I giggled, my other hand cupping his neck, gently over his scars. I love you, I thought. I love that you make inappropriate jokes without even meaning to, and I love that it always makes me laugh even if it shouldn't.
"Little doll, I want to see the whole world with you. I want us to jump off a cliff into the ocean in Thailand. I want to know whether you'll scream or laugh."
"Scream," I whispered, and the smile on his face grew.
"And Sweden. We used to visit where my mother grew up, and in the summer, it stays light there until after midnight. I want to show you. I want to do all of that and so much more while we're not running for our lives."
I stroked one fingertip over his chest, watched goose bumps rise there.
He was beautiful. He was a cocky pain in the ass and the most broken person I'd ever met, and also one of the strongest.
I love you, I thought again. But now, the words felt so much fuller, thrumming through me like a heartbeat. I love you.
I flattened my palm in the center of his chest. "I love you," I whispered again.
He exhaled softly. "Kuklachka," he said, and my own heart sped up to the rhythm of his, fluttering under my hand.
I'd been wrong before. I did want him to need me. I wanted us to need each other.
My eyes were drawn back down to my hand on his chest.
"Here," I said. "Get the tattoo here."
The door cracked open and the tattoo artist stuck her head inside. She stopped short just inside the door, and said in French something I was sure had to be "Am I interrupting?"
Stellan ducked his head to plant one firm kiss on my lips, then turned to the tattoo chair, plucking his shirt off it and sitting in its place, balling the shirt in his lap. "Ready," he said.
I sat in another chair a few feet away, and we didn't say another word, but I watched the whole time.
When his tattoo was done, he shrugged his shirt back on but left it open so the tattoo peeked out, dark and slightly irritated on his skin. Beautiful. Right in the place where part of it would peek through a shirt with a deep V neckline, but otherwise, it'd be secret. Earlier, I couldn't stop staring at my tattoo. Now I couldn't stop staring at his.
"We match," I whispered, holding my tattoo up next to his. Stellan took my wrist and stared at my tattoo in the candlelight, the black of the symbol and the tiny blue veins underneath. He brought my wrist to his lips. And when he pulled me into his lap in the tattoo chair, it was really, really hard to remember that there were people right outside this room waiting on us.
Finally I stood up and straightened my clothes. "We have responsibilities," I said, with as harsh a frown as I could muster. "Stop distracting me."
Jack and Elodie's voices murmured in the hallway outside, and it sobered me. "What about Jack?" I said. "Will that be weird if we're actually together and he's our Keeper?"
Even if Jack was fine with us being together, the three of us would always be something-something that wasn't Stellan and me, or Jack and me, or Jack and Stellan. Another thing, together, the three of us, that ached a little when I prodded it, but not in a bad way. In a way that somehow made each of the individual relationships stranger, and richer. Like the unfinished Rebellious Slave. The messiness of it made it not less, but more. At least that was how I felt. I didn't know how Jack felt, and that was the problem. "I don't want to hurt him," I said.
"I don't either. Trust me, I've thought about it a lot. But I think he'd be offended if we gave him a full bank account and a mansion and told him to go have fun. Being a Keeper is his life. So I'd say it's his choice. What do you think? And what about Elodie, for that matter?"
Shadows passed the sliver of light under the door. "I think it feels really strange to be discussing the lives of our friends like they're chess pieces."
"Welcome to the Circle."
He was right. We were a Circle family now. This was only the first of many situations that weren't likely to come naturally to me.
"I say we tell both of them we'd like them to get our tattoo and be part of our family if they want. And if they ever change their mind and no longer want to work for us, that's fine, too," I said.
"I completely agree."
• • •
In the end, we needn't have worried. We did the ceremony twice more, and while the two of them were getting their tattoos done-Elodie's on her wrist, matching mine, and Jack's on the forearm opposite his compass-Luc, Rocco on his heels, came in with news.
The meeting was to be held in Rome. At the Vatican. And, because everyone had known it would be somewhere in Europe and so all twelve families were close by, it would be in just a few hours.