Map of Fates (The Conspiracy of Us 2)

The door was closing. I clawed at it, keeping it open. “Don’t kill anyone you don’t have to!” I yelled.

Stellan grabbed my arm and pulled me away. “Nothing you can do.”

I felt sick. With one last glance back, I stumbled after him, letting the door slam.

“You know what our tattoos mean, right?” Stellan said. “Loyalty to the death. He’s given that to you now. If they’d seen him letting us escape, he’d be the one killed.”

My necklace was still dangling from my wrist. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t fasten it, and Stellan reached around my neck and did it for me. His white shirt, at my eye level, was stained such a dark red that it looked black in the dim light.

“Is it like stabbing the meat?” I whispered. “Like once you keep seeing people die over and over, it gets easier?”

“No.” He dropped the necklace on my chest. It was bloody and still warm. “It never gets easier.”

Stellan rested a hand on my shoulder, and I let out a shaky breath. For a second, I thought he was trying to console me, but I realized he was swaying. I caught him around the waist. “Concussion,” he said, leaning into me. “I think. Not feeling good. Should probably sit.”

I blocked out everything else. We weren’t out of the woods yet.

“Do you know where Elodie was going to look for Jack?” I said.

“No.” Stellan stumbled a little, and I held him up.

I looked at the chateau. It was four stories tall, all windows. I had absolutely no clue where Jack might be. I hadn’t been letting myself worry about him, but now it washed over me. What they’d do to a Keeper who’d gone behind their backs.

Still, they would have kept him alive long enough to interrogate him. And Elodie would find him. Right? And then another thought, just as dark. If they offered him what they’d offered me—side with them and live—could Jack have chosen the people he’d been loyal to all his life?

The question was answered with a crash. A second-story window halfway down the building shattered in a rain of sparkle in the moonlight.

Two people leaned out of the window. Jack and Elodie. I ran toward them, pulling Stellan with me. He tripped over his own feet and came down hard on one of my toes, and I realized his eyes were sliding closed.

I hissed and elbowed him in the side to wake him up. “You have to walk.” He mumbled something in Russian. The head injury was way worse than I’d realized, or maybe he’d lost too much blood, but he was heavy, and slipping.

I half dragged him toward the window, where Elodie was dangling from the sill and ready to drop into the hedge below. Just as she fell and jumped up, Jack climbed out after her, and then the lights flicked back on in the house. A shadow entered the room where Jack was hanging.

The guard who’d been outside my room earlier appeared in the window, shouting back over his shoulder. He saw us first, then Jack. He raised his gun.

Something silver swished through the air. Elodie’s knife hit the guard in the shoulder, but not before he squeezed the trigger. Jack managed to swing his body in toward the wall, and the bullet missed him, but he lost his grip, and then he was falling, crashing headlong into the brush below.

I threw Stellan’s limp form onto Elodie and rushed to the hedge. Jack was sitting up, dazed. “I’m all right,” he said, holding his shoulder.

“Allons-y,” Elodie called, and I hauled Jack to his feet as shouts came from overhead. Jack took Stellan’s other side, and we hurried to a car hidden behind the chateau. Elodie jumped in the driver’s seat, and we sped away.

CHAPTER 22

Earlier in the day, we’d reserved train tickets to Cannes under fake names. Elodie took Stellan into one of our two first-class suites to do some first aid on his head, and Jack and I trudged silently into the other, exhausted and lost in thought now that the adrenaline was wearing off. The suite was small but elegant, all the walls dark wood, with just a few feet of space on either side of a double bed made up in maroon brocade, and a lone armchair in a small sitting area by the bathroom door. Fresh yellow carnations brightened the space on both bedside tables.

I didn’t know how it was possible that the rest of the world was just going on like normal. I felt like nothing would ever be okay again.

Jack came up behind me and surveyed the platform, then yanked the heavy curtains shut. I kept staring at them like I could still see out.

“Elodie thinks we need to tell the whole Circle what they’re doing,” Jack said.

I turned from the window. I figured this would come up. “Not until we get my mom back.” I told him what Alistair had said, and he nodded. “Assuming Alistair keeps his end of the bargain,” I went on. “Do you think he will?”

Jack’s eyes looked hollow. “Until today, I would have said yes.” I recognized his expression. I was sure it was mirrored on my face. Shock. Helplessness. Anger. Doubt. Neither of us had any idea what they were capable of. “Now, I can only say that I hope so.”

I hoped so, too. I wouldn’t have left if I didn’t think he would, but honestly, what did I know?

Jack’s normally rugged face looked drawn. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Lydia is a lot of things, and Alistair’s not perfect, but I never would have thought . . .”

“I know.” I fiddled with the bracelet. I’d gotten it back from Elodie on the way to the station, and it felt weird on my arm with its newly raised inset. “At least there’s one upside to all this,” I said. “It’s not the Order out to get us after all. We don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

Jack laced his hands behind his head. “I can’t believe none of this has been them.”

“I know. I wonder what the real Order’s been up to this whole time.”