“All I knew was he was the youngest deacon I’d seen. My grandfather had bought the bank he worked for at twenty-five; he passed it on to my father, who became very successful. I felt a lot of pressure, even then. I was called in a year later. Told I was special, given a mission. A single thing I had to do, when the time came, that would set me, my family up for life, and right an age-old wrong.”

“Then you can identify them!”

“I never saw their faces. And I never saw the rest of the fraternity again. By the time I was seventeen, I was working for a startup. It landed a major contract the same week I was accepted to Eötvös Loránd University.”

“So, did everyone in the fraternity go on to become a—”

“No. I suspect the Scions keep many charitable organizations as grooming grounds for positions in their members’ enterprises. The hunters are a small and very specialized part of what the Scions do as a whole. I actually don’t like talking about it. I was . . . completely brainwashed. I hate thinking about it, actually.”

“So what changed your mind?”

“You.”

I’m quiet for a long moment.

“What did you tell them you got from my memory?” I say finally.

“I said I botched it. That you were too badly burned for me to retrieve anything.”

I swallow. “And what did you get for my death?”

“I told my contact I didn’t want anything. That I wanted to travel and just be left alone. I dropped out of university, quit my job. I didn’t want anything to do with them. Forty thousand euros showed up in my account the next day.”

“That’s it? The going rate on a life?”

“Audra, I failed.”

“You killed me as far as they knew.”

“But I retrieved nothing. Based on who you are—what you possibly knew—I failed. They probably should have killed me but paid me instead. Leave with your life and a little bit of money—it’s enough to keep anyone indebted and paranoid. That’s how they work.”

“You could have reported it as an error, refused to keep it, so they couldn’t have anything on you—”

“How do you think we paid for this new life?”

I let out a breath, recall the stack of cash in my packet upon arriving in Maine.

He’s gazing at me in the darkness as though there are fifty things he’d say, given the courage to voice them all.

“You could still go back,” I say. “To save your family. Say I faked my death and you’ve been tracking me ever since—”

“I lied to you at lunch,” he says abruptly. “The other day. I said you were pretty. You’re not. You’re beautiful.”

I stop, and then give a short laugh. “Okay, you must be—”