At the end of the dock, Ruth stood up. Jordan thought she could see the stubborn set of that fragile jaw all the way from here. Anneliese held out a hand, but Ruth brushed straight past her, breaking into a run. That’s it, cricket, Jordan wanted to cheer as Ian whistled one more time and her sister pelted off the dock.
At that moment, Tony broke out of the cabin at a flat sprint, door banging open, something long in one hand. He scooped up Ruth like a football, tossing her over one shoulder and running for the car. Anneliese scrabbled in her coat pocket, but her pistol snagged for a split second and Tony was moving too fast. He yanked the car door and dove inside, pulling Ruth with him out of sight. Jordan could hear him urging Ruth down flat on the floor of the car, even as he slapped a long glinting shape down across the open driver’s-side window: Dan McBride’s spare shotgun, taken from the cabin and now leveled at Anneliese.
Jordan quivered inside like a plucked violin string, seeing Ruth disappear inside the car. Tony had sworn that if all went wrong he would drive away with Ruth, that he would make her safe first. The most precious pawn was off the board.
Now, staring across the chessboard, they faced only the queen.
Anneliese had frozen midway down the dock, pistol finally in hand, caught between lunging toward shore and firing from where she stood. Her back was to the trees as she stared at the car, and Jordan stepped out of cover onto the shore.
Ian strode arrow straight at her side. “Stay back,” he said very low voiced. “This time she may shoot you.”
“I know how to throw her off guard,” Jordan murmured back, feeling the Leica about her neck on its strap. She’d snatched it on pure instinct when they left the house—perhaps the same instinct that made Ian stretch for his typewriter, Nina for a plane, Tony for his own nimble tongue. When preparing to level with an enemy, you readied your best weapon. “Anneliese doesn’t really want to kill me, and after years of hiding, she’s scared of the camera. I can use both against her. If I don’t, she’ll shoot you—you’re the stranger; she’ll aim right for your head.”
Ian’s stride didn’t slow, sun glinting off his hair as he aimed for the dock. Jordan didn’t stop either.
From inside the car, Tony was shouting at Anneliese in German and English, telling her to remain still or he’d shoot, keeping her gaze aimed at him. Jordan could see him from the corner of her eye. She didn’t turn to look directly; neither did Ian. The world had narrowed to the two of them, and Anneliese. It has to be us, Jordan thought. The ones who have already gone against her and lost something—me, my father; Ian, his brother. Us. The ones who refused to lose Ruth too.
Anneliese saw them as they stepped onto the dock, stiffening in a freeze of pure shock. She seemed to turn very slowly, or maybe it just seemed slow to Jordan through the Leica’s lens as she lifted the camera—the flying strands of her hair, the blue of her eyes as they rounded, the knuckles whitening around her pistol. Watching it, something in Jordan telescoped, compressed, divided: there was the side of her that flinched in fear; the human side—and there was the lens that narrowed with perfect focus, the ruthless eye that put a lid on the chaos of emotions and simply watched Anneliese scrabble like a cowering animal chased out from under a bush. The cold inner lens that wanted nothing but to record what happened here and show it to the world.
“Smile for the camera, Lorelei.” It was Jordan who smiled as she took the picture.
Then the shot rang out.
Chapter 56
Nina
September 1950
Selkie Lake
Nina crouched on the shore of Selkie Lake not eight hundred meters down from the cabin, yanking off her boots. She watched Tony snatch the child, saw Jordan and Ian come from the trees, saw the slim figure of the woman now frozen on the dock. There you are, Nina thought, yanking her summer dress over her head. The blue-eyed huntress with her Walther PPK and her scar. Half a decade and half a globe had had to be traveled, but the hunt went on. Only now, who was the huntress and who was the prey?