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Page 2 of We Are the Match

Helen

My father does not make mistakes. He makes acts of strategy, and he makes acts of war.

It is strategic, then, that tonight’s party comes ten years to the day since the bomb that ignited my father’s last great act of brutality.

As my attendants style my hair, as I sit perfectly, perfectly still, I wonder which one tonight will be, the strategy or the outright violence. Both have a place here—in our home, on this island.

“Helen?”

Erin’s hand is gentle on my shoulder. My personal attendant is sometimes my only companion, a carefully curated isolation to protect me from rival crime families, or to protect my father’s alliances from me.

From the bombs I once built, from the reckless way I once used them, and from the knowledge I still have—because everyone would try to use it.

Bomb-maker , they call me.

Death follows her.

Most beautiful, most deadly.

But most of all: alone.

Erin’s hands are always gentle when she helps me.

Sometimes I wish they were not.

Perhaps then I could feel them.

I have to fight to feel her touch or anything else. I can see her hand on my bare shoulder, the silky lavender evening gown swishing to my feet, the thin strap of my heeled sandal, gold, ornate. And yet Erin could just as well be dressing a mannequin for as much as I can feel it.

I run my finger along the ridge of my phone, a new, sleek thing, because I am never allowed to keep the same phone for too long. Someone could find the number. Someone could use it to find me . God knows how many have tried, over the years.

There is a veil separating the world, and I am on the wrong side of it.

And tonight, if all goes as planned, that veil becomes permanent. My father and fiancé-to-be left grieving. A hole left in the Greek crime families once more.

And I—I will be away from here, free, while they fruitlessly search the waters below for my body.

“Helen?” Erin’s voice is more insistent now, but still pleasant, mellow, compliant.

Perhaps it is this—the easy compliance, the deference—that made my father select her all those years ago. Every woman around my father had to fit the mold that this woman seems to have been born for. Every woman, except perhaps my mother.

I shake loose, move Erin’s hand away. “I’m ready.”

“Is there anything I can get you?”

I stare at her numbly.

Erin is a few years older than me, tall, dark-haired, attractive. In another world, we would be friends, or, at the very least, tangled up in bed together.

In this one, she does not meet my eyes.

In this one, very few people do.

But no matter. If I am successful in my plan to fake my death and escape tonight, I will never see her again.

“Nothing,” I manage. My voice sounds hoarse. My tongue must be dry, my throat parched. “Perhaps some water?”

She pours a glass as shame worms through the edge of my consciousness. If I could feel my body right now, I know how it would feel, a squirming, cruel thing riling my stomach. This is a task I could—should—do myself.

Erin places the glass of water into my hands.

I suck in a breath.

Cold.

The cold of the glass against my palms, that I can feel.

My palms are suddenly sweaty, slippery with nerves, and I bite down the panic, force it away before it bursts out of me in ways I have never been able to control.

Before the glass in my hand shatters from the strength of my own fear, manifested in tightly clenched fingers.

Dangerous as we all are on this island, from the heads of crime families all the way down to the newest fixer, I am among the most dangerous.

Few can turn the tide of power with just an appearance.

Fewer still have the knowledge and skill to build bombs by hand that can lay waste to whole buildings. I am something unheard of, even here.

A heavy knock on the door nearly sends the glass I am holding to the ground. I cling to it, hands shaking.

“Are you ready, ma’am?”

Just Tommy.

My Tommy.

He has been my guard since before I can remember—by my mother’s account, has been my guard since I was minutes old and she placed me in his arms.

My shoulders relax of their own accord.

Tommy is here, so all will be well. He promised me that.

“Ready,” I call.

I glance back again at Erin. My father chose my dress for tonight, the accessories, all of it.

Another strategic move, another move in a game that has lasted longer than I have been alive.

But it is Erin who made the dress bearable, who added padding in the strapless bra, who chose the flowers she knew I loved.

Erin who did not question when I set aside the bracelet laid out for me and chose, instead, the bracelet my mother gave to me before— before .

If I am to be a set piece, I will at least carry her with me. And when I jump from the cliffs tonight to fake my own death, this will be the only piece of the past to remain with me.

Erin folds her hands and drops her eyes to the ground respectfully.

“Erin,” I say. “Are you happy here?”

Her head snaps up. “Happy?” she repeats.

“Yes.” I am shivering in the gown, goose bumps crawling up my skin. But Erin cannot answer me. I should already know that; I do already know that.

I hold the power in the room. I am the power, wrapped in silk and glittering.

Smooth skin, soft hair, clothes no one else on this island could ever afford.

Even now, when I am no longer a bomber, no longer laying charges beside my mother or recklessly sneaking out at night to blow something up just for fun—even now I am too dangerous to be honest with.

“Of course I am happy, Helen,” she tells me, in that same changeless, smooth tone, and then it is time.

Erin opens the door, and I step through, take Tommy’s waiting arm to keep from falling.

I am no longer here nor there. I am in my body, just muted, feeling the solid weight of his arm, even smelling the subtle scent of cologne, but the pressure, the smell, it is as if neither sensation belongs to me.

And Helen—I, me, Helen, gone—I drift.

Perhaps I am just a collection of the spirits who died here.

My mother, the rest of the guards I had grown up with, the maids, the cooking staff, the doorman. They died here, and my father rebuilt when he should have left the ashes to rest.

My mother would have called this notion a foolish dream, but—but my mother is dead.

Tommy releases me before we reach the double doors to the staircase, releases me because the guests assembled below cannot see me leaning heavily on the arm of a guard.

My father runs guns and topples elected leaders and still deals in the explosives my mother and I were so viciously good at.

Their daughter cannot look as if she is about to collapse. Not in any version of this world.

“You gonna be okay on those stairs, k—ma’am?”

Tommy had almost said kid , as he always used to call me, but there is another, newer guard flanking us, and the guards here would report each other—or kill each other—just for the chance at rising in my father’s ranks.

And Father has never liked the familiarity or the gentleness of Tommy’s words, never liked that Tommy could calm my fear as a child, that I would seek out Tommy and not him. That it was Tommy who had seen me as I was—small, seething, cruel—and tried to teach me gentleness when no one else could.

“Of course I’m all right,” I tell Tommy. My gaze skims past the other guard, who stares straight ahead, face impassive.

When I walk through the double doors onto the balcony above the ballroom, every head below turns.

It is to be expected, of course.

I am half god, half woman to them. Enough woman, always, to expect the gazes that rake down me, the hungry hands that graze me without permission on the rare occasions I pass through a crowd. Always, always enough woman.

Enough god, though, for men and women to worship whenever they see me.

Enough god. Enough woman.

And in all of it, I am always utterly alone.

My heels tap the pattern on marble floors.

Father looks up at me from the dais below, where he is elevated above the other guests—only two steps, a subtle but significant sign of the power he exerts here.

I inherited his fair skin, but not his narrow green eyes, not his broad, tailored build.

He is an impossible man to read, but he nods imperceptibly at me.

I have passed the test. I tilt my chin just high enough to be regal, but not high enough to be defiant. I have performed my part.

At least so far.

I am a shade of a daughter to him, just a piece on the chessboard.

So well trained now that I move without being commanded.

I take a step toward the staircase, and another. In the sea of color, of gowns and gold, one person stands out from all the others. A lean slip of a woman, dressed in black jeans, her shoulders square, her brown eyes fierce. She meets my eyes, and my heart catches. I descend.

There is silence, and beside the glittering, living souls who are here to celebrate stand the dead.

There is glass shattered across the floor, strewn in bloody fragments. My mother is there at the center, empty-eyed and bleeding. The soft clink of champagne glasses is the gentlest kind of violence.

I descend.

I am a sharp shard, the glass of the front windows blown in, blood spilled across the ornate marble beneath my father’s feet. I am the glittering fragment they forgot to sweep up.

I descend.

The room is a mausoleum for me, and still they dance, they whisper, they laugh.

I descend.

I am Helen. I am half god, half girl, half fury, half grief.

And though they do not know it yet, my death is what they have all come to see.