Map of Fates (The Conspiracy of Us 2)

Stellan put his shoes back on, but I squished my toes in the sand. “This place is beautiful.”

Stellan looked down at my bare feet and then up over my leggings and sweatshirt. The knife tucked into my pocket burned into the skin of my stomach, and I shifted self-consciously.

“Well?” he said. “I need to know what I’m working with. What have you learned?”

I took a deep breath and took my knife out, tossing its sheath on a rock.

Stellan laughed. “Oh, definitely not. I didn’t come down here to die.” He picked up the sheath and slipped it over the knife, taking the whole thing carefully out of my hand.

“This is better to practice with.” He picked up a piece of driftwood as big around as my wrist and snapped it in half. He handed me a piece about six inches long and kept the other half for himself. “Well?”

I wondered if he was being more careful with me because of last night. He was probably thinking I couldn’t handle this.

I cleared my throat. The piece of wood felt different in my hand than my knife. “Jack taught me how to stand. And hold the knife. Mostly self-defense stuff. He thinks I shouldn’t count on fighting with the knife, so he hasn’t taught me much about it, but I looked up some tutorials online . . .”

“You’ve been watching YouTube videos about knife fighting?” he said incredulously. “No wonder you’ve been having a hard time.”

I frowned. “What do you want me to do?”

He shrugged. “Stab me.”

I adjusted the stick in my hand, planted my feet, and—

Stellan threw his elbow into my “knife” and knocked it six feet away. He lifted his chin in the direction it had gone. “Try again.”

This time, I made a point not to prepare much so he wouldn’t know which way I was going. I stabbed at his side, but he sidestepped effortlessly. “Again.”

I lashed out at his shoulder. Sidestepped again. At his side. Straight on, like I was trying to stab him in the heart. He grabbed my wrist with one hand. He was so much stronger than me, he pushed my hand back until it was against my own chest. I jerked away.

“So the baseline’s nothing,” he said.

“You knew I wasn’t good at this,” I grumbled. I hated being bad at things.

“All right.” Stellan shrugged out of his gray hoodie so he was just in a thin white tank that showed the tops of his scars creeping over his shoulders. “Let’s look at this differently. Tell me what you’ve learned.”

I tore my eyes from him and described the stance I was supposed to take.

“Show me.” I did, and he corrected me, nudging my bare feet a little farther apart with his boots and pushing down on my shoulders. “You’ve got to loosen up. At least half of fighting is being ready to dodge, defend, or attack. That can’t happen if you’re tense.” He put his hands on my shoulders and shook them. “Relax. More.”

The second he let go, I felt my shoulders rise back up to my ears.

Stellan sighed. “Next?”

He corrected my grip and my striking posture. “You’re not entirely terrible,” he conceded. “At least you remember a lot of what you learn. What else?”

Besides what Jack had taught me and the videos I’d watched, I’d read a lot on the Internet. “I learned about where the best places are to—if you want to, you know. Hurt somebody.”

“Or kill somebody,” Stellan corrected.

I felt myself hesitate, but nodded silently. He gestured for me to go on.

“The arteries,” I said. “I read that they, um, they bleed a lot.”

The sun had just popped over the cliff, and Stellan squinted into it before directing us into a shady spot. “All right, arteries. Like where?”

“The, um, the carotid artery? In the neck.” I looked at Stellan’s and could just make out the throb of his pulse.

He nodded. “Come here. Put down your stick.”

I did, warily.

“You’re right. You so much as nick the carotid artery and it’ll bleed everywhere. Stab it good, and the person will be unconscious in fifteen seconds, dead in a minute. But . . . Give me your hand.” He pressed the tips of my fingers to the side of my own throat, pressing hard enough I could feel my pulse speed up. He moved my hand around, exploring the area. I felt my hard swallow. “Feel that? This is where the carotid artery is, but it’s under a lot of muscle, even on someone as small as you. On someone bigger . . .” He moved my fingers to his own neck. It was harder, much less pliable than mine. “That artery is buried deep. And that’s if you can even get a person in the position necessary to reach it.” He lowered his chin to his chest and brought my hand to his neck again. I could barely reach past his jawline. I pulled away, and there were red marks on his neck from my fingertips.

“If you have the element of surprise and are strong enough and have a big enough knife, you could take off somebody’s head. You will probably have none of these things, so the carotid artery’s going to be hard for you. Next?”

I tried not to think about Prada, about Luc actually taking off someone’s head, followed by Stellan stabbing someone else in the chest. It seemed like so long ago now. “Um,” I said. “The heart. The heart is pretty much the place to stab someone, right?”

This time, he took my hand without asking and pressed my fingers to his chest. “Show me exactly where the knife would go.”

“I . . .” I felt awkwardly around the left side of his chest for just a second. “I don’t know. Somewhere around here.”

He moved my hand lower than I’d had it and pressed down hard. “Pretty small area,” he said, pushing up and down so I could feel between two ribs. “Through the back is easier.” He pulled my hand behind him so it probably looked from afar like we were embracing. His back wasn’t quite as muscular as his chest, and I could feel the ribs more clearly. “But it’s still a space barely big enough for a blade, and you’d need a lot of practice to get that kind of precision.”