Page 15 of We Are the Match

My plan had felt perfect: revealing Lena before she was ready for the world to see her, breaking Zarek with the depth of the betrayal. So while I do not need Helen to survive this in the end, I do need her to survive long enough for me to destroy this Family.

“Last time,” Helen tells me quietly. “My father ignored the warnings until it was too late. This time we can’t let that happen.”

“And then your father obliterated an entire Family,” I say. “Yes, we all know what happened.”

I was there.

I was there when he dropped his bombs on my island. I was there when the doors melted shut, sealing my sisters inside. I was there, holding Kore’s hand while she choked on ash and soot.

Helen swallows and looks away from me. “I know my father was involved in the violence against Troy,” she says. “I remember—well, I remember his face when he found my mother. She was so unrecognizable they had to identify her with her teeth .”

Again, we skirt toward Helen’s grief, this loss that sits at the center of her, and if I gave myself time to think about that look in her too long, I might almost feel for her.

But still: plenty of the girls from the Troy group home were never identified at all, because no one cared enough.

I clench my jaw shut.

“Anyway,” Helen continues. “My father will take this threat seriously, but he also knows better than to move on the wrong queen. If you imply they are suspects, you will offend them. And you will destroy trade relationships that have taken years to solidify.”

“He’ll get less money,” I translate for her. “And if he gets less money, people die.”

Helen’s face is pale. “I have heard no one speak of my father as you do,” she says.

“Then you have been lied to all your life,” I tell her.

They could kill me for this.

And they will, when they learn I am not here to stop a war. I am here to push them over the edge of it.

“How will you do it?” she asks. “You know that discretion is paramount to the success of this investigation. How do you plan to find out more about each of the queens?”

“We start with Hana,” I tell her.

“Hana the horrible,” Helen says, and then claps a hand over her mouth in horror. She glances around, as if making sure she was not overheard.

The wind sweeps over us in a gust, tossing her curls off her shoulders. Her fingers ghost over the bracelet on her wrist, a thin band of metal devoid of decoration.

“You were wearing that last night.” I gesture to the bracelet.

She jumps, her hand covering the bracelet involuntarily. “Yes,” she says. “It was a gift. A message from my mother.”

“What does it say?” I set down my croissant, twisting one of my own rings around my middle finger. What kind of messages do gods leave their daughters? And will it be one more thing forcing me to confront the ways in which Helen and I are the same?

Helen hesitates. Then she tilts the bracelet so I can see the writing engraved on the inside.

Méchri thanátou.

Unto death.

“That’s not your Family’s slogan,” I say. “Not any of the Families that I’ve heard of.”

“Not my father’s,” she says. “Not Troy’s. Just my mother’s words, her very own. And what about you? Your rings?”

My hands still, thumb and index finger still touching the rings on my left hand. Three steel bands, each with a flame engraved. One for all those I lost on Troy. One for the unwanted gift of life still beating in my chest. One for the Family I will punish for it all.

“Also a gift,” I tell her finally.

“Paris,” Helen says, and for just a second she actually meets my eyes. “Why do you want to be here?”

To get close to you. To get close to your father. Because he has taken everything from me, and I wanted some of it back before the end.

But I cannot say that.

So I say: “I had a few options. This one looked like it would make me the most money and leave me the least dead.”

“There are jobs that make more money,” Helen says thoughtfully, but now she cannot meet my eyes, a muscle in her jaw tightening as if there is something to my response that caused her pain.

“I—Tommy said ... he said he thought you were dangerous. Violent. That you looked at my father like—” She shakes her head.

“You’re from the group home. I heard there was an accident during the war, that part of the house was destroyed. ”

I lunge forward, leaning across the table, my hand inches from her throat. “An accident ?” I snarl. “A fucking accident ? Don’t bullshit me, Helen, not here.”

She shifts just slightly, the soft skin of her shoulder exposed. There is terror in her eyes, and it rushes through my body. “What are you talking about?” she asks.

“You can’t be serious.”

Helen shivers in the wind.

“He killed them,” I say finally. “Your father dropped bombs and killed them to make a point, Helen. And they all died, except for me.”

Helen gasps as if I have struck her, and I am frozen there, watching emotion play out over her face.

I want to wrap my hands around her throat. I want to push her back against the chair and make her pay for what happened to the girls of Troy, make her pay for not bothering to know the way we all died.

Instead, I reach across and tuck her wrap over her shoulders again, my fingers brushing her exposed collarbone as I do.

She nearly jumps out of her skin, and I freeze, my fingers still touching her shoulder.

We stare at each other, our faces inches apart, and then Helen of the gods reaches for me in return.