Page 18 of We Are the Match

Helen

Tommy takes me aside on the rooftop garden and tells me, in a few words, about Paris. About what my father did to her.

Her finger, just her finger, he tells me, but everything is suddenly muted—Tommy’s voice, the wind, the crash of the surf below.

Paris. Brave, brutal Paris, who compels me even as I do not fully trust her.

“Come back to me, kid,” Tommy is saying gently. “Come back.”

I think, for a moment, of what I could do.

If, instead of running, I took my father’s place on the throne.

I could do it. I could lay the charges. Hide the explosives, the way my mother taught me.

That I could lay waste to anything, even something that is supposed to be a home.

He puts his hand on my arm, and I jerk backward.

“ Don’t, ” I say. “Don’t be gentle with me right now. ”

He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “I will always be gentle with you,” he says.

I am trembling as he guides me to one of the chairs.

“Is she okay?” I ask.

“The doctor is reattaching her finger,” Tommy tells me.

“She tried to refuse medication, gritted her teeth until she passed out. He has her sedated now to finish the job, but your father wanted you to know. He wanted you to be there. Why, Helen? What is it your father thinks is so important about this woman?”

“Because she’s close to me,” I whisper finally.

My father cannot know I plan to run. I have been careful, more careful than those who did not survive him.

And yet—and yet he sees danger in this alliance I am forging with Paris.

Tommy shakes his head, his face clouded.

“I stood there,” he says. “I just stood there . ”

“There was nothing you could do,” I tell him, but he will not believe my empty words. We are all of us complicit here. “You know that.”

“Kid,” Tommy says sternly. “You know that’s not true. There is always something we can do, and I didn’t do it.” He turns away from me, his face toward the wind and the sea.

My knees weaken as I clutch Tommy’s arm for stability. “What can I do?” I ask. “Should I remove her from the investigation? Hire someone else?”

I could let her go now, tell her to leave this island and me behind. Do I owe her that, for saving me? A life for a life?

“She said you wanted to work on this with her,” Tommy says wearily. “Stay away. From her, from this, from your father’s business.”

“Someday I will inherit this,” I say, but even as I say the words I can taste ash. It coats my teeth, and the blood spills over my fingers and Mama is dying in front of me, dying because of the Family, because of the money, because of the blood we have spilled here.

“Stay far, far away,” Tommy repeats. “Do you understand me, kid? You will not be involved in this.”

Briefly, I fight the urge to be obstinate with Tommy just because I can, because he is the closest thing to a father I have had, at least when it comes to telling me no.

But then I see the bloodstains along his arm, undoubtedly from Paris, and I swallow my words.

“Tommy,” I whisper. “Thank you. For helping her.”

He grunts in reply, and then he looks at my thin wrap and scowls. “You should come in from the cold,” he says.

I should.

My eyes wander to the overturned breakfast. Tommy’s gaze follows mine. He looks back and forth between me and the table and the toppled cushions, and when I blush, the faintest smile touches his face.

It is tinged with sadness, though. “You really like her,” he says, wonder threading his voice.

“She fascinates me,” I admit. Can you like someone who mocks you with a grin and holds a knife to your throat? Can you like someone who has both saved your life and treated you like a plaything? Can you like someone who you will leave in the end?

“Helen,” he says. “You will only get hurt.”

“And get her hurt.”

He exhales. “Yeah, kid,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

The ground is scorched beneath me, the pillars crumbling, the blood swirling at my feet. We are always, always burning in this house. Dying over and over again. Me and Mama, Paris and I.

And never, ever my father.

I allow Tommy to coax me inside, to walk me to my rooms, to tuck a warmer blanket about my shoulders. “Your fiancé will want to see you later,” he says as he approaches the door. “But for now, rest. I’ll call for Erin, and she can bring up a tray of food.”

But when he leaves, I do not rest. I pace my rooms, the balcony, the hall, and I feel the soft carpet beneath my bare feet, feel the places on my skin where Paris touched me with hands that are no longer whole.

I pace and I pace and I pace, and when I close my eyes on the balcony and feel sea spray on my cheeks, I see something for myself beyond the life I have been given.

For the first time in years, I do not even dream of the sharp white cliff and the escape below.

I dream instead of taking my place on his throne.

Tommy would have words with me if he knew what I was about to do, but I wait until he leaves to take Paris home that evening.

I asked if I could see her—of course I did—and Tommy told me she was still groggy from anesthesia, which was likely a kinder way to say she would have told me to fuck off if I’d seen her in that condition.

My father is not in his office now, after sunset. He is taking his scotch in his private library, which juts out on the opposite side of the house, his balcony facing away from Troy.

When I enter, he is seated in an easy chair near his fireplace, the double glass doors open to the sea breeze that comes in over white cliffs.

“Helen.” He does not look up.

“We need to speak of the alliance,” I tell him. Around Paris I fumble; around everyone else, I command. Even, at my best moments, my father himself.

He does look up now, swirling the scotch idly in his glass. “Is that so?”

“I want to make a deal with you, Father,” I say. “I want more power, and more responsibility. I know you worry about—the impulsiveness. The bombs in the past. But I have grown, I am no longer a girl, and I want in.”

I have never been sure if it was my impulsivity with explosives earlier in life that he did not trust, or my withdrawal from bomb-making entirely after Mama’s death.

My father sets down the scotch. “Paris mentioned you wanted her to report her findings to you,” he says, steepling his fingers together and watching me with a thoughtful expression.

It strikes me: my father rarely learns the names of his employees, but Paris must have left her mark on him, if in a subtler way than he left his on her.

“I have no issue with you wanting an update, but do not try to go around me, little girl.”

Mama taught me bearing, that when you are afraid, your face remains the same, your spine remains straight. So I fold my hands and nod. “Then I need you to let me in, too,” I tell him. “I want more of a role in the family business.”

“Do you?” he asks. “Is it truly the business you want to be involved in, or do you just want to have this affair before you settle down?”

This rankles more than Tommy’s question did, that my father, too, believes me to have no interest in anything but Paris.

“I am your daughter,” I say. “The only heir to your empire. Milos and Marcus are new blood, and—”

“Have your affair,” my father interrupts. “So long as we dispose of her afterward. That should not be a problem, should it? If you are as ready to return to this work as you say you are, the death of one woman should be nothing.”

“Of course.” I smile at him as serenely as I can manage. “The fixer is nothing to me. I want some idle amusement before I marry someone as dull as Milos.”

At this, my father tips back his head and laughs, the sound warmer with understanding than I would have expected. “Should I have given you his younger brother, then?” he asks me. “I thought you would have preferred the boring one over the violent one.”

“Why choose, when both are mine for the taking?” I say.

At this, my father laughs once again, shaking his head at me.

The truth is far more dangerous: that the only person I wish to choose is myself .

Not Paris, kiss or no kiss.

“I am pleased to see you are taking an interest in the business,” he says. “But see to it that this affair does not consume you. It is no interest of mine who you see beyond that. You could be fucking the pope for all I—”

“Father.”

“Well? You can have whomever you please. But they must be playthings, Helen. Too many people would use you if your emotions were involved, and you know how much our Family has already lost because of that.”

“If Paris is my lover, it will be easy to get her close to the queens,” I say. “We need to know which of them moved on us, and she could travel with me when I pay them a visit.”

He smiles at me now and nods his head to the other chair.

Mama used to sit here, before the bombs.

She and Father planned and worked while I played at their feet.

How many nights has my father sat opposite the empty chair, the hollows and dips in the leather reminding him of all he’d lost, letting his grief warp him further and further from anything resembling a man?

I settle into the chair, folding my hands gently. “I am sorry it has taken me so long to choose this, Father,” I say. “The scare the other night—I think it shook me awake. And I am ready to do this, if you are willing to guide me.”

There is a light in his eyes, a warmth to him that I have not seen in years.

“I am pleased to hear it,” he says. “So settle in. Let us discuss the queens, and their old alliances. And.” He offers me—of all things—a wink, a gesture I am sure is intended to be fatherly, or at least familial. “Tell me about this fixer you’ve decided is worth your time.”

The fire dies down to embers before my father returns to his suite, our night spent discussing trade routes and politicians, wars and alliances, money and power.

When he leaves, long after dark, I linger there, in this one place where I can almost feel my mother’s long-missing presence. And I call Hana, one of the few people remaining who once called my mother friend.

She answers my call on the first ring.

“Darling,” she says. “I’m so pleased to hear from you. Are you well, after the unfortunate business at your party?”

“Very,” I tell her. I play my role, my voice soft as silk, polite and measured. “I called to see if you were well, and to see if I might pay you a visit and make my apologies in person.”

A pause.

“Is he allowing this?” Hana asks me gently. “Even after the unsettling business at your party? We had assumed you were the target, poor dear, unless?”

Her voice ends in a lift, a question waiting for me to answer.

“I make my own decisions about my movements on this island,” I tell her smoothly, but her words rankle—both the insinuation about my powerlessness here, true as it may be, and the thought that my mother’s friend could be playing a game like this.

“Our fixers will leave no stones unturned, of course.”

“Of course,” Hana says. “I’ll see you—would Thursday do, then?”

She blows a kiss through the phone, and hangs up before I do, a subtle gesture, but a gesture nonetheless.

I watch the dying flames reflected in my mother’s bracelet, illuminating the words inscribed there while I think of Paris.

Of kisses and storms and stepping off the edge into the unknown.

Méchri thanátou.

Unto death.