Or living with this much fear.

Today I spoke with a man in the last hours of his life. Tomorrow that could be me.

The TV is on when I emerge from the bathroom. I haven’t allowed myself to consider the thing I nearly asked Luka before I locked myself in there. But I am painfully aware that life is far too short.

I find him slumped in the chair. I think he looks nearly as lost as I felt sitting there.

“Before I went into the Center,” I say, finding it much easier without him looking at me, “what were we—”

“Audra,” he says, sitting up, gaze riveted to the image on the wall. “Is that him?”

I glance at the television and have to stare to reconcile the picture with the grizzled man I met. The man in the corner of the screen is clean-shaven with hair neatly cut. More hot college professor than hermit.

Go, Ivan.

“Yes.”

Though I can’t read Croatian, the name beneath the photo is plain enough: Imre Tomić. I glance at Luka, puzzled.

So I’m not the only one living under an alias. ’Course, Ivan’s not exactly living anymore.

The image shrinks as the telecast shifts to earlier footage of the ferry: a lone, white Peugeot in the hull, paramedics packing up. Luka slides to the edge of his seat.

There’s a woman being interviewed as blue police lights flash in the background. Though I’m weirdly picking up a few words—a remnant from my time in Croatia before?—I can’t make it all out. “What’s she saying?”

“A man tried to revive Ivan—Imre.” He pauses a moment and then translates: “And when he failed to resuscitate him, stayed to comfort him as he died. She doesn’t know who it was, he left as police arrived. She’s calling him an angel.”

The video shifts to a still shot taken from a security camera. A man in the act of fleeing, only part of his face captured on camera.

But I know the angles of that face. Recognize the curve of that ear.

Rolan.

Luka gets to his feet, paces away with a curse.

“I knew this was off,” he says. “One hunter, one mark. Rolan was hunting you. But if he’s just killed Ivan . . .”

“Then someone else is hunting me.”

Either that, or there is no need for a replacement. I slide a glance to Luka.

“Something’s wrong. Something changed,” he says. He’s agitated, head bowed, knuckles pressed against his lips.

“The woman they interviewed,” I say slowly. “Why would she think that, about Rolan being an angel?” I recall the way he recited from the Book of Daniel, the way I equated Watchers with angels.

“You have to hold the head in your hands,” he murmurs. “That’s why it looked like he was comforting him.”

An angel of death, then.