by Maggie Hall
Elodie pointed a finger in my face. “Avery June West. Korolev. Whatever. If you’re going to be part of the Circle, you have a very important lesson to learn, and that’s that you sometimes have to take your happiness where you can find it. The world is literally falling apart. There is nothing we can do about it tonight besides what we’ve already done and planned.”
“And—sorry, but it’s true—you might die tomorrow,” Luc added. Everyone frowned at him. “We all might! The Circle could turn on us at any moment. An asteroid could hit Paris. There could be a zombie apocalypse! Who knows?”
Elodie nodded. “Exactly. So we could sit around all night and worry, or we could have a party.”
She and Luc high-fived solemnly.
“I—” I didn’t know what to say. Colette and Luc took it as agreement and broke into the happy birthday song in French. I tried in vain to blow out the sparklers.
We ate macarons, and they gave me presents. I had no idea how they’d done all of this without me knowing.
Colette got me white slippers so pretty and fluffy, I could hardly imagine they were meant for feet. “Because stilettos are fun,” she said, “but no one actually likes wearing them for more than a few minutes.” I kicked off my shoes and put the slippers on.
Jack handed me a folded piece of paper. I opened it to find a stick figure drawing of what looked like two people fighting a dragon. “I drew this when I was ten,” he said. “Fitz found it and gave it to me. The girl’s you. Or, it’s Allie Fitzpatrick, anyway. I thought you were pretty great back then. Not that I don’t think you’d be able to fight a dragon these days, because you could,” he said quickly.
We told the story of Fitz’s setting us up when we were kids, of Allie Fitzpatrick and Charlie Emerson. “Thanks,” I said quietly, and Jack just inclined his head, and I could feel a moment, just a moment, of what might have been. But this was how we should be, and I knew it. “Thank you,” I said again.
Elodie got me a new knife. Its handle looked like pearl, with gold-and-silver inlay. Elodie showed me how to close it. “Easier to carry,” she said. “But still plenty deadly. You can stick it in your bra when you don’t want anyone to know it’s there.”
It was a testament to what we’d become together that it wasn’t weird at all when I reached into my shirt right there in front of everybody and lodged the knife in my bra. “I love it,” I said, and I genuinely meant it. I never thought I’d get so excited about a knife. “Thank you.”
“I have to show you your present later,” Luc said mysteriously.
Stellan, still sitting beside me, was quiet. The last thing he’d said before they’d burst into the room knocked around in my mind. Why did I come to Russia? He’d said it like it mattered.
I’d thought I was feeling calm about the experiment tomorrow, but suddenly, it was hitting me hard what it meant.
I could die tomorrow.
It might not matter to me whether Stellan left, because I could be gone. Just like I’d accepted that my life was going to have to go on without my mom, his life, and the lives of the people who I had come to care about so much, might go on without me. After all the times we’d been chased and shot at and stabbed and I’d survived, I might be handing my life over voluntarily.
I tried not to be too obvious about staring at everyone’s faces, memorizing them. Tried not to hug the presents to my chest too hard, or press my foot into Stellan’s too obviously. Tried not to linger too long on my last bites of macaron, wondering whether this might be the last birthday dessert I’d ever get to eat. Tried to tell myself I was being overly dramatic. Knew I really wasn’t.
“Thanks, guys,” I said. How do you soak up the last bits of what might be your last few hours in the world when you’ve only just realized how full your world really is? I’d spent plenty of birthdays wondering if this year would finally be different. Now, for the first time, I could guarantee it would be. “This was really nice of you.”
“She’s funny,” Luc said. Sometime during the festivities he’d ended up with a glass of something harder than wine in his hand. I couldn’t blame him. No matter how strong he acted, it had been a hard twenty-four hours. He pointed gleefully at me with his drink. “You’re funny. You must not know us at all if you think that’s the end of what we have planned. Everyone get dressed. Black tie required. You have fifteen minutes.”
“Until what?” I said, but Elodie and Colette were already bundling me out the door.
Colette had half a dozen dresses hanging from the four-poster bed in one of the bedrooms. “What will be the best for tonight?” she mused. “Sparkly?” She pulled down a dress that was slinky and low cut, with thousands of sequins and beads leading down to a full train.
“She wouldn’t be able to move,” Elodie said.
“What are we doing?” I asked again.
“Maybe romantic?” Colette held up two more dresses, ignoring me, and I gave up.
One of the dresses was white lace with a high neck and a flowing skirt, and one was pale pink and intricately embroidered, flowers and birds and vines snaking across the bodice and down to the hem. I reached out to touch it, emotion threatening to overwhelm me again. This could be the last time I got to wear something that was a piece of art.
“Let me choose,” I said. In the closet, I pulled aside hanger after hanger of charming dresses and slinky dresses and fancy dresses, and then I saw it. I peeked at the tag. My size.
Elodie was sprawled on the bed, sunken into the fluffy comforter, Colette sitting over her. They looked up, and Colette clapped her hands. “Sparkly and romantic and sophisticated. Perfect.”
The dress was a gossamer gray-blue lace with a sheer back. It had lace cap sleeves and tiny pearls sewn everywhere, giving it a subtle shimmer. It nipped in at the waist and flowed to past my knees when I held it against me.
Colette looked at her phone. “Seven minutes!”
“This is the one, then,” Elodie said, and I put on the dress, carefully avoiding the bandages at my shoulder. Elodie did up the tiny buttons down my back while Colette emerged from the closet in a navy-blue low-cut dress with a full skirt.
“There,” Elodie said. “Those will be fun to unbutton.”
“Elodie,” I scolded, but I felt my skin get hot at the implication.
She poked her head in front of me, raising her eyebrows. “That was not intended as innuendo. I was simply saying the buttons are difficult. But I think we can all tell where the birthday girl’s mind is.”
I felt myself flush even hotter. “I didn’t mean—”
“I think you did,” Colette singsonged, arranging the lace over my shoulder bandage.
“She did,” Elodie said. “She seems to think no one knows they’re all over each other all the time—”
“Not all the time,” I cut her off, then realized I’d just dug myself in deeper. I would be blushing for the next ten years.
Colette giggled. “We’re just teasing,” she said, surveying me like I was a doll to dress. “We won’t talk about it anymore unless you want to. And if you do want to talk about it, we will always be here. We just want you to have fun.”
“Oh, she will—” Elodie said.
Colette kicked her.
“What are you wearing?” I said to Elodie, but they were completely, embarrassingly right. Ever since Stellan and I had talked on the couch downstairs, I’d been thinking about how tonight was very possibly all we had, in one way or another. And I was thinking about what I wanted that to mean.
Colette stole the vase of flowers off the dressing table. They looked like miniature roses, white with a hint of blush pink, and woven between them were a navy-blue thistle. She broke off stems one by one and hummed while she stuck them into my hair, then kissed me on the forehead. “Très belle,” she proclaimed, then swept her own hair up and ran out of the room to tell the boys we’d be just a min
ute more.
Elodie tried to give my hair a sarcastic eyebrow raise, but it turned into a smile. “Very Colette,” she said, and thrust her makeup bag at me and hurried into the closet.
I put on mascara in the mirror. Colette had given me a subtle flower crown, tucking the tiny roses and the thistles and a few lush leaves into it so they stood out against my dark hair, and pulled a few strands of pink out around my face. During my time with the Circle, I’d worn lots of fancy clothes. I’d looked cute, or sophisticated, but I’d hardly ever worn anything that was as pretty as this whole look was. It felt a little unlike me, but in a way that I liked.
Elodie still hadn’t come out, so I picked up her makeup bag and peeked into the closet.
She was standing in front of the full-length mirror. She wore a strapless, shimmering gunmetal gray top that hugged her torso to the waist, and a pair of slim-fitting trousers that stopped just above her ankles.
She was holding her platinum wig in her hands.
Elodie had always been gorgeous, but the blond hair pulled a lot of focus. Without it, her delicate features took center stage. I’d seen it when she’d had it off before, but it was even more obvious now.
“You look beautiful,” I said.
Elodie jumped, and I remembered that I was trespassing on a moment that wasn’t mine. She scowled at me in the mirror. “Beautiful and badass,” I said, backing away. “Definitely badass. I’ll see you downstairs.”
She studied herself in the mirror again, and I tried to slip away, but she called, “Makeup bag, please.”
I handed it to her. She gestured for me to sit on a stool and swiped eye shadow across my lids, then turned to herself. I couldn’t help but look at her back, now that I was closer. It was not as scarred as Stellan’s, but now that she was wearing something more revealing than usual, I could see obvious scars there. And in the center of her back, vertically down from the Dauphin tattoo on her neck, was a small rendition of the Order tattoo I remembered seeing on the men at Prada so long ago. “How has no one ever noticed the scars or the tattoo?” I said, and then, nodding downstairs, because if I wasn’t mistaken, both Jack and Stellan would have seen her with no shirt on, “How did they not notice?”
She shrugged. “I kept it covered. Always. Literally always.” She finished putting on lipstick so dark it was almost black, smacked her lips together, and smiled at herself in the mirror.
She picked her wig up from the dresser where she’d set it, stared at it for a moment—then put it back down. “Ready?”
When we got downstairs, almost everyone did a double take at Elodie’s hair. Stellan’s gaze, however, skipped straight to me. He was dressed in a classic tux, leaning against a wall with his hands in his pockets, one foot propped over the other, like he had been the very first time I’d met him, at the prom in Minnesota. Just like that time, he met my eyes and smiled. Unlike that time, the smile was so warm I couldn’t help but smile back.
I didn’t notice Nisha until we got to the bottom of the stairs. That warmth cooled to ice.
“Nisha’s going to hang out with us,” Colette said. I breathed again. “She needs a break, and the others are taking over for a few hours.”
Nisha had her arms crossed uncomfortably, looking around the Dauphins’ formal living room. “Are you sure?”
Jack, of all people, said, “Of course. Stay.”
Nisha was about to answer when the lights fuzzed, then blinked out entirely.
There were a few curses, and some scrambling, and then phone screens were turning on.
“Electricity out. That can’t be good,” Elodie muttered.
“Merde,” Luc whined. “My birthday present.”
“It’ll still be fun,” Colette assured him. “Maybe more fun. Do you have candles?”
While we all went in search of light, Elodie took Nisha upstairs to find a dress. Then Luc led us through his family’s apartments, into a passageway that looked like it should be for mail deliveries, and onto an elevator. And when we got out—
“Bon anniversaire!” Luc said, and it echoed through a hall the size of a football field. Moonlight filtered in through frosted glass, but other than that and the candles we all held, throwing erratic shadows over our faces, everything was completely dark and silent. I could still tell exactly where we were, and a smile crept onto my face as Luc said, “I got you the Louvre!”
CHAPTER 24
This is Julien,” said Luc. “It might appear that he’s trying to kill that goose, but they’re best friends. They are having dancing lessons.”
We were standing in front of a gleaming marble statue nearly as tall as me, of a little boy and a bird. Luc had stories he’d made up as a child about every piece of art in here, and he was giving us a personal tour.
We’d come through a side entrance to the museum and made it halfway up this hall, ducking into galleries along the way.
The Louvre was all ours for the night. No guards. No alarms. For as much time as we’d spent in Paris, and even in this complex, the only time I’d actually been inside the museum was when Jack and I were looking for Napoleon’s diary. And then we were being chased, dodging tour groups and blending into crowds. I tried not to think about the fact that this time here could be my last.
“This one”—Luc spun, his dress shoes clicking across the checkerboard floor to a statue of a cherub reaching to the heavens—“this is Felipe. Doomed from an early age to go into politics because of his family name, but his real love is opera.”
He cut off when the wail of a siren started up nearby, and then another, and another, a mechanical chorus. We all glanced at each other.
“Felipe sings in the shower,” Luc continued defiantly, his candle spotlighting the cherub’s cheeks, “and one day, he was discovered by a famous singer walking by his window, and now he’s onstage every night in Vienna.”
My arm brushed Stellan’s. We were standing close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his body.
Luc ran across the room, his candle flickering dangerously. “Here!” he said. Elodie grabbed Colette’s hand and twirled her in the moonlight. Colette’s hair clip fell out, letting her strawberry-blond curls loose. They’d both already ditched their shoes, and were barefoot in their formalwear.
“One of my favorites!” Luc’s voice echoed off the stone arches. “Sven, the butcher.”
Stellan took my arm lightly in his hand. As Luc rushed ahead, he whispered, “Can I show you something?”
I glanced after the rest of the group and followed him into a dark gallery. “My favorite in this wing,” he whispered.
The statue was of a man, larger than life, his torso twisted, emerging from a block of stone.
“The Rebellious Slave,” Stellan said, setting his candle at its feet. “No one knows why it’s not complete. Some people say it’s on purpose, the juxtaposition of beauty and roughness. Some say Michelangelo abandoned it when he couldn’t achieve the perfection he wanted.”
From the next room, music started up, something jazzy and old and scratchy. Stellan reached out and touched the rough chisel marks at the statue’s side, thrown into greater relief by the small, flickering light at its base. I couldn’t help touching it, too, the marble cold under my fingers.
“I like it because it’s unfinished,” Stellan said. “I like that you can see the chisel marks. See where it came from. It makes it so much more.”
The music had been getting farther away, and now there was a shriek. We jumped, and Stellan picked up his candle. But the shriek was followed by a burst of laughter.
Stellan’s face relaxed, and he held up his candle. It bathed me in soft light, his eyes tracing over my dress, the little buttons, the lace. The flowers in my hair, fragrant enough that I could smell them every time I moved my head. Especially by candlelight, I must have looked like a Jane Austen heroine. The sultrier version—the one wh
ere lace and buttons weren’t quite so prim and proper. If I had been trying to wear something he’d like, I could tell I’d gotten it right.
“You clean up okay,” he said huskily. “Not that covered in blood isn’t a good look for you . . .”
I smiled down at my flickering candle, then brushed a tiny piece of lint from his jacket. “You don’t look terrible, either. I guess.”
I tried not to think about how, whether I died tomorrow or he left the next day, this might be the last time he looked at me like this. It might be the last time I teased him. It was so unfair, and it was the way it had to be.
“I almost forgot,” I said. My voice was surprisingly level. “I got you something.”
“You got me something? It’s your birthday.”
I felt around in the tiny bag over my shoulder and handed it to him.
He set down the candle and twisted the top off the little pot. A tangy, medicinal smell wafted out. “Lotion?” he said.
“I asked Nisha to try this while they were doing their other experiments. It’s for your scars. To make them not hurt anymore. And if you don’t want it, for Anya.”
Stellan raised his brows.
“I only told Nisha. I know she won’t tell anyone.”
He stared at the little pot of cream. Then he put one finger in it and spread it over the scars on his opposite hand. After a second, a surprised smile came over his face. “It feels—” He shivered. “Strange. Tingly.” He pushed experimentally on the scars and looked even more surprised. “Different. I think it might be working.”
He put the cap back on the cream and stuck it in his pocket, then looked up at me with the same tormented look he’d had on his face a few times over the last day.
“Birthday girl! Where are you?” Luc called.
Stellan smiled ruefully down at his candle. “Shall we?”
We followed the tinny music and the laughter into a new gallery. Stellan’s hand brushed mine. I looked down at it. So did he. Our fingers slid together.
