“No,” I tried to say, but it came out as a strangled gasp. Elisa wailed. Stellan ignored us both.
“How the hell did this happen?” he said to Jack. He pulled out the dagger. “How did the Order get in here?”
“You were supposed to be watching Avery.” Jack hauled Aimee and Elisa up by their arms and moved them away from the spreading pool of blood.
“Like I knew they’d come for her!” Stellan said. “Unless you’ve been lying about who she is, there is absolutely no reason for this.”
Elisa spoke in rapid, garbled French. Stellan pointed the bloody tip of the knife at her.
“Don’t!” I found my voice and tried to stand, but had to grab on to the couch to keep from falling. “She didn’t do anything.”
Stellan whirled on me. The beautiful, arrogant boy I’d been talking to in the car was now a beautiful, arrogant boy with a knife in his grip and blood on his hands. “Why did he try to kill you?”
“What?” I choked in disbelief. Was he angry with me? “I have no idea! Why did you kill him?”
He stalked across the floor until he towered over me. “Did you not get the tried to kill you part?”
“He didn’t. The other guy did.” I tried to yell, but my voice broke.
“And this one was Order, too.”
“So why didn’t you question him? Or lock him up? Or—”
I quaked, looking from the headless body to the newly dead Frederic and back.
“You don’t reason with the Order,” Stellan spat. Blood dripped off his dagger, and he held it like he was about to plunge it into someone else.
Jack pushed between us, his hands on Stellan’s chest. “Stop,” he said. “It’s the Order’s fault, not hers.” After a second, Stellan’s arm dropped to his side, but his eyes never left my face, even after Jack let him go.
Luc stood up, running a hand through his messy hair, his lanky shoulders more tense than they had been a few minutes earlier. “If I may propose a theory. The Order learned we would have family members here today, in whatever way they’ve been learning of all our movements. They planned another strike. They may even have wanted me.” He paused and took a long drag of his cigarette, and I thought again of that conversation. The Order. Attacks. “It seems our guest was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
From the other side of the room, Aimee piped up again.
“She says these two”—Luc gestured to the bodies with his cigarette as he translated—“came a few hours ago. Said the other branch of the store sent them. The girls thought nothing of it until Frederic tied them up in the back room.”
Luc had to be right—the men wanted someone else. But then again, that was what I’d thought at prom.
“Doesn’t matter now.” Luc put out his cigarette on an issue of Vogue on a side table. “Get these girls out of here so we can have someone clean up this mess.” He said it like milk had been spilled on the kitchen floor.
My hands started shaking.
Luc flipped through a rack of coral-colored dress shirts. “Would you call these pink or orange, cherie? Pink is not my color, but I need to change for dinner. I’m starving.”
It took me a second to register what he’d said. “What?”
“There’s an adorable bistro around the corner, or that little cafe on Rue de Rivoli,” he continued.
Stellan, too, wiped blood off his dagger with nothing more than a scowl. Jack, at least, was covering the bodies.
I blinked. “What is wrong with you?”
Luc pulled a shirt off its hanger and cocked his head to one side.
“People are dead.” My breath rasped. “Who cares if the shirt’s pink?”
Luc draped the shirt on the rack. His face softened. “Cherie, I apologize. This all is new to you. I must appear so callous. You’ve got to understand—killing Order members is not the same as killing normal people. Even if he hadn’t hurt you, if you knew all they’d done to our families, you’d understand.”
I shook my head. I wouldn’t understand. I didn’t understand.
Across the room, Jack dropped a patterned scarf over the killer’s head and stood. “You should get cleaned up,” he said. I shook my head again.
“There’s a bathroom upstairs,” he said pointedly. I bit my lip, hard. I could tell he thought I was about to lose it. Maybe he was right.
“Show me?” I whispered. He started to point up the stairs, but I steeled myself. Jack would give me some answers. He had to. “Show. Me.”
He frowned, but nodded. On the way to the stairs, he flipped through a rack of floral sundresses and pulled one off its hanger. “Here. Put this on.”
I held the dress by the tips of my fingers. “I can’t just take this—”
“It doesn’t matter.” He climbed ahead of me up the stairs.
I stared at the dress. It did matter. It mattered that this dress cost more than my entire wardrobe at home. Probably more than we paid for a month of rent at home. But to these people, it didn’t. It didn’t matter that there were two dead bodies on the floor downstairs and that I could have been a third. That beheading someone—in one of the fanciest boutiques in Paris—was nothing more than a minor delay of your dinner plans. And that someone had attacked me, right as I learned that I had family who associated with some of the most powerful people in the world, and that it hadn’t felt like a case of mistaken identity.
Just how much had my mom been hiding? Was it possible that she’d kept my father’s family from me because of more than hurt feelings?
Jack opened a door off the hallway.
“Please,” I said. He held the door wide open with one arm, peering in like he was making sure it was safe. “Tell me what’s going on. Was this really a mistake? Luc said it was nothing.”
He looked both ways down the hall, chewed his lip, then finally met my eyes. “Clean up, and then we’ll talk about it. But no, it’s not nothing. And I don’t think it was a mistake.”
CHAPTER 14
The blood wouldn’t come off, and none of it was a mistake.
There was non-mistake, not-nothing blood everywhere. The dried blood from my hands and the fresh blood still oozing from my shoulder turned different shades of pink as they swirled down the drain.