The Conspiracy of Us (4 page)

T
he plane pitched, and I grabbed the armrests so hard, my fingernails hurt, like holding on would save me if we fell from the sky.

France. We were going to France. In a matter of hours, I'd gone from moving to Nowhere, Maine, to this. Visions of summers in Europe with exotic, wealthy relatives danced in my head. I knew I was getting ahead of myself—they probably just wanted to satisfy their curiosity and send me back home with a souvenir key chain.

But Stellan hadn't taken me to a regular airport. We were on a private plane nicer than any house I'd ever lived in. And not only that, but the second I'd heard we were going to France, I'd told Stellan I didn't have a passport.

He said it didn't matter.

I thought I'd heard wrong, but the fact that I had no passport and was on my way to Europe did. Not. Matter.

I rested my forehead against the cool of the plane window and stared out at the endless blackness, broken only by the blinking white and red lights on the plane's wings.

Stellan was taking me to Paris, Jack had a British accent, and they could get me into another country without a passport.
They run your world
, Stellan had said.

I glanced at Stellan. As soon as we'd taken off, he'd stretched out on one of the ivory leather couches and fallen asleep. He snored lightly, the white T-shirt he'd had on under his dress shirt pulling tighter across his chest with every inhale. One hand rested on his stomach, rising and falling with the easy rhythm of his breath. His other hand clutched the handle of his knife—dagger, sword, whatever it was—even in sleep.

There were other couches, and my seat leaned back so far, I could lie down, but there was no way I was sleeping with the heady combination of anxiety and exhilaration coursing through me. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, and my foot wouldn't stop bouncing.

How had my mom gotten involved with this? An aristocrat's son studying abroad, falling in love with a commoner? Or a powerful politician seducing a young girl, then ditching her when she got pregnant? How had I not known my mom's life was a soap opera? And what, if anything, did the
mandate
have to do with it?

The plane pitched, and I drew a sharp breath. Stellan sat up and rubbed his eye with the back of his hand, the hint of soft sleepiness in his face and the blond halo of his tousled hair making him less intimidating for a second.

I'd expected Stellan to look less epic in the light and without half the prom staring at him like he was a Greek god, but I was wrong. Where Jack was always perfectly put together, Stellan might have cut his mop of hair himself, and he'd slept in his clothes. And still, he was attractive in an almost unbelievable way, like he glowed from the inside.

Well, I didn't care if he
was
a Greek god. I didn't trust him for a second. And that would have been true even if he hadn't pulled a knife on me a few hours ago.

He cracked his neck from side to side, then stood and stretched his arms above his head, raising his shirt to expose a strip of toned midriff.

I averted my eyes, but not before he caught me and smirked knowingly. “We're landing soon. I'm going to clean up,” he said, scrutinizing me. “You might want to do the same.”

I tucked my feet under my skirt. I knew I barely looked presentable for a small-town dance, much less for meeting with government officials in Paris, but it wasn't my fault. I hadn't had time to change out of this punch-stained dress or wash my face or anything. I was lucky I happened to have a hairbrush and contact-lens drops in my bag.

“What's the mandate?” I said, putting on a veneer of bravado I didn't feel, but that I'd need if I was going to get any information out of him. I'd already run through all my questions once, in the car after we left prom, but Stellan had ignored me and spent the whole drive making official-sounding phone calls in French.

He reached into an overhead compartment. “Nothing that concerns you.”

I pressed my lips together. “You said something about a search. Can you at least tell me what you're searching for?”

He retrieved a small leather duffel bag and tossed it onto the seat. “What's everyone always searching for?” With a glint in his eye, he leaned in close to my ear. I tensed. “Treasure,” he whispered.

The breath whooshed out of my lungs, and I frowned up at him. He chuckled.

“Is my, um.” The word still felt strange. “Is my family from England?” I said.

He took a folded shirt out of the bag. “The
Saxons
are from England; maybe they're your family.”

A smile pulled at my lips. My relatives had British accents. “And you don't work for them?”

He reached up one slim arm to pull down the combat boots he was wearing when I first saw him. They hit the floor with two hollow thumps. “I represent another family of the Circle.”

I traced the cream-colored leather of the seat through the lace overlay of my dress. “Which is what, exactly?”

Stellan paused, then turned, his hand resting on the overhead compartment so he loomed over me. “The Circle of Twelve?”

I shook my head.

He narrowed his eyes. “They claim you're family, but you didn't know your father, and you don't know what the Circle is.”

I pressed my lips shut. Jack had said not to tell him anything. I didn't think I had anything
to
tell, but Stellan had seemed especially curious since the dance, so I wasn't going to risk it.

Stellan shook the creases out of the clean shirt, then stripped off the one he was wearing. I tried not to watch him, but my breath caught when he turned to put his bag away.

A network of scars crisscrossed his back. They were startling, long and slightly raised, but didn't look like any scars I'd ever seen. Not fresh ones, like when Joshua Metcalf had been in that car accident in tenth grade, and not old ones, like the one on my mom's leg she got falling off a horse when she was little.

These were translucent, and they disappeared into two tattoos, both black, made topographical by the scar tissue underneath. One was a sword, starting between his shoulder blades and traveling down his spine. The other looked like a sun, just above it.

I stared at my headrest. The same sun symbol was embroidered onto each seat and etched into the mirror behind the bar and on every door in the plane. It had a large circle in the middle, with short rays coming out of it.

My eyes snapped to Stellan's back, to the scars, to the sun tattoo, to the sword, until he closed the bathroom door behind him with a bang. I slumped back into my seat.

The Circle of Twelve. Maybe they weren't government, but a group of European crime families. A French and British mafia. Was there a French and British mafia? Maybe that sun was their symbol. And those scars were . . . some kind of brand? Or just an old injury.

And there was also Jack's tattoo, which was different. So . . . rival families?

My excited side conceded a little to my nervous side, and I buried my face in my hands, not sure whether to cry or laugh or scream. I decided to take out my bobby pins. My head hurt.

Since Stellan had taken the bathroom, I peered through the rows of crystal liquor bottles to the mirror behind the bar. I felt like a mess, but I
looked
even worse. Besides the stained dress, my mascara had smeared, and my hair was a wreck.

I wet a cocktail napkin and wiped some of the dark rings from under my eyes, then turned to my hair.

The bathroom door clicked open, and I dropped the pin I was holding.

“Jumpy,” Stellan said, easing the door closed. “Afraid of flying? I should have brought the big plane instead. Less turbulence.”

This was the
small
plane?

Stellan tightened the knot on a slim black tie and reached over me to flip on an espresso maker. “Coffee?”

I stepped aside and side-eyed the espresso cups he set on the counter. I wanted to get him talking. If he wouldn't answer any of my questions directly, maybe he'd at least let something useful slip. “I would have taken you for a vodka-in-the-morning kind of guy,” I said, measuring his reaction.

He loaded the machine with coffee grounds. “Why's that?”

“I want to say because your accent sounds Russian and that's the stereotype.” I tapped a bobby pin on the sink. “But really, from what I've seen so far, it's just what I would expect from
you.
”

He filled a small cup and set it in front of me with a quick laugh. “
Half
Russian,” he said in that light accent. “The other half's Swedish, so feel free to make insulting Viking references, too. Besides, they don't have my favorite vodka on this plane.”

He sipped a second cup of espresso and gazed silently out the window at the fingers of pink sunrise stretching across the sky. So much for getting him chatting.

“So you and Jack are what, bodyguards?” I took my place at the sink again, concentrating on the mirror.

He smiled. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like one of those dolls?” he said. “A . . .
kuklachka.
How do you say it in English? With the white skin and the big eyes.”

“A porcelain doll.” My pale complexion and dark hair would have been enough, but add dark eyes and cheeks that flushed too easily and too often—like I was determined for them
not
to do right now—and that sealed it. He wasn't the first to make the comparison. “Why does the family you work for care about me if I'm related to someone else?” I said, steering the conversation back around.

“A pretty little porcelain doll,” he said. “That's you.
Kuklachka.
”

I wasn't sure if he really did want something from me, but if he thought taking his shirt off and acting like we were on some kind of bizarre vacation was going to make me flustered enough to reveal secret information, he was wrong. It was only making me a
little
flustered.

I shook it off and reminded myself that even if he'd been civil since the prom, something about him still made me uncomfortable, which meant it was deeply messed up to let him flirt with me at all, much less react to it. But if he was trying to get me to let my guard down, I could do the same to him.

I yanked out a few more bobby pins, which clinked as I pitched them into the trash can under the sink. The next pin stuck, shellacked in place with hairspray. I pulled harder, and hissed through my teeth when I yanked out a few strands of hair. It wouldn't help to take my nerves out on my scalp.

“Here.” Stellan set his espresso cup down on the sink and peered into my mess of hair, his fingers moving mine aside.

I ducked away. That was going a little far. “Absolutely not.”

He moved my hands off my head. “It reflects poorly on me for you to show up looking like you've been in a bar brawl.”

I twisted away, and he sighed. “I'm not going to hurt you.”

“Maybe if I knew what you
were
going to do to me, I wouldn't be so worried you'd stab me with a bobby pin,” I said under my breath. Honestly, I wasn't that worried—it did seem like it was his job to deliver me unharmed. I just didn't want to let him think he was getting in my head.

He ignored me and placed my hands firmly at my sides.

I was too exhausted to protest anymore. And who knew? Maybe it'd be good for me to let him think he was getting in my head. Plus he was right—the stuck pin was making it look like I had a wing on top of my head. He worked it out with a surprisingly gentle touch and pushed my hands away when I tried to take over again.

“What am I going to do to you, you ask? Well, I barely know you,” he said, freeing the last of my curls and softly tousling my hair for any remaining pins. He looked me up and down in the mirror. “But I'm sure I could think of something. I do appreciate your enthusiasm.”

I didn't give him the satisfaction of rolling my eyes, but my inconveniently active blushing mechanism gave away that the innuendo wasn't lost on me. He gave a short laugh, and adjusted an earpiece in his right ear.

We broke through a layer of clouds, and a vast city spread out below. I pushed by Stellan and stared out the window.

If this was real, I was about to meet my family. People who had known my father. For the first time in my life, people who wanted to know
me.
But I couldn't help thinking about Stellan's scars, and the tattoos, and about what kind of people would practically kidnap a girl from her prom to bring her to France, and my heart skipped painfully.

“Please take your seats,” the pilot's voice said from the speakers in the cabin. “We'll be on the ground in twelve minutes.
Bienvenue à Paris.
”

P
aris looked like a movie of Paris.

Most places don't. All of New York isn't Times Square, and you can't see the Hollywood sign from the beach in L.A. The only place I'd ever been that could have played its movie self was the Las Vegas Strip, which we drove through on our move from Texas to Oregon.

But Paris wasn't just the white dome of the Sacré-Coeur on a hillside in the distance, or the Eiffel Tower—the
Eiffel Tower
!—growing larger every second. It was the details.

The entire city seemed to have been color coordinated long ago, so the gray roofs and cream buildings and wrought-iron balconies all worked in perfect harmony. The bridge we trundled over featured rows of dark streetlamps that looked straight off a movie set, and golden statues at both ends of it kept watch over the Seine. It felt unreal, like a camera crew would show up at any moment and remind me that this wasn't my life.

The car rolled to a stop.

Stellan climbed out and came around to my side. He stood straight now, hair smoothed, suit jacket buttoned, very official. I couldn't help but yank on the hem of my dress. I suddenly felt very small and very out of place and very nervous. I rubbed the gold filigree on my locket as the driver opened my door, marveling that there was a driver opening my door. I felt like Dorothy stepping out the door of her little house into Oz.

A tour bus that had been blocking my view pulled away—and I did a double take at the glass pyramid in a vast courtyard. “The Louvre?” I said, surprised. The building was easy to recognize from pictures.

But rather than walking toward the main entrance at the pyramid, Stellan's boots crunched across the fine gravel toward one of the side arms of the complex. He murmured into the microphone attached to his earpiece and glanced back at me. “Coming?”

I hurried to catch up, the straps of my prom shoes digging into my heels. “Could we maybe go sightseeing later?”

Stellan stopped. “Do I look like I want to play tour guide? We're not sightseeing. There's an informal meeting going on, and I'll have to take you through it. Unknown teenage family members are to be seen and not heard, understood? Or in this case,” he continued under his breath, “maybe not even
seen
until you're cleaned up, but I guess it can't be helped.”

I hugged the bag over the stain on my chest and followed him. It was a beautiful morning. Paris in springtime—the sayings about it were true. We walked down the side of the Louvre, past tourists taking pictures and eating ice cream on expanses of new-green grass. A group of kids giggled and played tag in what looked like a maze of hedges. I could still see the Eiffel Tower, far in the distance against a sky dotted with clouds.

Stellan stopped at an unassuming set of double doors with men standing at attention on either side. One of them spoke to him in French, then held the doors for us, and Stellan gestured ahead of him. I took a deep, centering breath and walked inside.

The first thing I saw was a machine gun.

I recoiled automatically, but it was just a security checkpoint. The guard holding the gun across his body ushered me through a metal detector, and a stern woman on the other side patted me down. The low hum of conversation and background piano music beckoned from a nearby entrance hall.

The music grew louder as we stepped through a high archway draped in red velvet curtains. People milled around a drawing room covered in more red velvet and gold than a PBS period drama. Even though it was before noon, I felt incredibly underdressed.

This didn't look like a mafia gathering. I supposed government officials could take over the Louvre for a brunch party, though. A gray-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses spoke to Stellan as we walked by. Stellan just gave him a tight smile and gestured down a hallway, but I couldn't help but glance over my shoulder as we moved on. The man looked exactly like Edward Anders. As in, the vice president of the United States. This man was shorter than I would have imagined Anders, but the resemblance was uncanny.

I hurried to catch up with Stellan as he stepped into a smaller drawing room with the same gold-trimmed red velvet brocade on the walls and chandeliers dripping with crystal. I did my second double take of the morning when I saw Padraig Harrington on a bench, deep in conversation with a man wearing a white turban. This time, I was sure it was him. Padraig Harrington was the most famous golfer in the world, nearly as well known for his tabloid antics as he was for the distinctive scar on the side of his face, which was turned toward me right now.

Lara would die. She was obsessed with celebrity gossip. I was still staring when Padraig Harrington looked around the room and caught me. He grinned and gave me a wink. I felt my cheeks blaze.

“Are you going to tell me any more about the Circle?” I said to Stellan. If that was Padraig Harrington, maybe that other man really
was
the vice president. What would that mean? Was this a fund-raiser for a French politician? I never imagined being connected to anyone who attended events like this. “Which of these people am I related to?”

Stellan held up one finger until he was finished speaking into the small microphone on his lapel. Even though he'd combed it back, his blond hair fell into his face. “I've just been told the Saxons are arriving tomorrow. My orders are to keep you here until told otherwise.”

I deflated a little. If they cared enough to send a private plane, I'd hoped they'd have someone here to meet me.

Wait. “Did you say you're keeping me
here
?” I wondered out loud. “For how long?”

Stellan was already walking away. “You're not going to question everything I say, are you? It's growing tiresome.”

I started to reply that keeping me in the dark was also growing tiresome, but I shut my mouth and watched him climb the stairs ahead of me. His slim dress shirt was tucked into still-wrinkled black pants, which, on him, looked like they were meant to be that way. Stellan was different from how he'd been on the plane. The teasing note to his voice was gone. I hadn't gotten anything out of him before; I could tell I really wasn't going to now that he was in work mode.

We wound our way past a series of small rooms off the main corridor. The whole party hummed with power and wealth, but if I hadn't known better, I'd have said people also seemed . . . paranoid. The guests darted glances over their shoulders as they talked, and you didn't have to be a body language expert to see all the strained smiles, the tension in gestures. I couldn't help but wonder what exactly this meeting was about.

Stellan stopped in front of one room, where a line of people waited to talk to a hugely pregnant woman with a pale, striking face and a severe blond chignon.

A slim girl wearing black pants and a black jacket and holding a clipboard appeared from inside. She narrowed her eyes and eased the door partway shut behind her when she saw me. She was probably about my age, but at least six inches taller, and seemed to be part Asian and part European, with wide almond-shaped eyes, a blunt blond bob that was obviously dyed but perfectly highlighted, and heavy bangs. Since I'd just seen Padraig Harrington, I assumed she was a French actress or model, so I was surprised when Stellan said, “I'm taking her to a room on the fourth floor. Are they made up?”

“Of course,” the girl said, her voice unexpectedly husky and bored. She made no show of pretending she wasn't giving me a once-over, then frowned and switched to French.

“Avery's a guest,” Stellan answered in English. “Distant family of the Saxons, waiting here until they arrive. What are you doing?”

The girl tapped her clipboard. “Keeping track of baby shower gifts. So far we've been promised artwork, highly trained military, next year's Olympics . . .”

“Her
assistant
of all people shouldn't joke about it,” Stellan said, glancing in at the blond woman. “It's important for all of our futures.”

“Nothing I said was a joke.” The girl gave a saccharine-sweet fake smile. Stellan frowned in response, and she rolled her eyes and disappeared back through the door.

“What was that?” I hurried to keep up with Stellan's long strides.

“Elodie wanted to know who you were. It's uncommon to see strangers at a gathering like this.”

“She
was
joking, right?”

Stellan laughed once. “I have things to do, so I'm going to take you to your room. Please stay there until I retrieve you.”

To my surprise, he didn't lead us out of the Louvre, but farther into the maze of hallways off the front sitting room. “I'm
staying
here?”

“The Dauphins live here, and for the moment, you are their guest. So yes.”

“They live here. In the Louvre.”

“That's what I said.”

Maybe it was better I wasn't meeting my family right now. I couldn't seem to put together a coherent thought, much less a whole sentence. It didn't help that I hadn't slept for even a second last night. I was starting to wonder if this was all a very vivid dream.

With one last glance back at the party, I followed Stellan, keeping a close eye on everything we passed. Paintings and tapestries and bookshelves lined the walls all the way upstairs. I ran a finger over one of the shelves we passed, and my eyes caught a row of books, all a deep purple, each with a different symbol in gold filigree etched into its spine. On the book farthest to the left was that sun from the plane and from Stellan's tattoo. Above it was another symbol, like a starburst with long rays emanating from a dark center, and a phrase in a few languages, including English:
Rule by Blood.
Below the sun, in smaller lettering, and just French and English:
Light in the Dark.

I slowed and scanned the rest—an olive branch, some kind of wheel, and many others—including the compass from Jack's tattoo, on the third book from the end. They all had the same
Rule by Blood
phrase and starburst, but below Jack's compass, it said
Know the Way.
I did a quick count. Twelve books total.

The Circle of Twelve, Stellan had called them. The Saxons were one, the Dauphins were another, and I assumed other families made up the rest. At least that made a modicum of sense.

A dark-haired older man came out of a room at the end of the hall, nodding at us as he passed, and I slowed. He wasn't famous, but I couldn't stop staring at him anyway. His eyes.

His eyes could almost have been deep blue, but they weren't, not quite. No, they were a dark violet.

They were exactly the color of my eyes.

I had never, ever seen another person with my real eye color. The guy disappeared back into the party. He must be related to me. I had to bite my lip to keep a smile from spreading across my face.

•   •   •

The suite of rooms Stellan showed me to was less flashy than the rest of the house, but the high bed covered in navy brocade and the crystal-and-gold chandelier looked antique and expensive. The air in the room was a little musty, but the pillows were silky and crisp under my fingertips.

Stellan gestured inside. “Rest, wash up. I'll come for you later.”

He left, and I found myself all alone, in a suite three times the size of my bedroom in Lakehaven. Probably as big as our entire apartment had been in New York. I crossed to the window and drew back the navy velvet curtains to reveal a view of the Louvre courtyard. Below the window, a long balcony stretched as far as I could see to the left and right, and far in the distance, the Eiffel Tower reached above the Paris skyline.

I stared at it for a long minute, then rooted around in my bag, pushing aside an unopened package of Junior Mints, my least favorite pair of sunglasses, and a library book I'd meant to return on the way home yesterday. I finally found my cell phone. No signal, which I should have guessed, since this was a US cell phone and Dorothy, we weren't in Minnesota anymore. After a quick search around the room, I found a discreet landline tucked away on a desk in the corner, with a card beside it listing country codes for international calls. I dialed my mom's phone. I wouldn't let her force me to come home, but I was starting to feel bad. She was probably worried that I hadn't answered my phone all night. Maybe she thought I'd snuck out to prom and gotten in a car accident, or even that I'd spent the night with some guy.

Not that I meant to spend prom with Jack if the night had gone as planned. Even now that I knew all his interest in me was purely professional, the thought made me blush annoyingly.

No answer on my mom's phone.

I did a quick calculation and realized it was before dawn in the United States, and called two more times in case she was asleep. Maybe her phone was off. Or her battery had died.

Just in case she'd realized I was gone and was home already, I called our house, too, and when she didn't answer there, I called her cell again.

“Hey,” I said when her voice mail picked up. “It's me. I'm okay, don't worry. I'm . . . in France. Sorry,” I said automatically, but then stopped. “No. I'm not sorry. I really want to meet my dad's family, and I know you probably don't want me to, but give me one day, okay? My phone doesn't work here, so you won't be able to reach me. I'll call you back later. I have a
lot
of questions.”

I hung up, shaking a little, half shocked that I'd just said that, and half exhilarated. I'd made it. I was here. She'd get my message and be mad for a couple of days. I'd been lied to for sixteen years. Thinking I didn't have anybody when, really, I had family.

I stared out over the Paris morning and thought the word to myself, over and over.
Family.