Page 12 of We Are the Match

Paris

The sight of Helen staring up at me from the floor of my apartment, lips parted, tugs at something relentless and wild in the pit of my chest. It leaves me breathless, long after she is gone from my room.

She will be mine.

Regardless of how much or how little Helen really told me, what I learned at the tip of my knife was enough.

After she leaves, I sit in the same spot on the floor of my apartment, staring after her, imagining the way the hollow of her throat felt against my palm.

Her hair, wild around her shoulders, just brushing my arm.

The curve of her body beneath clothes that are wet with rain, clinging to her and leaving nothing to the imagination.

I take the poppy and kneel near my bed, where I retrieve the box beneath it. This box represented an ending, once. Of Troy, of us.

And it is a beginning, now, of the plan that will end the people who hurt us.

Inside the box are keepsakes, of a sort. A shard of metal from the group home doors, part of it melted again to make the three rings I wear, part of it saved here in remembrance.

And then—

A handful of photographs—a woman with dark hair and a regal bearing leaving a bombed-out husk of a building on Troy. The same woman, over and over again throughout the years since the bombing, making a hideout out of my sisters’ tomb.

Because there is one more player in this fucking game, one that—as far as I can tell—none of them but me know about.

Lena, like me, did not die when she was meant to.

And if it was her supposed death that started the war that killed us, then Lena, like Zarek, is to blame for what happened to us that day.

Beside the warped metal and the stack of photographs I place one more token:

The poppy, a gift from the woman I am going to kill.