Map of Fates (23 page)

“Fabulous,” Stellan echoed, but he barely glanced at me as he toed the ground with one boot.

“Well,
I
like it,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster.
This was about being able to leave the house without getting recognized, not about looking pretty. And I
did
like it.

“You look great,” Jack jumped in again. “I just—it's so . . . different. I—”

Elodie frowned at him and threw her arm around my shoulders and led me to the front window.

“I hate them,” Elodie whispered in my ear. “I've hooked up with both of them, and they were both terrible.”

I hiccuped out an appalled laugh.

Elodie made a face. “Okay, that's a lie. It's a complete lie. But I hate them, anyway.”

I glanced over my shoulder. “That was the worst pep talk I've ever heard,” I whispered.

“It doesn't matter what they think,” she said. “Every gay boy in Cannes will want to touch your hair.”

I touched my forehead to her shoulder.

“Too much like a hug,” she said, pulling away. “And now, Lettie,” she said, grabbing Colette's arm, “it's our turn. Surveillance time in less than four hours.”

L
ater, Elodie and Colette were getting ready and Stellan had gone out somewhere. I wandered into the kitchen. I kind of wished we were going after the bracelet tonight. I understood why tomorrow was a better idea, but I was starting to get antsy. At least I had the date with Jack to look forward to. I wondered what we'd do. Idly, I picked up my phone from the counter.

There was a text.

I don't appreciate you not answering me.

Lydia Saxon.

My whole body went cold. But Lydia didn't even know about my untraceable phone—or if she did, it wasn't untraceable anymore.

I started to shout for Jack. We had to get out or the Saxons would find us—had already found us.

And then I saw my phone sitting just where I'd left it earlier, in the sparkling white dining room, on top of my bag.

The phone I was holding wasn't mine.

It was Jack's.

I couldn't help it. I scrolled through his texts. There was a whole series of them.

I sat down hard in one of the Lucite chairs at the dining room table. All I could do was blink at the words on the screen, forming sentences that shouldn't make sense.

The whole dining room wall was doors, and Jack entered through one of them. Between the doors were floor-to-ceiling mirrors, with the same on the wall behind my back, and the uncertain smile on his face reflected back and forth, back and forth, into infinity. “Hi,” he said. “I'm sorry I reacted to the hair like that. I was just surprised.”

I squeezed the phone in my hands. “Of course.” My voice was hollow. “Of course you'd be surprised that I'd want to do anything you don't agree with.”

“Avery,” he said. “I'm sorry. You look beautiful with any—What's wrong?”

I held up the phone. “I was checking texts. I thought it was mine.”

He looked confused for just a second, and then his face fell a thousand times over, taking the whole room with it. I pushed the phone across the table.

“Avery—”

“That
is
how they knew what we were doing in Paris,” I said calmly.

Jack sat down hard opposite me. “God. No. This isn't—”

“Isn't what it looks like? Then what is it? Because it looks like you've been telling my sister everything. And lying to all of us about it.”

He spread his hands on the glass-topped table. I held my breath. Maybe there was another explanation.

“I was keeping you safe,” he said, and everything inside me shattered.

“That was
not
your choice to make.”

“Lydia promised she'd send people to watch out for you, without getting in our way,” Jack went on.

I held up my hand, pieces clicking together in my head. “Every time I thought I saw somebody watching us, and you pretended it was nothing—
all
those were Saxon people?”

“It was the only way,” he pleaded.

It
hurt.
My chest actually hurt, enough that I couldn't help grasping at the front of my shirt. It was like my insides had exploded into a million shards.

“I had no idea what she was really doing,” Jack said. “I found out when you did. I would never have—”

“Just stop.” I looked out the doors, past white columns and hedges cut into an archway down to the drive. “Do the Saxons know we're here?”

“Absolutely not. I haven't been in contact with her since yesterday, and she's never been able to trace this phone. You have to understand, Avery. Your father wouldn't have let you go to Greece if they didn't have security on you. They wouldn't have let us go to Paris alone yesterday.”

I should have known it was all too easy.

“And they actually have been working on the clues—”

“You told them about the
clues
? All of them?” I rested my head in my hands. “Were you in contact with her even before we decided to go to them in the first place?”

“Do you really think we could have stayed hidden in Paris as long as we did? They would have tracked you down. And that way they could have security on our apartment—”

I made a sound like I was choking. “And you've been doing all this with Lydia.”

Jack's hands clenched into fists, leaving streaks of his fingers on the glass. “I thought she was on our side. We all wanted to stop the
Order—and Lydia knew you needed space. She didn't want you to feel like you were being watched—”

“But I was!” I jumped up, tamping down the pain with indignation, because that was a little bit easier. This was
humiliating.
I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it. “Did it have to be Lydia, of all people? Besides being a Saxon, she's a girl you've had a thing with.”

Jack's head snapped up.

“Stellan told me, since he's the only one who tells me anything anymore. I don't care that you have a history with other girls, but I do care about you lying. After all this
family member and the help
stuff? And God.” I ran my hands through my newly short hair. “
Lydia?
She
looks
like me. She's
me,
but a Saxon.”

Jack was shaking his head. “Which you're
not.
That's the whole point. I mean, you are, but not in the important ways. You two are nothing alike.”

I shoved the chair in hard enough that it almost toppled over. “But this whole time you've been saying
we
shouldn't be together while you went behind my back to
her.
”

“To keep you safe! And you've been going behind
my
back talking to Stellan about things you should be asking me about.”

“That is not the same thing.” I heard footsteps cross the floor above us and tried to lower my voice. This was bad enough without Elodie and Colette listening. “This isn't about Stellan.”

“It's not? You haven't been picking fights with me lately because of him?”

“If anything,
you're
fighting with
me
because of him.” I felt like I could punch something. “Can we leave Stellan out of it? This is about you doing exactly what I asked you not to do. You were the only thing in the world I trusted. You had a
choice.
You could have chosen me.”

Jack stood, leaning across the table. “I did have a choice. Between doing what you wanted or keeping you alive. Do you know how many times I wished I could be selfish enough to choose
us
?” He pushed away, and the vase of peonies in the center of the table wobbled. “Remember what I told you on the balcony that night after the ball at the Dauphins'? It's
all
been for you.”

My fingernails grated the back of the chair and I glimpsed myself in the endless mirrors. I looked crazed. “You should leave before the others find out whose side you're really on.”

Jack shook his head. His hands were white-knuckled on the tabletop. “I am on
your
side, Avery! I made a different choice than you would have, because I
care
about you.”

“And I'm saying you shouldn't.” I grabbed my bag and started out the front of the house. “You shouldn't care about me anymore. Whatever it is we've been doing here—it's over. We're over.”

“Be careful,” Jack called from behind me after a second, his voice strained. “The hair doesn't make you invisible. Stay hidden, and—”

I ground to a halt at the lacquered front door. “I told you to stop! Stop trying to protect me!”

Jack's boots sounded on the tile, and then he turned the corner. “Avery! You can break up with me, but I can't not care about you.”

“It's not breaking up if we were never together in the first place,” I said, and slammed the door behind me.

• • •

I wasn't crying. I was cried out. But my heart felt like it was about to explode, and I couldn't sit still. I stomped down the residential street and sat at a bus stop, the cold metal of the lonely bench seeping through Colette's dress and into my legs.

I was a mess. What was I doing? Even though it was getting dark, I put my sunglasses on and kept my head down, hoping I looked
enough like a random punk kid that no one would give me a second glance. I was pretty sure I believed that Jack hadn't told the Saxons we were here, but I couldn't be certain. And the Circle had eyes everywhere.

I clutched at my bag in my lap like it was my last lifeline. For the first time in my life, I actually belonged somewhere, and yet I kept losing everyone I cared about. Mr. Emerson. My mom. Lydia and my father. Jack.

At least the Dauphins were upfront about it when they snatched me and tried to marry me off to Luc.

I didn't know what to do. I wasn't going back to the villa, but I had nowhere else to go. Without really thinking about it, I felt around in my bag for my phone.

I typed
where are you
and hit send.

I was already walking when the answer came back.

A
t the bottom of the hill, a pedestrian walkway ran along the shore, dotted with cafes and restaurants and bars. I bypassed one that had dozens of cheerful yellow tables on the sidewalk and, glancing at my phone to confirm the address, pulled open a nondescript maroon door. Inside it was small and dark and warm and
red
—every bulb in the hanging chandeliers seemed to be crimson, and it gave the small bar the air of an elegant but dingy brothel.

I pushed my way between a couple laughing groups of kids a little older than me. Stellan was leaning at the other end of the bar, chatting to the bartender and another guy. I stomped up next to him and took whatever he was drinking out of his hand and took a big gulp, frowning when it turned out to be espresso.

“Hi?” he said, and I ignored the eyebrow raise at his companions, who quietly left us alone.

I put his cup back on the bar with more of a bang than I needed to. “What are you doing here?” I said.

“I wanted coffee.”

I looked around. “In a bar?”

One side of his mouth quirked up. “I thought you'd be glad I'd come here rather than having Colette make it for me.”

“I don't care what you do with Colette. Why does everyone seem to think . . .” I almost said it out loud, but stopped myself in time. Why does everyone think you're
mine
? I leaned on the bar, running my hands over my hair. Such a mess. I was such a mess. What was I even doing here?

Stellan looked over my shoulder toward the door. “Should I ask where your boyfriend-slash-bodyguard is?”

“I don't care, as long as it's not here.” I tried as hard as I could to make the not-caring part true.

Stellan raised an eyebrow.

“He was telling the Saxons what we were doing the whole time. To keep me
safe,
supposedly.”

Stellan's whole body tensed. “Did he tell them we're
here
?”

“He says he hasn't talked to them since we found out what they've been doing. I think he's telling the truth.”

Stellan raised a finger and two glasses of something clear appeared in front of us. I choked mine down without asking what it was and signaled for another before the bartender had a chance to turn around again.

It was only then that the taste hit me, and I gagged. “That's disgusting.”

“Vodka,” he answered.

“Do people actually like drinking that?” The next round arrived and I tried to down it again, but a reflex kept it far away from my mouth. I just held it, swirling.

Stellan cleared his throat. The dim light deepened the hollows under his eyes. “So you and Jack . . .”

“Can we not?”

He nodded and took a sip of his own drink.

In about thirty seconds, my stomach started to feel warm. In another minute, it spread to my head, and in another, I felt a little floaty. Finally, I looked around. Despite the vampire lighting, the bar was cozy and friendly, like everyone here had known one another for years. It wasn't the kind of neighborhood bar you saw in the US, with old grizzly men getting wasted on Bud Light. We were the only ones here taking shots of liquor. Most of the patrons were drinking espresso or sipping wine.

“Done,” I said into my drink.

Stellan raised his eyebrows.

“Me and Jack. Finished. Over. Whatever we were before, we are now nothing.”

I waited to feel pain wash over me, but the sharpest edges had dulled. I deliberately didn't look up to see Stellan's reaction. Behind us was a makeshift dance floor, and a guy was doing a completely inappropriate robot to the sultry French music coming from the speakers. My head felt even fuzzier.

We sipped our drinks in a companionable quiet for a few minutes while I calmed down even more. I liked that about Stellan. He didn't have to fill all the silences.

I leaned on my elbow and watched him watch the rest of the bar. His hair still looked blond in the strange light, though his skin glowed red. He had saved my life in Greece. He'd been pretty good at saving my sanity since then. I wondered what he was thinking right now. He was probably making fun of me in his head. He was probably berating Jack.

And . . . I watched the rest of the bar watch him. One girl and two boys did the most obvious double takes I'd ever seen after noticing
him, and then they looked at me with this mix of fascination and jealousy.

Stellan waved his hand in front of my face, and I realized he'd caught me staring at him.

I giggled a little. My drink didn't taste as bad as it had before. “Bottoms up,” I said, and clinked my glass against his before draining the rest of it with a minimum of gagging.

Stellan raised one eyebrow. “Easy there, party girl. We have things to do tomorrow. Important things.”

I ignored him. Now I understood why people drank. All I'd thought about in the past few minutes was how pretty the boy standing next to me was. A couple more, and I could forget everything that had happened tonight. And the past few days. And actually, for a long time. “More,” I said.

Stellan ordered two more drinks in French, but I understood a few words now, and I knew he'd gotten mine with soda. “I'm not
drunk.
”

“I like this shirt. I don't want to clean vomit off it later.”

I elbowed him in the side, then did a quick pirouette. My bag didn't quite keep up. It smacked into the bar with a thud, but I kept spinning. “See?” I said over my shoulder. “Not drunk, or I couldn't do that.”

“Yes, and you absolutely would have done that sober,” Stellan said wryly. I stopped abruptly and stared at his hand, which was suddenly on my waist, steadying me.

I watched him notice, too, then remove it, slowly. I climbed onto one of two just-vacated bar stools. When he sat next to me, I said, “Do you even like the Dauphins? Except for Luc, you don't seem to care about them nearly as much as Jack cared about the Saxons.”

“Where did that come from?”

I shrugged.

Stellan's knee hit mine as he sat at the stool next to me. “I do what I have to do for myself. And my sister.”

I remembered seeing him at the ball, talking to Madame Dauphin. “You always do what they tell you, though. Madame Dauphin had you spying on me when we first met. And you did it.”

“Yes. I had to. That's the point of this job.”

My feet reached out, legs barely long enough to hit the footrest under the bar. “You almost seemed afraid of Madame Dauphin. You're not afraid of anyone.” The words came out before I could stop them.

“She's . . . hard on me. I can't do anything wrong around her.”

“She doesn't like you?”

He smirked. “Something like that.”

I gestured for him to go on, and at first it seemed like he wouldn't, but then he took a gulp of his drink. “Okay. A year or so ago, I may have . . . I misjudged a situation.”

I shook my head, not sure what he was trying to say.

“It's always been in my best interests to stay on her good side. She's always liked me. Until that point, I didn't realize just how
much.
”

It took a few seconds longer than it should have for me to understand. I twisted my bar stool to gape at him. “Wait. Madame Dauphin tried to . . . ?” It sounded like a bad soap opera.

Stellan swirled the splash of vodka left in his glass, and I had a horrifying thought. “Did you?”

“No. But maybe I should have. Now she does everything in her power to make things hard for me. Before, I was in line to take a position that would let me travel to Russia to see my sister a few times a year. Then . . . I wasn't. Which is another reason the thirteenth thing could be helpful. The tomb. Whatever we find.”

I swiveled back forward. “That's why you want to find it so much. Leverage.”

“That's one reason.”

“There's more?”

“There's always more.” He spun his glass on the bar. “A few years ago, I found out that the Order had set the fire that killed my family.”

I stilled. “I thought it was an accident.”

“It wasn't.”

“Leverage
and
revenge,” I said. I thought I could see right through him like he could through me, but I was wrong. “I didn't know. You didn't tell me.”

“You didn't ask the right questions.” He finally glanced over. “I didn't lie to you.”

“I know. I don't think you've ever really lied to me. Surprisingly.”

The look on his face was almost a smile. “Nice to know you think so highly of me.”

I reached out to shove him, tipping off my own bar stool in the process and practically landing in his lap. He grabbed my hand to steady me. We both paused, his heart beating under my palm.

“I feel like such an idiot for trusting them,” I said. The filter on my mouth had been turned off, and my tongue felt clumsy, like it wasn't keeping up with my brain. “The Saxons only wanted what I could do for them. And Jack . . .”

Stellan's chest rose and fell with a deep breath. He never smelled like cologne. He smelled like something else, like pinpricks of light in the dark. Like
boy.
“It's seductive, being wanted,” he said. “It makes us less careful.”

I looked his long fingers, holding my hand against his chest, and thought of Jack, trusting the Saxons blindly because they acted like they cared about him. Lydia, talking about how it was appealing,
being part of something bigger than yourself. She used that very fact to coax the whole Circle into believing the Order were their enemies.

“And it's seductive
wanting,
” Stellan went on, slowly setting my hand back on the bar. “It feels good. And it feels terrible at the same time.”

“I don't want anything,” I said quietly, pulling myself upright.

The bartender came by, but Stellan motioned him away. “I don't think you actually felt safe when you got on that plane with me. You just
wanted
so much that you were willing to do anything. You wanted this family, this life you could have.”

I thought of that first morning, in the car on the way to Prada, when I didn't yet realize quite how far my life had been turned upside down.
Toska,
Stellan had said.
Something's missing, and you ache for it, down to your bones.

I ran my finger through the condensation on my glass.

“That's how I know you're lying when you say you don't want anything. Being someone who
wants
that much—it doesn't just go away, as much as you try to suppress it. You just hope you can eventually realize what it is you're missing.”

“What do
you
want, then?” I said into my drink. “What do you
ache
for?”

He smiled an enigmatic little smile that made me stare at his mouth for a moment too long. “You remember that.”

“Of course I do.” I gathered my hair away from my face, surprised for a second not to have enough of it to twist into a bun. I let go of it, and it fell back over my shoulders.

Stellan pulled one of the strands of pink.

I batted his hand away. “I know, you don't like it.”

“Oh, I like it,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and inspected the ends of one of the pink strands. “You don't have to lie. It was pretty obvious that you hated it, and it's okay. I don't care.”

He gave a small laugh. “No, I just wasn't stupid enough to say what I thought out loud in front of your sort-of boyfriend.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“
Kuklachka,
I think you look . . .” He broke into a string of French. I didn't know what the words meant, but his tone, and the way his eyes flicked over me when he said it—fast enough that it could have been an accident, but slow enough that my skin tingled—made me have to look away.

“Didn't I tell you to stop flirting with me?” I said.

I could hear a smile when he said, “Then suffice it to say I like it.”

I pulled my hair back for real this time, quickly, into a messy ponytail.

“Why is it . . . ,” I said, the words bouncing like helium balloons. “Why are you sometimes like, my best friend or something? And then sometimes I think you hate me?”

He got very still and watched us in the mirror behind the bar. “I'm sometimes your best friend?”

I found us in the mirror, too. After a few seconds, I pulled a few strands of the pink hair around my face.

“
Kuklachka.
” I could feel Stellan looking down at me, then so quietly I barely heard him, “I never hate you.”

Something warm that had nothing to do with the drink settled in my chest, and I peered at his sunburst tattoo.
Light in the dark.

I reached up and traced it with one finger. It was hot over the ink, like it really was the sun burning into his upper back. Then his scars, cool and smooth like marble veins over the warm skin.