“No!” I said. “Don’t.”

   “Why not?” he growled. “We can’t let them go. They’re going to release a plague.”

   Lydia put her hands up. “We won’t,” she sobbed. “We’re not stupid. Put down the gun, and we’ll wait until our security gets here and talk—”

   “You don’t believe her, do you?” Stellan didn’t drop his gun.

   I didn’t. But . . . “They don’t have our blood. And they’re still—” I cut off. They’re still my family, I finished in my head. It sounded crazy, after everything, but it was true. “Please don’t,” I said out loud.

   Jack reached around me and grabbed Stellan’s wrist. “Kill them, and the guards will kill you.”

   “Please,” I begged.

   Stellan’s jaw clenched, but he finally dropped his arm. And then the three of us, plus Luc, were running. I looked back to see Lydia watching us silently. We held each other’s eyes for a few seconds, and then the dark swallowed her.

 

 

CHAPTER 35

   A couple days later, we were back in Paris.

   I woke up in the bedroom of the apartment Jack and I had shared in Montmartre. My mom, who had been sleeping next to me, was already in the shower.

   I stuck my head out into the living room. Jack was asleep on the couch. I watched him for a few seconds, the rise and fall of his hand on his stomach, his shirt pulled up a few inches, exposing the strange scars on his side that I still didn’t know the meaning of. His dark hair, long enough now to be a little wavy, spread over the pillow.

   He hadn’t said anything more about our breakup, and I hadn’t, either. I truly thought I’d lost him forever, and now I wasn’t so sure. He trusted too blindly, too deeply, but so did I. I always thought I couldn’t let anyone in, but it wasn’t true. Over and over, I’d ripped my heart out and handed it to anyone who wanted me. I was finally internalizing that no one was worthy of that kind of blind trust, not even Jack. But maybe that didn’t have to mean all or nothing.

   Stellan hadn’t brought up that night again, either, but there was no doubt that things were different between us. We knew now that the union didn’t mean we had to marry each other, but that suddenly didn’t seem like a big deal. I’d finally realized what a steady presence he was in my life. He didn’t trust anyone, but I had finally realized I could trust him—and maybe more than that.

   For just a second, I let myself imagine a conversation I might have had someday with Lydia, if circumstances were different. A real sister talk, about love and lust and loss and confusion and how a person’s supposed to understand it all. How I suddenly felt even more confused, and even more alone.

   But maybe alone wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe what I needed right now was to learn to trust myself.

   I shut the bedroom door.

   Stellan, Elodie, and Luc had convinced the Dauphins they just happened to be at Cannes when everything happened, and they were back in Paris, Elodie’s bullet wound starting to heal.

   Last night, Colette had called us. Though the rest of Cannes had been canceled, Paris Fashion Week was just beginning. Madame Dauphin had gotten it postponed once, while she’d been pregnant, and she wasn’t going to push it back again. They were just going to step up security and move forward, and Colette’s friend and distant Dauphin cousin Emilia Deschamps was walking in the first show.

   Through her, Colette had just learned that Lydia and Cole Saxon would be there as honored guests.

   We’d tried to contact Lydia a few times since Cannes, but she hadn’t answered. Neither had my father. They didn’t have my blood and Stellan’s, but they knew about the virus, and that was bad enough. Without me fulfilling the mandate, and without any other gain in power from the tomb, I wasn’t sure what they’d do with that knowledge.

   So we were going to confront them at the Fashion Week show. They wouldn’t be expecting us, and we’d be ready to handle anything they might do. I hoped I could reason with them, and we could come to some semblance of a truce, especially because I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do about the Circle. I was so recognizable now, it’d be hard to disappear. And even with my mom back, with it no longer a hypothetical, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

   I put on the clothes Colette had sent over—a black beaded minidress, a military-inspired jacket, and chunky heels from the new collection we were seeing today. Then Jack and I—and my mom, who’d been with me every second since we’d gotten her back—made our way from Montmartre down to the Carrousel du Louvre, the mall right under the museum.

   Colette and Luc met us out front, and Luc led us through mobs of paparazzi yelling not just Colette’s name, but mine, too. The news had stopped reporting me as a suspect in Takumi’s death, but that didn’t stop the Circle from speculating about both that and Cannes. And it didn’t stop the media and the world from realizing that the girl in the middle of the Eli Abraham tragedy was at the Cannes bombing and was also Colette LeGrand’s new best friend.

   Circle or not, everyone loved intrigue, especially when it involved famous people. And now the scandalous famous person was me.

   We bypassed hordes of extremely thin girls in extremely strange clothing and made our way down the hall. Elie Saab. Miu Miu. Alexander McQueen. Chanel.

   Colette led us to Emilia’s show. There were probably only a hundred or so people here, but it was a tiny room, crowded and buzzing. We had seats in the front row, and I watched for my siblings.

   Stellan and Jack were posted at the back of the room. If the twins made any attempt to kidnap me or Stellan or steal our blood, they’d be taken down in a second.

   But Lydia and Cole never showed up, and soon an electronic beat boomed out of the speakers in the ceiling, and a whole line of models in tweed pantsuits, or mirrored jackets with nothing under them, or boxy cocktail dresses like mine started parading down the catwalk. People lined both sides of the runway, snapping photos on their phones and taking notes and crowding in from the back to get a better look.