child in my baby picture tucked within my journal, a last gift from my mother to me.

Forget the diary, and the archive. I am staring at the secret I died to protect.

She has Luka’s eyes.

*  *  *

My name is Audra Ellison and I am twenty-one years old. I am Utod, from the noble and long line of Bathory. I remember who I am . . . those I died for, those I love.

And I am ready for the fight of my life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve said before that every book is a journey of a thousand thankyous and amazing companions—one that leaves me humbled and changed, each time.

Thank you to my readers for your voracious imaginations, intrepid souls, and devoted companionship. The author is only half the storytelling equation, after all, which is a collaboration between two souls. It was one of you who first asked me to write something about Elizabeth Bathory a few years ago. (Keith Moulton, here you go.)