Page 10 of We Are the Match

Paris

The storm is raging now, thick sheets of rain and rapid flashes of lightning across the sky. No one would be leaving the island in this fury, even if Zarek had not closed the harbor and airfield.

But me?

I have work to do.

Thea’s house is not far from mine. The city is a cramped little thing, crawling up the south side of the island and clinging to the unforgiving rock.

The wealthy members of the Families—like Zarek and his queens—have vast properties and mansions on the north side, but Thea has chosen to live closer to the rest of us, her house on the southwestern shore.

When she moved into her place, a three-story, she rented with roommates, other girls who had aged out of the group home on Troy.

Then she bought the house. Then she no longer needed roommates.

Then those girls she grew up with became her partners or employees or faded away when her life intertwined more and more with the Families.

She has always been willing to leave the rest of us behind.

I am here often enough to have a key—courtesy of Perce, not Thea—so I let myself in the unguarded side door, and then slip down the hallway.

I shake rain from my coat onto the rug in her entryway. It’s pristine, new, like some of that handwoven shit you can buy from charities to support women’s small businesses. It’s a very Thea move. Beneath, the recently finished hardwood floor gleams.

She has money, and she wants everyone to know it as soon as they enter her house. But new money, too. She wants them to know that part. That she can be Family and not. That she can play at their level without belonging to them.

A click, and my breath catches at the sound of a safety sliding back.

Not a rifle, then. Just Thea and her handgun.

“Come out,” I call. “You aren’t happy to see me?”

She steps out from the doorway, gun leveled between my eyes. There is something akin to humor in her dark eyes, but the gun does not waver. “Why are you in my house, Troy?” she asks, as if we had not been tangled up in her king bed more evenings than not.

“Thought I still had an open invitation to spend the night.” I shake more water off my jacket, this time above the newly finished wood floor. It pools at my feet. I do not break eye contact with Thea. “Why are you awake in the middle of the night, Thea?”

Perce appears in the entryway behind her as she opens her mouth to speak. There are dark circles under his eyes and his curls are tangled, as if he has just gotten out of bed. “My love,” he says wearily. “Why are you threatening Paris?”

“She’s not,” I say.

“I’m not,” Thea says at the same time.

“What is the gun for then, my dear?” Perce asks patiently. “Is this some new foreplay I’m not familiar with?”

“Thea,” I say. “Let’s take a walk.”

“No,” she says. “Give me a reason not to throw you out of this house right now.”

Perce makes a noise in his throat. “Thea—”

“Enough,” she snaps. The gun has not moved.

I am close enough to smell Thea’s perfume, something like bergamot. That’s Thea, bergamot and bullets.

Not the perfume that I smelled at the mansion tonight, the one mingling with TNT. But I had to know. I had to be sure.

I stare down the barrel of her gun.

“Why are you here?” she demands again. “You’ve refused to work with me for years . And one night at the big house, and you’re a fixer now?”

I bite my tongue. How do I snap back at someone who has saved my life, not once but twice now? She vouched for me tonight.

And worse, she has cared for me since I crawled out of the rubble of Troy.

“The explosive was not from you tonight,” I say.

Because if it had been—if she was vying for a new place within the Families, I am not sure what I would have done.

“A useless fact we all knew,” Thea says. “Not one you needed to break into my house to tell me. It was your terms when we all started fucking, wasn’t it, Troy? That we were nothing but what we are in bed? Not friends, not allies. So if you’re not here to fuck, why the hell are you in my house?”

“Zarek asked if you were one of the queens I should investigate,” I tell her.

The gun falters in her hands, just briefly. Just for a second. Just long enough.

She was not the bomb-maker, no.

But her loyalty to Zarek is as fragile as my temper.

“Why would you ask me before going to Zarek?” she asks. “If we are not even people who can be honest with one another?”

Why would I?

We all claw our way upward.

“We are friends from Troy,” I say. “Even if you wanted to leave us all behind.”

Thea snorts. “ What? ”

I open my mouth, but she holds up her free hand in one commanding motion.

She holsters the gun and shoves dark-brown hair behind her ear.

“Sit down, Troy,” she says. “And spare me your self-righteous bullshit. I took my sisters with me when I left, the ones who wanted to come. You ran for yourself and yourself only, didn’t you?

What did you do for any of the girls left behind? ”

I open my mouth and close it again.

I carried the ones I could, I want to tell her. I went back for all of them.

And I was too late.

It sits there in the air between us: I would not have survived at all if not for Thea.

“I gave them a home,” Thea snaps when I don’t answer. “I kept them safe. I gave them work when they wanted it.”

“This isn’t just about Troy,” I say.

“It’s always about Troy,” Thea says softly. “You’ve been carrying Troy around with you for years. And we would have—Perce and I, we would have—”

I hold up my hand, stopping her words. They would have let me talk about it, if I had wanted to.

They would have let me say the names of the girls who died, and rage about the Families who let them.

They would have listened, even, to the story of my singed flesh and the goddamn stubbornness that would not let the fires consume me.

Something flashes in her eyes, and she nods, just once.

“All right, Paris. Have it your way. I don’t know the bomb-maker,” she says.

“I didn’t see anyone. A shard of the grenade went through my arm.

” She holds up her left arm, which is bandaged along the forearm.

“If it’s a queen you’re looking for, you’ll have to look higher than me. ”

Perce shifts beside her, and then he looks at me. “Won’t you come in, Paris?” he says gently. “You can sit down. I’ll get some food. We—”

“ We are not friends,” I tell him, and hurt flashes across his face, because I am telling the truth.

We used to be friends, Perce and I. When he was just a baker and Thea and I were just girls in secondhand donated clothes hanging around his family’s shop. Before Thea fought her way up through the Families.

Before a bomb in the mansion blew open a path for me to take my revenge.

Before Helen .

“Stop being an asshole to my husband for no reason,” Thea says icily.

I don’t have a way to respond to that, don’t quite know how to back down or apologize. So instead, I smirk. “Did you say husband ? Thought tonight was your engagement party.”

Thea’s face reddens.

Perce’s slight smile confirms my guess.

“Was it private?” I ask them. “How did you keep it a secret?”

Perce’s smile saddens, just a little, and he places a hand on my arm. “It was just us and a priest on the mainland,” he says. “We would have had you there, Paris. We invited you for drinks—a few months back?”

I shake his hand off. “I’m not bothered,” I tell him. Thea has chosen her path: a place among the Families, a piece of their power. A husband to protect.

And I have chosen mine.

I scuff my foot against her rug.

“Don’t ruin my goddamn rug,” she snaps.

Perce rolls his eyes. “Well, I’ll leave you two to sort this out then,” he says. “Good night, not-friend and not-wife.”

Thea and I snort at the same time, both near-laughs that sound so similar I want to turn around and get the fuck out of there right now.

We were close, so long ago.

“You know something,” I say when we’re finally alone. “I know you do. I’m going to look into the other queens. You know that, too. But I came to you first, because if you’re doing shit with any of them behind Zarek’s back, I’m going to find it. You know I am.”

I don’t say the rest: I’ll burn them all on my way to ending Zarek, because while this is personal—he took my fucking family —it is bigger than just him. Bigger than just me.

The girls of Troy have never rested quietly, and I intend to make sure that all my sisters—Kore and the others, Cass and Milena and Yara and all the rest—have their vengeance.

Thea’s eyes blaze. “I don’t know you anymore, not really,” she says finally. “I will not insult you by pretending I do. But I know this isn’t about an investigation or a bomb-maker. I know you don’t give a fuck if they all kill each other.”

I can hardly breathe, cannot look away from her.

She knows me, she does, and I cannot deny that it is almost a relief to be known, even like this, especially when I had thought her largely cold and indifferent.

“Paris,” she says. “You can’t win, especially if you pull Helen into your games. But you can still get the fuck away from them.”

I hesitate, and then shake my head.

“Paris,” she says my name again, softer this time. “I know. I know .”

My stomach drops, fear heavier than it was when the bomb went off beside me tonight, thicker than when Zarek had me pinned to the wall.

Because part of me thinks she does know, that she can see in my eyes that I am here to destroy them.

She could tell them that—could tell them with one line in a text message, and I’d be dead by morning.

She has enough power in the Families to be believed, and I have nothing.

Finally, Thea sighs, jaw tightening into something unyielding. “Whatever it is you’re actually planning—whatever shit you intend to dig yourself into. If it comes back on me or my husband—”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Got it. I promise not to come for any more nighttime heart-to-hearts.”

“I didn’t say that .” A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “You can come any night you like, so long as you’re here for the right reasons. Though I think your nights may be occupied for the foreseeable future.”

I scuff my boot against her rug again. “Thea, what I said about you leaving us—”

“No,” she says. “Stop.”

We stand there, staring at each other, the years hanging between us. The moment is as tense as if the gun was still between us. I could apologize, or I could—

I grab the front of her jacket and haul her toward me, press my mouth against hers. She gasps against me and then kisses me back, hard, her tongue pushing into my mouth.

“Ah,” Perce says as he pokes his head through the door again, and I spring backward, but there is humor in his eyes. “So it was foreplay, then. Are you staying, Paris?”

“No,” I say. Bergamot and bullets. Whiskey and poppies and gold-plated grenades. “No, I’m not staying.”

“You’re always welcome.” His eyes sweep down Thea’s body, hungry, but too soft, too emotional.

I cannot fall into bed with these two tonight, because they—they care too much, tonight has showed me that, and I cannot be a person others care for, not if I want to do what I have to. Not if I want to survive.

It solidifies, too, what I told Zarek: that Thea could not have planted the bomb, that she has made the mistake of falling in love with someone who can be ripped from her. That she knows better than to risk someone she loves this much.

“Good night, Perce,” I say finally. “Goodbye, Thea.”

He nods to me, slips back down the hallway, but Thea remains where she is, feet planted.

“Whatever you think Zarek deserves, whatever you plan to do to get yours,” she says softly, so, so softly. There is a click , the safety sliding back on her handgun again. “You’ll do it, and I won’t stop you. But whatever else may come, you keep my husband out of it .”

When I leave Thea’s, I keep my hood low as rain batters me.

It will be worth it when all this is done.

That is enough to propel me forward. That is enough to carry me through this dark, rain-soaked night. Helen will be mine, and the Family will fall.

My hand moves to my pocket instinctively, searching for the poppy.

Zarek’s fixers will start researching the queens, some of them exploring the forensics, picking apart the remnants of the explosive and tracing its origin.

The others will comb the islands. Still others will be on secure lines talking to connections on the mainland, in all the dark corners of the continent and beyond.

They have the might of the Family, of blood and money and power going back decades.

But I have something they do not.

I know the smell that surrounded me before the grenade went off—the TNT was mixed with something, something that was used on Troy. I recognize the smell—solidox and sugar—and I knew the girls who once used them for their bombs.

When I finally return to my apartment, I am bone-tired.

I tread lightly, kick my boots off at the door, and then—

Stop.

There is a scent here that does not belong.

A note of vanilla, a note of poppies, a note of—

Helen is standing in the bedroom doorway, hair loose around her shoulders. She has one of my blankets draped over her, and her lips are parted, chest heaving slightly as if she is winded, or nervous.

I drop my rain-soaked jacket with a wet thump . “Helen,” I say. “What the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”