CHAPTER 8

There was a moment of complete silence before the room burst into screams. People stampeded toward the doors, chairs were knocked over, well-dressed guests were shoved to the floor.

I was still sitting, stock-still, not least because Takumi had collapsed onto me. He made a gurgling noise in his throat, and behind his glasses, his eyes were glassy, blinking.

Guards rushed Eli from both sides. Jack was the first to knock him to the ground.

Eli raised his gun. “Jack!” I screamed. But Eli pointed it at his own head and pulled the trigger.

And then Jack was pinning down the dead lead singer of the world’s most famous pop group and I had a guy I’d just met dying in my arms.

Takumi sagged across my lap, his flop of hair fallen over his eyes. I clapped a hand over the wound on his chest. There was so much blood, I couldn’t see where the bullet had actually hit. “It’s okay,” I said blindly, my voice thin, reedy, desperate. “It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.”

He wouldn’t be okay. He blinked twice more, staring up at me, and then his eyes slipped closed and his rasping breaths stopped.

Hands were lifting him off me, and then I was being bundled outside and into a boat. Only when we were zipping away down the Grand Canal did I realize that my hands and my white dress were caked in blood.

• • •

Eli acted alone, they were saying. The other band members realized something had been bothering him for a few days, but had no idea what was going to happen. How the Order had managed to coerce Eli no one knew, but it was clear they’d killed two birds with one stone. Literally. A boy who could be the One and another important Circle member, both in spectacular fashion.

Back at our hotel, security stashed me in the suite of rooms they’d secured for us. As soon as I’d showered and put on clean clothes, I started working on a way out. Maybe we should have canceled our plans after what had just happened, but Takumi Mikado’s blood still felt like it was all over me. Eli Abraham’s apology, and his odd assertion that I could change things, had been burned into my mind.

Following the clues felt more important than ever.

But now there were even more guards outside my door and new ones posted at either end of the hallway. My original plan to sneak off once they left me here wouldn’t work. I crossed to the window and pushed aside the heavy silk curtains. No way. It was four stories to the canal below.

For a few minutes, I wore a path in front of the door. On top of everything else, they’d spirited me away before I could be sure Jack wasn’t hurt, and he hadn’t responded to my texts. I tapped my phone with my fingernails, faster and faster. And then I heard Jack’s voice in the hall. I stopped. He wasn’t supposed to be here. But it was definitely him, chatting like everything was normal. Relief flooded through me.

And then, from down the hall, a loud boom. A flurry of exclamations and running footsteps, then Jack saying, “Go. I’ll watch her door.” A few seconds later, two knocks, a pause, two more. The signal we’d agreed on.

I grabbed my bag and opened the door a crack.

Jack stood, his back to me, looking down the hall. Plausible deniability. If this was caught on camera, he could pretend he hadn’t seen me sneak out.

“Three doors down on the left,” he murmured, not turning around. “Emergency exit. I turned off the alarm.”

“Okay,” I whispered, easing the door shut behind me and padding down the plushly carpeted hallway. I pushed open the door to the emergency stairs and hurried down, emerging into a narrow alley between buildings. I listened for a moment, then let the door shut behind me and shrank back into the shadows halfway down the block.

The door opened a few minutes later. I went as still as I could, just in case—and Jack stuck his head out and looked around. I waited to make sure he was alone, then ran to him.

Before I could say a word, he swept me up in his arms, and I let my guard down for the first time since dinner, the shock I’d been holding back finally washing over me in waves.

Jack hugged me tighter.

I disentangled myself just enough to pull him down and kiss him.

He broke away. “I—”

I just shook my head and kissed him again, and then we were kissing so fiercely, nothing else mattered.

That last time we’d slipped up, Jack had stopped it as quickly as it had started.

Not this time.

We pulled each other so close, I could feel the hard ropes of muscle in his arms as he wrapped them around me. Everywhere his skin touched mine felt like it was melting, in the best way.

This was so much better than I’d remembered. How had we possibly been able to not do this all the time? Kissing him felt safe. Kissing him made me forget.

It was only when we ran roughly into the damp stone wall of the next building over that we pulled away, gasping. I hadn’t even realized I had his shirt half off, my palms pressed to his ribs, just under those mysterious round scars.

Jack pushed my hair back from my face. “You were so close. He could have shot you.”

“He didn’t.” I slipped my hands out from under his shirt and around his back. “He could have, and he didn’t. That’s what I’ve been saying—the Order doesn’t actually want to kill me. But he could have shot you.”

“He didn’t.”

Another violent shudder ran through me. Jack pulled me to his chest again.

“We have to stop this.” It wasn’t just for my mom anymore. Dev Rajesh, then Eli and Takumi . . . I’d realized intellectually that the Order was killing people, but I didn’t know them.

If I did marry somebody, though, would that stop it? The Saxons thought so, but I’d never been sure. Maybe if it proved that the union didn’t lead to the tomb after all, they’d have no reason to kill any more boys . . . but that wouldn’t help my mom. Finding the tomb was the only thing that would solve both problems. After tonight, seven days. “We have to find it,” I said. “There has to be something here.”

“I know.”

I took a deep breath, and felt Jack’s chest expand with one of his own. Finally, I pulled away and smoothed my hair back from my face. “We should go.”

Jack’s hair was wild, his shirt askew. I saw his arm move, almost reach for my hand. Stop. Notice me notice the hesitation. Both of us frozen, waiting for the other to make a move. To acknowledge that the worse everything got, the more difficult it became not to have each other to fall back on.

“I—” Jack said. He stuffed both hands into his pockets.

I nodded, smoothed my skirt, and we ran out of the narrow alley without a word.

• • •

The fog that had settled since dinner made it impossible to see more than ten feet in any direction, but it seemed to amplify sounds echoing off the narrow alleys that served as streets for anyone not moving around by boat. I flinched at every slamming door or boat motor, and glanced over my shoulder at every set of footsteps.

Jack walked quietly beside me, lost in his own thoughts. I wondered suddenly what would happen if—when—I did get my mom back. If I stayed with the Circle, I might not have to be married off, but unless I had enough power to change the rules, Jack and I would never work, anyway. Maybe we’d leave, but then I’d be abandoning the family I’d just met, and he’d be leaving the only family he’d ever had. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The only certainty was that we had to find this bracelet.

• • •

Finally, after ten minutes of weaving quietly through the maze, a glimmer of light shone up ahead and the alley opened up onto a wide square. “Oh,” I breathed. Despite everything, the square ahead looked like magic.

The fog wasn’t as dense here—it must have had more space to dissipate. But the driver had told us earlier today about the acqua alta. “Just be glad it’s not August,” he’d said in broken English. “If the acqua alta comes in August, you can smell Venice from anywhere in Italia.”

Now I saw what he meant.

The Piazza San Marco was underwater. Tourists strolled along wooden walkways that stretched across it, but it looked like they were walking on the water’s surface. The lights from the basilica and the surrounding buildings shimmered in the ripples, creating gleaming pinstripes in the settling dusk. Around the edges of the square, locals went about their business as usual, ducking into stores and sitting at half-submerged cafe tables in knee-high galoshes.

I licked my lips. The air in Venice tasted a little like stagnant ocean and fish, but with an overtone of fresh breeze that made it not unpleasant.

I looked around and got my bearings. We’d emerged at the corner of the piazza nearest the San Marco Basilica, with a small cafe on one side of us and a row of shuttered shops and outdoor bistros on the other. “La Serenissima doesn’t refer to any specific part of Venice, so that doesn’t give us a lot of direction,” I said, “but there’s this conspiracy theory about Alexander the Great’s bones being hidden at San Marco Basilica.” Stellan had found the book I’d asked for from the Dauphins’ library and told me the details.

“Napoleon might have heard that rumor, too. He was really interested in the church. And that over there”—I pointed across the piazza—“is called the Ala Napoleonica. The Napoleonic Wing. Though it seems to have only Venetian history these days, which is why I want to check the basilica first.”

Jack was nodding along. “Sounds like as good an idea as any.”

“Actually,” said a girl’s voice from behind us, in a light French accent, “I’ve got a better idea, but by all means continue to waste more time.”

We both spun around toward the cafe. There, leaning against a column, hundreds of miles away from Paris where she should be, was the Dauphins’ maid, Elodie.