The Conspiracy of Us (The Conspiracy of Us 1)

“If you pick that bandage off, it’s going to get infected,” Elodie said, and I jumped. My reflexes were still set on fight-or-flight.

“It’s fine.” I crossed my arms.

Elodie went back to studying her tangerine fingernails. “You got stabbed. Who knows where that knife had been?” With her light French accent and her throaty voice talking about stabbing, she sounded very femme fatale.

Stellan came up beside us. In contrast to his pointed-but-lighthearted banter this morning, he had barely talked to me since Prada, but he had spent the whole plane ride scrutinizing me. He couldn’t know the truth yet, but I could tell he hadn’t bought Luc’s “wrong place wrong time” explanation for my drawing the Order’s attention. He’d put two and two together eventually. I had to be out of here before he did.

“She’s right, kuklachka,” he said. Even the nickname had lost its playful edge. “The Order—and their weapons—are nasty things. It’s a shame for a random innocent to get mixed up with them.”

I tensed, but gave what I hoped was a noncommittal shrug and busied myself picking at invisible lint on my dress. A Herve Leger bandage dress, Elodie had called it. From afar I would have called the color champagne, but up close, it was white, shot through with shimmering silver and gold threads. It was the exact dress Krissy Silver had worn to the Grammys a couple of months ago—Elodie said she’d chosen this specific dress because the singer and I had the same pale complexion and dark hair. I wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to be a compliment or not.

Elodie had paired the dress with four-inch copper Louboutin heels—all the girls at my school in New York had been obsessed with Louboutins, and I never would have expected to have a pair on my feet. We’d stood at the bar mirror in the plane while she teased my hair into wild bed-head waves, all the while making it clear that she was playing stylist only because she didn’t trust me to do it properly on my own.

Elodie wore a faux-leather minidress, and had pinned her blond bob half up. Her dangling earrings shimmered when Stellan murmured in her ear, and then she glanced at me and her almond-shaped eyes narrowed. I pretended not to notice, but my stomach flipped nervously.

I was saved from further questioning when Luc gestured, and I followed the three of them past the line and inside.

Mr. Emerson was fascinated by the history of Istanbul, and had taught me about it when I was younger. It had been called Byzantium when it was first founded, then renamed Constantinople when Constantine took it over. It was such an important city politically and geographically that it had been conquered and claimed by empire after empire ever since. It wasn’t officially called Istanbul until really recently, in the 1930s.

Istanbul had always been a crossroads city. A crossroads between Europe and Asia. A crossroads of Christianity and Islam, like the Hagia Sophia itself. A crossroads between ancient and conservative, like that museum, and modern and anything but conservative, like this club.

I squeezed the shoulder strap of my bag, wondering what kind of crossroads the city would be for me tonight.

Luc and Stellan disappeared into the crowd. I considered doing the same—I didn’t really want to be alone right now, just in case the Order had followed me, but I didn’t particularly want to be with Elodie, either. And I really needed to look up Mr. Emerson. But it’d probably look suspicious, so I followed Elodie across the dance floor, breathing the humid, heavy air that comes from too many bodies in too small a space. She and Luc had cracked a bottle of champagne on the plane, and even though I hadn’t had any, I wasn’t sure it was possible to feel entirely sober in a club. Between the lights and the unbuttoned dress shirts and the glistening bare shoulders and the driving beat of the music that got under your skin even if you weren’t dancing, I was swaying by the time we got to a tall bar table where the lights flashed a little less brightly.

I took inventory of the club—for anyone who looked sketchy, for my eventual exit, for suspicious glances from Stellan. I found him near the dance floor, already being flirted with by a gorgeous, dark-skinned brunette. As I watched, he searched the room and met my gaze. His smile faded.

“As you can see, you’re not special.” Elodie was staring at him, too.

I leaned on the table to hear her over the pulsating techno mix. “What?”

“He has a list of conquests a mile long. The whole innocent thing you have going on is just a novelty.” She took a compact out of her bag and touched up a nonexistent imperfection in her lipstick. “He’d corrupt you for fun.”

Even though that was far from why I’d been watching him, heat shot to my cheeks. I couldn’t suppress a flash of what Stellan corrupting me would entail. Maybe Elodie liked him and all this animosity was because she thought I was trying to steal him.

“That’s really, really not—” I paused, trying to make it as clear as possible. “I’m not interested in him in that way. At all.”

Elodie rolled her eyes and the copper on her lids shimmered. “Everyone’s interested in him in that way.”

Before I could answer, an arm went around my shoulders. “What are we talking about, girls?” Luc said, grinning widely. He’d ditched his jacket, popped the collar of his pink shirt, and found a green glowstick necklace.

“The unfortunate attack this afternoon,” Elodie said, smiling sweetly at me.

“Aw, El.” He squeezed my shoulder. “We’re having fun now, remember?”

Luc was the only one who’d bothered to ask how I was doing after Prada. He sat by me on the plane and chatted about movies and Paris and the club we were going to, and I could tell he was trying to get my mind off it. His kindness made how quickly he moved on from killing someone even more disconcerting.

And I couldn’t help glancing at his eyes, like I’d been doing all evening. They were so much like mine.

“It’s time for me to do my job,” Elodie said. My ears perked up. I’d assumed they were here to dance.

“Already?” Luc pouted. He bumped Elodie’s shoulder with his own. In her towering heels, she was taller than he was.

“We don’t want him seeing me with you. I doubt he’d recognize you, but . . .” Elodie leveled a cool stare around the room. The bottom of a tattoo peeked out from under the hair at the nape of her neck. It looked like Stellan’s sun symbol.