“The crown’s debt was canceled and the king confiscated her remaining land when he banished her descendants from Hungary. But the peasant families of her victims received nothing—justice least of all. And so the Scions of the Dispossessed was founded nearly thirty years later, as her descendants began to return from Poland. And they have carried out retribution against her progeny ever since, hunting and killing without mercy.”

“You’re insinuating a whole family has been systematically murdered for four hundred years.”

“I’m not just insinuating.”

“I don’t believe in”—I gesture wildly—“vampires or monsters.”

“Vampires don’t exist. But monsters most certainly do.”

“Then why hasn’t anyone stopped them? And how is there anyone left to kill?”

“They don’t get caught, Audra,” he says quietly. “They’ve become powerful through the centuries. No one’s going to convict them. And there are descendants left to kill.” He looks pointedly at me.

This time it’s my turn to laugh. It’s a brittle sound, tightly exhaled with an incredulous gaze at the ceiling. “I don’t believe this.”

“Whether you believe it or not doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.”

“And this . . . is why I did what I did? Because I’m being hunted by a guy from the Food Mart?”

But even as I say it I recall the way Luka stared. The weird desperation to see me again. The accent. Eastern European.

“Why have I never heard about this League of Medieval Justice? Why haven’t I read about it somewhere?”

“You probably have and didn’t know it,” Rolan says. “A man dies in a car accident on a deserted highway. A woman jumps off a bridge. They’re ruled suicides, accidents, random acts of violence. They’re not. Their hunters are precise, highly secretive, and they don’t get caught—or if they do, they admit no affiliation. Each of them receives orders from a source known only as the Historian. Because of that, one hunter wouldn’t know another if he passed him or her on the street.”

“Oh, come on. That many accidents and suicides in the same family have to get suspicious after a while.”

He shakes his head. “Progeny are rarely raised by their birth parents—at least those aware of who and what they are. For that reason, the Scions might go decades without a kill. But they are nothing if not devoted to their cause. Few Progeny survive beyond the age of thirty.”

“So you’re saying Luka killed my mother.”

“No. I’m saying someone like him did. Luka himself is singly and wholly dedicated to one murder. Yours.”

I can’t help it; the hair rises on my arms.

This is so not the mob involvement I was expecting.

“If I’m adopted, how did he find me?”

“Two years ago you went looking for your birth mother.”