Page 14 of We Are the Match

Paris

The voice is vaguely recognizable.

“Who are you?” I shrug on my tank top and scramble into jeans.

“My name’s Tommy,” he says. “Can I come in?”

Helen’s guard.

I pull open the door, knife in my hand.

He raises a single eyebrow, amusement flickering in his eyes. “You’re about as friendly as I expected,” he says, holding up his keys. “You ready to go?”

I shove my knife back into my boot.

“I can’t let you bring that into the same room as Helen,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

I roll my eyes. “If you can’t trust her in the same room as one little knife, you should have taught her self-defense,” I tell him.

He barks out a laugh, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “I can see why she likes you. Doesn’t change the rules, though.”

I am not sure like is the word either Helen or I would use, but she at least finds me interesting—or useful. She will hate me soon enough, though.

I straighten. “Let’s go,” I tell him. “Gods don’t like waiting.”

“No one on that hill is a god,” Tommy says. “No matter how much they like to believe they are. No matter how much money and weapons they possess. Though I have never heard someone say the word god with so much disdain before.”

I stare at him.

The corner of his mouth tips up like he’s fighting a grin. “Let’s go,” he says.

“Tommy,” I say. “Do you promise not to drive somewhere remote on this island, kill me, and dump my body off a cliff?”

He grins, though there is a shadow on his face. “You’ll be just fine, kid.”

Kid.

“You promise?” I hold out a pinkie finger. His pinkie is about three times as wide as mine.

I say it sarcastically, but the shadows deepen on his face, some emotion there I cannot read.

I follow Tommy down to the car, shrugging my hoodie up over my face as I go.

It is not a large island—about a twenty-minute drive from the southern edge, where I live, to the northern tip, where the mansion is.

The warehouse–turned–apartment buildings are well behind us now, and we are passing mansions like Thea’s, three- and four-story homes set close together on the hills.

And then soon after, we pass mansions that belong to the higher-ups in the Families—sprawling, towering creations that attempt to rival one another but cannot come close to the mansion still ahead of us.

We pass a few layers of security—a lift bridge over the river that can be retracted to prevent any crossings, two gates, and a guard tower.

Tommy shows ID at each one, until finally we’re parked in an underground garage.

There are over a dozen vehicles, some nondescript limousines like the one we’re in, a few sports cars, a few black Suburbans.

I follow Tommy to an elevator, where he swipes his key to enter and then again when he chooses floor seven. A family of two, and it has seven fucking floors.

How many of us could the resources spent on this home have cared for? How many of us would have never gone hungry?

When the elevator stops, Tommy scans his key card again and we step out onto an open-air rooftop garden.

Helen is dressed in some soft, flowing rose-gold thing that flows over curving hips, thighs.

I see a flash of calf beneath the folds of the dress.

She wears a soft white wrap, hung loosely over bare shoulders.

Her dark hair is pinned at the nape of her neck, a few stray curls spilling over her shoulders.

The wind whispers, ruffling Helen’s hair and exposing one bare shoulder.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

She holds out a smooth, immaculate hand to me. “Paris,” she says, as if she wasn’t practically begging on the floor of my messy apartment, just last night, breathless and bright-eyed and desperate. “I hoped you would come.”

Beyond her, there is nothing but sea and wind and sky, and I cannot breathe.

“I—” I stare at her and clear my throat. “Who can refuse a summons from a god? Especially one that can tattle to her daddy on you.”

A shadow falls across her perfect face. A brief second where I pulled a thread of power back into my hands.

“Tommy, leave us,” she says gently, and her voice is music, the gentle lilt, the notes hitting just right. The desperate woman in my apartment last night is gone, replaced with the tightly controlled, regal woman before me.

“Helen,” he says firmly. “There must be no threat. No matter who it is from.”

She rolls her eyes. “Then I won’t invite Marcus again, or Milos. This woman won’t hurt me. And I need to talk to her alone.”

This woman.

Even girls from Troy can be something, I want to tell Helen. Even girls from group homes can bring gods to their knees.

And something that even guards like Tommy don’t know is that women like me?

We always have another knife.

It is hidden lower in my boot, a small thing, barely the length of my little finger.

Tommy steps back into the elevator, and then it is just Helen and me, windswept. Breathless.

Alone.

“I am sorry about that,” she says.

I don’t acknowledge her apology, but I do nod my head. “He’s loyal.”

“He has known me my whole life,” she says. “My mother placed me in his arms when I was hours old. He has kept me safe ever since.”

“Plus,” I say. “He didn’t find my last knife.”

Helen’s eyebrows shoot up, and then, unexpectedly, she laughs.

“That’s all right,” she says. “He doesn’t know about mine, either.”

She reaches beneath the fold of her skirt, showing a soft expanse of skin as she does.

My face warms despite the chill of the wind.

Helen pulls out a small, sharp blade. She turns it over in her hand, her fingers moving with the dexterity of someone who has long been familiar with a blade.

“Who taught you?” I ask. “Your father doesn’t seem as if he’d approve of his princess playing with blades.”

“My mother,” she answers.

I want to ask more about Lena, to look for some sign that Helen knows her mother is alive, that they have been working together—or confirmation that Helen is truly in the dark.

But more than that I want to learn about the woman whom I am trying to destroy, to lean close to Helen and inhale the scent of her, to ask the things we are never allowed to know about her.

I want to know it all, before I bring her to her knees.

“Were you—close?” My words almost catch in my throat. “You and your mother?”

It feels wrong to toy with Helen in this particular way—to ask about Lena, when I may be one of the few who have actually seen her since she faked her death.

“We were.” Helen’s eyes are anywhere but on mine.

For the first time, I wonder what kind of mother would leave her child to grieve the way Helen is now; for all her usual control, Helen cannot hide the sorrow on her face.

“She was from Troy, too.” The words rip from my lips before I can call them back.

That was where I saw her. I visited them every year—the ruins, the memory of my sisters.

Because who else would come to visit the burned-out shell of this place, except for the only girl left alive?

I had felt like I was the only one who would haunt a place like that—except on the first anniversary of their death, I saw her—Lena in the flesh, strolling into the group home as she once did when we all lived there.

Helen’s hands are clenched around one another, her knuckles white. “She spoke often of home,” Helen says finally.

Revenge had felt like a far-off dream before I saw Lena. Hatred for Zarek burned bright, but he was a god, untouchable. It was seeing Lena—seeing her there, rebuilding her empire little by little, that set me on a new course: revenge that would encompass them all.

Helen turns away from me toward the white couches and chairs, the table at their center laden with food, a clear end to this topic.

“I had Erin—my attendant—bring up a little breakfast.” She takes a seat on the couch opposite me, legs crossed, one arm extended gracefully along the back of the couch.

For one wild moment, I consider sitting down beside her instead of across from her, our bodies just touching.

Instead, I drop onto the couch across from her and reach for a croissant. I shove it into my mouth and then raise an eyebrow at her. “Don’t you eat?” I ask through the croissant, before pausing to think about how rude and abrasive I sound in the presence of royalty.

“Of course.” She lifts a scone more daintily than I ever could and takes a single bite.

“I have been thinking about our conversation last night. And I’ve—” She clears her throat, her hands dropping to my hand, to the rings there.

“I’ve, well, I’ve decided—” She squares her shoulders.

“You will bring me along when you go in ... in the field . I want to attend at your side.”

“No,” I tell her.

Helen chokes on the dainty bite of scone, her eyes widening. She laughs a second later. “ No? ”

I set down my scone and lean forward, elbows on my knees. “My terms, Helen,” I say. “Remember?”

She blushes. “It’s just—I want to be part of this. It’s going to be messy, and my father ... well, you know what he’s willing to do. But I would like to minimize the loss of innocent life if I can.”

The light, flowing rose-gold dress she wears has slipped below her collarbones, and I could hold my knife to her again—just there.

“Where do we begin, Paris of Troy?” Helen says quietly, the wind almost stealing her words from me.

I have to lean close to catch them, so close I can see one tiny, perfect freckle on her flawless skin.

“Three queens to choose from,” I tell her. “One of them is testing your father, maybe even telling him a war is coming. It’s a threat, or a promise. It’s either a bold queen showing her hand too early, or a calculating one trying to unsettle him at just the right time.”

Whichever queen is moving now, will it draw Lena out of the shadows sooner than she had planned? The one thing I remember of Lena during her rule was that like Zarek, she was infamous for her brutal response to any threat to Helen.