Page 11 of We Are the Match

Helen

Paris has a knife in her hand, she smells of TNT, and she is dripping wet.

“Um,” I say. “Hello, Paris.”

She snorts. “That’s not an answer.”

“I came,” I say finally. “Because I need to know . And because I think you can help me.”

The other fixers, the ones who work for my father, have been around long enough to know that they are to keep me away from the work of this world. If I asked for updates, for answers, they would simply call my father. Everyone keeps me at arm’s length. Everyone keeps me in the dark.

But Paris isn’t one of us, and Paris doesn’t know that. So Paris will let me work with her, and if she does— when she does—I can convince her to help me escape.

“What do you need to know?” Paris is shrugging off wet clothes and moving around the cramped studio, but her eyes track me as she goes, as if I am a threat she must not turn her back on—or prey she is determined to catch. “And what do you want from me?”

It isn’t that I care, not entirely, about who bombed my party. I am a target wherever I go; I have been a target before in my own home.

“I—I just want to know,” I repeat. “More about the attack. All of it. I want to be part of your investigation.”

She runs a hand through her short hair, tousling it, her rings catching the light as she moves.

“You want to work together.” Paris says the words like they are weapons.

And then she crosses the room in long, confident strides, stops so close in front of me that I can see her throat bob slightly as she swallows.

Can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes.

“But why would I need you, Helen of the gods?”

“I think—” I swallow hard, watching the rise and fall of her chest as I do. I almost feel drunk, unsteady just because of the proximity to Paris’s magnetism. “I think we can be of use to one another,” I finish finally.

Paris tilts her head to one side, amusement in her eyes as her gaze roves down my face, lingering at my lips. “All right,” she says. “I’ll bite. What is it you propose?”

I open my mouth and close it again. “You are leading this investigation,” I say. “My father is keeping me out of it. And I want in.”

She arches an eyebrow, leaning closer to me. “And why is that, Princess?”

“My father has his reasons.” Reasons that have something to do with the volatile, violent girl that I was, or with the timid woman I became—or perhaps reasons that have more to do with his own fear, sowed deep in him after we lost Mama.

“If my upcoming marriage is being targeted, I want to know. Besides, you need me. I have connections. I can get you inside their homes—Altea and Frona and Hana. If you work for me, I can—”

“I can get all of those things by working for your father.” Paris’s smile is mocking. “And I have no interest in working for someone who cannot be honest about what she wants.”

I open my mouth and then shut it again with a click. It is not honesty I lack, but courage. And besides, who in this world is honest about what they want? Who among us does not have secrets that could kill?

“Now get the hell out of my house.” The smile is still on Paris’s face, fixed in place as if welded there, but that danger Tommy mentioned—that danger is sharp edged and obvious in her dark eyes. “Unless there was something else, Helen?”

“You will not speak to me this way,” I tell her, summoning every piece of decorum and control I can. “I am—”

“We both know exactly who you are, Princess,” Paris says.

She shrugs off her button-up and slings it over the stool along the little countertop island next to her kitchenette.

Beneath is—not much. Smooth, toned skin.

Faint scars on one wrist. A tangle of tattoos circling her ribs.

Her bra is lacy, black, and shows most of her beneath. “Anything else?”

It is difficult, suddenly, to focus on the conversation, with Paris so bare before me.

“If you had spoken to my father this way, you would already be dead,” I tell her coldly. “Do not think for a second that I can be pushed around just because I did not show the same level of brutality tonight.”

Paris leans back against the high-top, folding her arms and raising an eyebrow at me. “No,” she says. “You just enabled it.”

“You can choose not to work with me,” I tell her. “But then you’ll have to explain to my father how you knew the bomb was going to go off a second before it did.”

Paris’s expression does not slip. “You think he has not already asked me that?”

“But would that matter?” I ask softly. I can be dangerous, too, and wrap it in silk. “If I confide in him that I think you are dangerous? Would it matter to the bullet with your name on it?”

Something settles in Paris’s expression, half a smile flickering across her face, and then she shrugs one shoulder. “So I update you as I have leads,” she says easily. “What is the endgame here, Helen of the gods?”

“You destroyed my plans tonight, Paris. And I want your help finishing what I intended.”

She surges forward, her knife flicking open, and then I am being propelled backward until I am pinned against the wall, rough wood digging into my shoulder blades.

The tip of her blade edges against my throat, and I feel every beat of my heart thundering within me.

“Was it your bomb?”

“No,” I breathe.

I am so close to Paris, I can almost taste her. She smells of TNT and woodsmoke, and I am as intoxicated as I am afraid.

She eases back, but her knife remains where it is, the tip digging into my skin.

“Talk.”

It is not the knife that loosens my words, but the fact that I really do need her. So I offer a piece of honesty, if not the whole of it.

“At the right moment,” I tell her. “The perfect one, when the party was at its height. I was going to step off the cliffs and be free of this world.”

Confusion flickers in her dark eyes. “You were going to kill yourself,” she says. “Why?”

“No,” I tell her. “I would have survived the fall. I would have been free. If I leave, I will be hunted. But if I am dead—there is no one to hunt.”

Her knife eases away from my throat.

I inhale deeply, grateful for the gasping breaths I can take now that the pressure of the blade is not robbing me of the ability.

“So you want me to what? Help you fake your death at the end of this?” Paris is watching me carefully.

“No, I can do that on my own. But someone already wants to kill me. If you help me find out who, it will be easy enough to frame them for my death. And I can give you enough money and resources to get away from the Families and start over,” I promise her.

“Or enough power to get a better, higher rank and continue playing the Family’s game.

If you help me be free, I can—I can give you whatever you want. ”

A smile flickers across her face now. “Yes, Helen,” Paris says. “I think you can.”

She steps back, flicking the knife shut and stowing it in the pocket of her black jeans so fluidly I barely see the movement.

“Should we talk terms?” I ask, my voice shaking more than it has any right to.

Paris steps away, though she remains facing me. She hooks a chair with her foot and pulls it closer to her and straddles it, leaning her forearms on the back. “Sit down.”

I glance at the stool at the bar and the ragged love seat on the other side of the room and then, flustered and uncertain, I sit down on the floor in front of her, folding my legs neatly beneath me. It puts me at an immediate and unexpected disadvantage, because Paris is above me, looking down.

“You don’t—you don’t give the orders here,” I manage. “I need to ensure my father doesn’t find out you’re working for me, rather than him.”

Paris raises an eyebrow and waits.

A blush creeps up my cheeks. “So what is it you want, Paris?”

“ I saved your life. So this? This will be on my terms. Do you understand?”

A flash of movement, and her hand flicks out, tracing the place on my neck where she held her knife just moments ago. One of her rings just brushes my throat, the cool metal sending my pulse racing.

“My terms,” she repeats. One ringed finger hooks my chin and tilts it forcibly upward. “Look me in the eye, Princess.”

I swallow, meeting her eyes. My heart pulses against my ribs. I have never ached so much as I do when Paris is staring down at me, fire in her eyes.

But I can do this. With Paris’s help, I can do this .

“Your terms,” I say hoarsely, and she drops her hand from my face.

“Then we have a deal, Helen,” Paris says as she stands, her rings clicking gently, and I notice she’s retrieved her lighter from somewhere. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Your place.”

I nod, push myself to my feet. “Tomorrow,” I say breathlessly.

I hesitate. There is no reason for me to stay, now that I have said my piece.

Paris gives me a searching gaze. “You want something else?”

“I want—”

Paris waits, and when I say nothing, her smile slips into that mocking look again.

She is still watching me when she opens her fridge and grabs a beer. She is still watching me when she sits down on her love seat, twisting the top idly off the bottle and then sips. Her lips part, and her throat moves as she swallows.

“Are you going to talk, or just stare?” she asks me.

“I—that’s all? We don’t need to talk about the bombing? What you already know? I want an update now.”

“I think you’re far too used to getting exactly what you want,” Paris says, any trace of amusement evaporating from her face. She swirls the liquid in the bottle. “I have theories, but nothing substantial. I’ll update you tomorrow when I know more.”

“At least tell me the theories, then,” I tell her. “If we are to work together—”

“If we are to work together,” she cuts me off. “You’ll learn to fucking listen.”

The words sting. Sharply.

“We could be civil,” I say breathlessly.

“No,” she tells me. She is godless, storm weathered, so vividly alive . “ You could be civil. But on me, it would look like compliance.”

I touch my fingertips against my wrist and then my throat, ever so lightly. Having Paris as my fixer—and my eventual liberator—is like trying to hold a flame in the palm of my hand.

Every inch of me is singed by her fingerprints.

Every inch of me demands more. But instead—

“Now.” Paris sets down her beer and leans forward, elbows on her knees as she looks at me. “Get the fuck out of my home, Princess.”