Page 19 of We Are the Match

Paris

It is harder to dress the next day with an aching, swollen hand. I could call Perce or Thea, and they would help, but Thea’s words— leave my husband out of this —echo in my head all the same.

Thea’s warning to leave this island, too, sits heavy on me.

You can have a better world than this, if you want it, Kore had told me once, when we were young and fresh-faced and flying across the harbor away from Troy on a stolen boat.

There had been six of us from the group home that night—Kore and Cass and I, twins named Milena and Yara, and a girl named Eris with night-black hair who was good with a gun and an explosive, so good she was snatched up by one family or another around the time Thea left.

It has been years since I dreamed of a better world. In the world I have, we burn and no one comes to save us.

In this one, my hand aches and rescue does not come for me in any form.

I spend the first half day after my injury changing the bandages, cursing the gods, and drinking. I spend the rest of it on the phone with Helen—who thinks it is “unwise” for us to be seen together daily, whatever that means.

In the days that follow, I dig through my own connections, such as they are: I ask a woman I knew from Troy—someone who left long before the bombs fell—about an old warehouse, which was once used by bomb-makers and may be worth exploring.

On Thursday evening a black SUV pulls up in front of my apartment building, later than Helen had promised when we spoke.

Helen steps out of the car, taking Tommy’s offered hand, and my heart stutters in my chest. This woman is never what I expect: the other day, dressed in silk, today in a simple dress that hugs every curve and pulls my eyes down her body before I can help myself.

“May I come in?” Helen asks, though not as if she expects an answer.

I jerk my head to the door and walk ahead of her without a word. If she compels me this much, I can at the very least not let her see it.

Tommy checks me—and the apartment—at length, for weapons, though despite his skills he misses the knives at the back of the cupboard.

“Really, Tommy,” Helen says, settling onto my love seat as if she owns it. “That is unnecessary. Can you give us a moment?”

Tommy nods, pausing before he goes, his gaze falling on my arm cradled against my chest. “You all right, kid?”

“Sublime,” I tell him flatly. “No thanks to you.”

“That sounds about right.” Humor flickers in his look, though it is threaded heavily with grief and guilt.

“I brought you some fresh bandages, and a wound cream I used when I first got this.” He gestures to a long scar that runs the length of his arm, from his elbow almost to his wrist—and he does not apologize for what happened to me, but this is as close as we come. “You two behave yourselves.”

Helen flushes a little.

When the door closes, I meet her gaze. “He told you what your father did.” When Tommy had half carried me to the car after, I told him I did not want to see her—but the truth was that I only wanted to see her, and that was somehow worse.

“I—I am sorry,” she says, a hint of tremble in her voice. “You must know. I had no idea he would ... well, I suppose it doesn’t matter that I didn’t know. But I think I have bought your safety now.”

I arch an eyebrow at her. “And how is that, exactly?”

Her flush deepens, her eyes flicking downward.

She clears her throat once and then again, studiously avoiding my gaze.

“We should talk about how to approach today’s meeting with Hana,” she says, evading my question with much less grace and tact than she usually commands.

“I have a basket of specialty imported fruits and cheese and—”

“Helen.”

Her body reacts to the sternness in my tone, whether she wants it to or not.

The blush has crept to the tips of her ears now. “I told him we were having an affair.”

The laugh that rips out of me is so sudden my wounded hand aches at the sudden jar. “Well done, Princess,” I tell her. “And are we?”

“I—are we— what ? It’s a good cover,” she says rapidly. “And we will need to plan away from prying eyes and ears.”

“Show me, then.”

Helen twists her hands together, still flustered, but there is that look in her eye I first saw the night of the party. Stubborn, all the way through. “Are you asking if I am committed to our cover?” she asks primly.

“I’m asking if you mean it, yeah.”

Mine, the hunger in my chest says. All mine.

“So ...” Her eyes dart to the bed, and she clears her throat, but that determined look remains in her eyes.

“I have never consummated a business partnership in quite this way,” she says finally, but there is steel in her eyes—and something playful beneath it, something hungry and excited.

“But I am happy to prove my commitment to this partnership.”

I grin at her, wolfish and just as hungry. “Get on the bed.”

Helen, who had looked so at ease and in control earlier, stagger-stands before she realizes she has done it. “Very well,” she says, shrugging off her dress and looking back at me defiantly, as if expecting I will call this before she does.

“I have never been afraid to own what I want, Helen,” I tell her calmly, letting my eyes sweep her head to toe. She is everything. Perfect round breasts and full nipples, smooth curves that narrow at her waist just a little and then widen at her hips, forming a perfect V—

“And—what is that?” she asks. “What is it you want, Paris?”

“You, Helen,” I tell her. “At my mercy.”

The negotiation about what she wants is a longer conversation—with a lot of fumbling on Helen’s part. But she obeys me, Helen who is used to being obeyed.

I guide her onto my bed.

“Are you—are you sure—” Helen looks so embarrassed to be asking that I almost reconsider my plan.

“Very. You will tell me ‘red’ if this gets to be too much,” I tell her as she settles back on my bed. “‘Green’ means good, continue. And I’ll tell you the same.”

Helen’s eyes flicker to my bedside drawer, cracked open. “At least make it interesting,” she says, before blushing at her own boldness.

“Oooh.” I stretch the word out longer, looking down at her without bothering to mask my hunger. “I should have guessed you liked it rough, Princess. Fine, then. Wrists, too.”

Helen gapes at my words, face furiously red.

“What is it?” I know my grin is mocking, but it is unsurprising that the princess is both inexperienced and intrigued. “Are you telling me you don’t want this?”

“I—no,” Helen says, and then I forget everything else because she unclasps her bra and lies back on my bed, holding her wrists out for me to restrain. “So long as you know how to tie a good knot.”

She is delicate and dangerous and cruel. She is afraid of me and drawn to me. She is letting the power slip into my hands, and it is a heady, endless thing.

Almost enough to make me forget whose daughter she is.

Almost enough to make me want to stay.

I take one smooth wrist and bind it to my bedpost, and then the other.

Helen is trembling, perfect legs spread.

I splay my hand out over one ample leg, slide my fingers up her thigh until I am just a breath away from her clit.

She moans, catching her breath with a sharp little sound that nearly derails me. She is slick with moisture already, waiting for me.

“Helen.”

“Paris?”

“I’ll see you when I get back.”

“ What? ” Helen’s face shifts from eager and embarrassed to confused to furious. “You’re—oh, no the fuck you are not .”

It is the first curse that I have heard slip past her lips, but I grin, shrugging on my jacket. “Happy to stay and play another time,” I tell her, tugging open my window.

“ I will have you killed, ” she snarls, tugging at the restraints. “Paris. Paris, listen to me. I will—”

“You didn’t say ‘red,’” I tell her, and then I vault through the open window, leaving the little goddess herself writhing in my bed, frustrated as much with the absence of my fingers inside her as she is with my trickery.

The car I hired is waiting in the alley, out of sight of Tommy, who presumably is still outside my apartment door.

The walls are thin; it will not take him too long to realize the thumping and screaming coming from my bed are not as pleasant as Helen had anticipated. If he does not—well.

Then she can lie there, wishing I was on top of her, doing as I pleased, and learn to wait for once. If I have read her correctly, it will make her come harder later, waiting at the edge of pleasure and pain for so long only increasing her enjoyment.

We pull up outside of Hana’s mansion about twenty minutes later.

Hana’s largest mansion is on her own private island due west of this one, but she spends most of her time here since the escalation between Zarek and Troy. It cannot be a carefree existence here, away from the home she built herself, near the man she cannot fully trust.

She walks a knife’s edge in her position in Zarek’s world, and if she has in fact positioned herself in my way, I intend to topple her off it.

Two of Hana’s guards join me at the gate where my hired car has parked, flanking me as if I am being led to an execution.

Hana’s manor is sugar-white, modernist simplicity contrasting dramatically with the pen of peacocks north of the house.

It is her signature—the peacocks, the white cliffside manor, the cascading turquoise pools on the west side.

Peacocks and pools and bloodied fragments of bodies mailed to family members.

I press my own injured hand to my chest. It aches. It aches. It aches.

We walk through an entryway guarded by two more men. Hana waits for us, a woman on each side of her. She is known for this, too—the two women who remain by her side, guards, confidantes, lovers.

“Fixer,” she greets me coolly. “Helen told me she would be visiting, not sending her investigator to interrogate me.”

“Hana,” I say. “Helen sends her regards.”