Page 1 of We Are the Match

Paris

On this side of the island, where the cliffs are stark white and brutal and the people are crammed together in small apartments like dolls in a dollhouse, your neighbors can hear every scream.

Or, in Thea’s case, moan.

She and Perce are in my bed, as usual on a Saturday night, and the three of us have spent it as we always have—fucking, arguing about business, and then fucking again.

It’s the buzz of my phone on the bedside table that finally interrupts us for good, and I clamber over Perce—who looks exhausted, poor man—and flip it over, silencing the alarm.

“So are you actually going to show up, Paris?” Thea flops back onto the bed beside Perce and arches a perfectly groomed eyebrow at me. “For the party?”

“I don’t understand why you want me there,” I say sharply, and there it is again. The argument that is always so close to the surface with us, the part where I ask her why she left me—left all of us at the group home—behind to play god with the crime families of the Grecian islands.

Perce groans. “Paris,” he says. “I don’t know what it will take to convince you. I really don’t. You’re our friend, and we haven’t had a proper engagement party. So we want you there. I want you there, even if it’s ... well, even if it’s Zarek’s party, really.”

Thea sits up and grins at me, the look on her face sharp. “Come on, Paris,” she says. “This is how Zarek is. It doesn’t mean we can’t have fun at our party.”

Thea works for Zarek in the same sense that we all do—he owns the mansion on the hill in name, but he owns all the rest of the island, city and all, in practice. Even on mainland Greece, far from the island, Zarek has reach that extends far beyond what it should.

“What’s fun about a party with a bunch of high-up people from the Family?” I say.

Despite the number of times Thea’s asked me to be one of her fixers, I’ve kept the Families and the work they do at a distance.

Thea drills me with a look. “You always seem so sure you’ll have nothing in common with any of them,” she says thoughtfully, “when you’ve done similar work yourself over the years. ”

It’s not that the work bothered me as much as who I’d be working for, though: after all, I’ve smashed a few fingers in my time. Convinced the occasional guard not to see something. Helped a whistleblower decide not to whistle.

Teach the bird not to sing. That’s what the heads of the crime families say when they want someone silenced. It sounds innocuous enough to wiretaps and listening ears. Almost pretty, if you’re the right audience.

“Will she be there?” I ignore Thea and direct my question at Perce this time.

He sighs, threads his fingers through Thea’s, his bronze skin contrasting with her much-darker brown skin. “Are you asking about Helen?”

Helen. Daughter of the most powerful man on the island.

The reason I am going to this party in the first place.

Not that Perce and Thea know this.

“Of course she’s asking about Helen.” Thea’s eyes narrow. “What’s your obsession with her?”

“No obsession.”

It isn’t Helen I’m obsessed with; it’s what her death will do to Zarek. He took my family, and I’m taking his. Pretty fucking simple by my standards.

“You know she doesn’t often make public appearances,” Thea tells me. “But I’m told she’ll be there tonight to celebrate her close friend’s engagement.”

I snort. “Close friend? I don’t see her here.”

“Not for lack of trying.” Thea releases Perce’s hand and swings her legs over the bed. “If you want introductions, and if you want to play the game, I got you. If you want to make a scene, do me a favor and just tell me now.”

“No scenes.” It’s a bald-faced lie, and if Thea still knew me like she did when we were growing up in the group home on Troy together, she would know that.

“What, are you finally ready for your leg up in the Families?” Thea asks me.

Thea’s been on this shit for years, saying she has a place for me if I want it, and good money, too. The kind that could buy me a new life, if I wanted it.

If I deserved it.

“I just want to celebrate my friends,” I tell Thea. “And maybe flirt with a pretty little crime princess while I’m at it.”

“Excellent,” Thea says, nudging me with her knee as she moves past me. “Now let’s get a move on, Troy. I’ve got gowns to try on and guns to sell to some pesky off-island motherfuckers before I have to be at Zarek’s tonight.”

Troy , she calls me, as if we are not both shit from the same place. “Wear a gown,” she tells me, and I laugh at her.

The mansion on the north end of the island will be everything I am not: glamorous, stunning, shrouded in wealth and privilege and unimaginable power. I intend to show up the way I always do—with a scowl on my face and a knife in my boot.

“I’m serious,” Thea says, but the humor is still there beneath. “And you’re sure you don’t want introductions tonight, Troy?” She pauses after she pulls her tank top down over her head, the look on her face shifting into something I cannot quite read.

“You know there is no force on this planet that could make me want to be part of them.” I look past her on purpose, because if there’s anyone left alive who knows me at all, it’s Thea, even if she sees less than she used to.

She’ll see this, though, written in my face, the fury that hasn’t ever quite stilled.

Thea tilts her head at me, leaning closer. “Why do you stay?” she asks. “Why do you stay on this island at all, if you don’t want any part of the Families who control it?”

My heart thuds harder in my chest. Why do I stay ?

How can I leave , after what they did to my family?

“Do you ?” I ask her. “Really want to be part of this?”

“ Want is only a small part of the choices I make, Troy,” she says after a beat of silence.

Thea has been in the game longer than I have.

She’s a few years older than me and left the group home before it was destroyed.

Since then, Thea has leveraged her innate ability to sell guns to assholes all over the world, bringing in money from corners of the market Zarek had never played in before.

If I was ambitious like Thea, I would ask for introductions to some of the players.

They’ll all be there tonight, not just Zarek and Helen.

The queens—Hana and Altea and Frona, three powerful women who were once allied with the Family on Troy and now run different pieces of Zarek’s Family—would not be left out of an event like this one.

“What about you?” Thea prods again.

“Just here for the sex,” I say.

Thea barks out a laugh, her expression sharpening. “Well, if that’s the case, I’d recommend Hana. For all Frona’s reputation, Hana’s got more spice. Unless you’re angling for the big man himself?”

Oh, I am, I am , I always have been, if not in the way Thea means, because Zarek’s pursuit of power cost me every person I cared about. But I, too, can play long games.

“I’ll settle for Helen,” I tell Thea. It’s true in more ways than one, of course.

The three queens don’t matter, not compared to Helen. Zarek doesn’t matter, not compared to Helen.

“That’s a stupid idea, Troy.”

Thea is always warning me, and I am rarely listening.

“Yeah, but it’ll be fun while it lasts.”

Thea’s gaze shifts to fury, but only briefly, and then she is still and placid, smooth waters covering the storm I know is beneath, the storm I have seen unleashed back in the group home on Troy.

She put her fist through the drywall, broke noses, threw the first punch, always, always .

The control she has now is new, and learned, and hard-won.

If I were honest with her, I would tell her I miss the brutality.

“All right, Paris,” she says. “I’ll get you an introduction, if that’s what you want. But be careful. Helen plays a game more dangerous than you.”

“She never leaves the castle,” I say. “How dangerous can she be?”

Perce, who is pulling his boots on, pauses. “Paris,” he says.

There is warning in his tone.

Thea is standing utterly still again, poised to slide her engagement ring back onto her finger. “You think Helen isn’t dangerous?”

I reach past Thea for my shoes, but her hand closes over mine, her dark-brown skin stark in contrast to my white skin.

“Be careful.” She leans close to me, her breath hot against my neck. “She can take everything from you without lifting a finger.”

There are stories about Helen. She does not date often, but every girlfriend and boyfriend she has had—dead.

She does not travel often, but everywhere she does—death trails in her wake.

It has made people only more ferocious in their pursuit of Helen, the most beautiful of all these untouchable gods.

As if they could be the one who survives her.

I have no interest in any of that.

I turn, my mouth inches from Thea’s. “No one takes anything from me,” I hiss back. “Not even this Family.”

No.

Not ever again. No, I will be the one that takes something from them .

I will take and take the way they once took from me.

I am no god, but I have their viciousness, and if I had let Thea listen when she gave me opportunities to talk, I would have told her what it was like to be kept alive by a tenacity I did not want.

To be the one who lived, even if I had not deserved it.

Thea draws back and laughs, the sound sharp as a slap. “Do you think you can do it?” She leans even closer, her lips almost brushing my jaw. “Do you think you can kill him?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. We pretend we do not hate him, even here, in a room that belongs just to us, because in this world, people listen. Words can be recorded and twisted. Words can kill. “I don’t want Zarek dead.”

And it’s true. I don’t want him dead. Not yet.

He has to suffer first. Has to lose what he loves, what he keeps locked in the tower like a precious jewel, before I take his life, too.

I have a plan, and once I have enacted it, I am going to kill Helen of the gods.

Unless Thea is right.

Unless Helen is the end of me first.