Page 13 of We Are the Match

Helen

I wake early the next morning, head aching. Last night—grenade and storm and girl—feel like a hazy dream, but when I sit up, Erin is there, also looking the worse for wear.

“Are you all right?” I ask her.

She raises an eyebrow as if the question is unexpected. “I’m just fine,” she answers. “And yourself?”

I push myself up on the silk sheets and lean against a few of the pillows scattered around the bed.

I must have tossed and turned last night, kicked wildly by the look of the tangled sheets and pillows.

I must have dreamed, violently, but I can remember none of it. “Did I—how long have you been here?”

“A few hours, ma’am,” she says quietly. “I waited in the sitting room to avoid disturbing you. I called for fresh fruit when I heard you stirring.”

I am overwhelmed by curiosity, as always, to know what I had dreamed. I wake like this often, sheets and blankets and pillows tossed as if I have been fighting all night. And I can never, ever remember what I dreamed of.

“Did you ...?” I let my voice trail off. I have asked her that question before, if I have said anything in my dreams. “Did you hear me?”

“I did,” she says. Her gaze finds the smooth, cold mahogany floors.

“And?” I lean closer, my hand pausing midair as I reach for the glass of water.

“Forgive me, ma’am,” she says. “It seems ... inappropriate.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Inappropriate?”

She hesitates. “You were moaning,” she answers finally.

My face warms, and I draw the tangled covers farther up my body. “Moaning?”

“Yes,” Erin says, twisting her fingers together. There is a trace of a smile hiding on her face.

“Oh.”

I do not remember the dream, but a flash of it hits me—sheets of rain and the smell of a leather jacket and the cold steel of a knife and ringed fingers sliding across my throat, smooth as silk and—

My door slams open. Tommy is in my doorway, eyes flashing. “What the hell did you do?” he snaps.

Erin jumps, startled at his tone.

“Erin, out,” he orders.

She looks at me, and I nod.

As soon as she is gone, he whirls on me. “You went out ,” he says. “Helen, what the fuck? Someone tried to set off a grenade next to you and you sneak out hours later? Do you have a death wish? Your guard certainly must have—”

“He ... he wasn’t supposed to tell you,” I say weakly. “It’s not his fault, Tommy. It isn’t. He did what I commanded.”

“Helen.” Tommy isn’t looking at me, and his voice is lower, careful.

“Tommy?” I don’t want to hear this. I want to beg Tommy not to say what I’ve realized too late was always going to come next.

“I tried to send the guard away quietly,” he says, and then he clears his throat. His eyes are haunted. “I did, kid.”

I press my hands down hard on my thighs, fingernails digging in. No.

No.

Did my father gut this guard like he gutted the other boy with the gun at the party last night? Did he make him suffer first?

“I’m sorry,” Tommy says, his voice almost crumbling. “I am.”

“Did you do it?” I ask him, but I am looking past him, because I cannot look at him, cannot bear to see him, to see our shared brutality.

But it isn’t shared, is it?

It was my choices that killed the sandy-haired boy who guarded my suite last night. It was my choices, and I don’t even know the boy’s name.

Tommy nods once. “I made it quick,” he says.

He swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. Despite the long years he has been in this work, protecting me, killing has never sat well with him—unless he is doing it to protect me.

“Tommy,” I say finally. “It isn’t an excuse. But I didn’t think—”

“He was dead the minute you pulled him into your game with Marcus,” Tommy says. “There is nothing you could have done after that.”

“Fuck,” I whisper, guilt settling heavy in my chest.

“Where did you go?” Tommy sits down on a chair near the bed, leaning his elbows on his knees and looking at me carefully. “Were you out walking the cliffs?”

It was my place, when I was a child. Wandering as close to the edge as I could without falling.

I shake my head. “I went to see Paris.”

Tommy closes his eyes, pinching his fingers over the bridge of his nose as if staving off an oncoming headache. “Kid.”

“I wanted—”

“Is it a fling?” Tommy asks when I can’t manage to finish my sentence. “It’s all right if it is. Everyone has them, and I can help you keep this one discreet.”

I blush scarlet. “ Tommy. I’m not having an affair!”

He shrugs, unbothered. “You know the way it goes in this house. You want to have an affair before you marry for an alliance, you’re allowed. But that little fixer will die when this is done either way.”

I want to deny the truth in his words, that just by being tangled up with me the woman who has saved me once and may save me again will die when this is done. But I know who my father is, and I know how the game is played.

My chest is suddenly tight at the thought that Tommy, who knows me better than anyone, who is maybe the only person who really knows me, cannot know what I am planning and cannot come with me.

“I just want to find the person responsible for trying to kill me,” I tell him with a huff. “And you know my father will never allow me close to the investigation.”

He nods slowly. “And you know I will protect you,” he says. “No matter what. So I hope you tell me enough truth to make that possible.”

I duck my head. “I—I am telling you the truth. Paris is tough. And Thea says she’s good. She’ll help me sort out this case. Will you send for her, Tommy?”

“Your father might have already sent for her.” Tommy pushes back his chair and stands. “But there’s no need to fuss. It will be all right, kid. It will.”

“Promise?” It is childish, this need for reassurance, but I ask for it all the same.

“Promise,” he tells me.

It has been our tradition since I can remember—any problem the rest of the world could not solve, Tommy could.

The first promise he gave me was one awful, impulsive day when I had taken some of Mama’s bomb-making supplies and laid charges out on the cliffs at the edge of our property.

I had timed it poorly, leaving me stuck on the wrong side of my own trip wire with a timed explosive ticking down.

The guard that found me ran when he saw it, and I remember it in a strange, disembodied vividness: the first time I left my body. I was frozen, unable to feel the cold ground beneath my feet.

Tommy found me crouched there, so far back he couldn’t reach me. He had crouched down low so we were eye to eye. I stared at him, pressing my back against the wall, wondering why I could not feel the bite of my fingernails digging into my palms.

“Put your hand on the ground,” he told me. “Press down hard, and then breathe. That will help.”

I did what he told me, and I could feel the ground just faintly. I could feel myself returning to my body.

“It’ll be okay, kid,” he said.

Promise? I had asked him.

He helped me slowly, carefully, across the poorly laid trip wires, away from the danger.

Promise, he told me, over and over again.

“You with me, kid?” Tommy asks now, and I am drawn inexorably back to the reality I am living in, the one where the girl and the guard died last night, where the boy and more will die today, and eventually Paris, or maybe even me, if I do not escape.

“I’m with you,” I say.

“Then we should talk about your next move,” Tommy says. “I can’t say that I care for strategy and countermoves—except where it keeps you safe.”

“I suppose I have to talk to Milos today,” I groan, and flop back onto my bed. “Can you make him leave?”

Tommy chuckles. “No,” he says firmly. “If you want this engagement to end, you have to be the one to end it. You know that.”

“As if my father would allow me,” I say.

“You know,” Tommy says thoughtfully. “Outside of this island—and the mainland, I suppose—your father isn’t all-powerful. You’re twenty-eight. You could just leave.”

But my father can shut down airports and harbors with a single command.

He sells weapons all over this part of Europe, and he has expanded to buying political leaders where he can, too.

The Mediterranean may be his primary playground, but there is nowhere in the world I could be free of him. Maybe not even in hell itself.

Still, the words light something in me. Something in me I cannot quite face.

You are the power, Paris told me, lip curling.

She sees me like she saw him, cruel and powerful and complicit.

And maybe I am.

I shake my head at him. “I wish it was that simple.”

He folds his arms across his chest. “And what about this fixer?” he asks.

“When this is over,” I say, the face of last night’s guard appearing at the edge of my memory, his dark eyes wide with fear. “Will it be you he sends to kill her?”

Grief flickers in Tommy’s eyes. “Pray that it would be me,” he says heavily. “That would be the most merciful outcome.”

“Bring her in quietly today, please,” I tell him, as if that will be enough to save her.

The look Tommy gives me says he knows it as well as I do: it is already too late for Paris of Troy.