Page 23 of We Are the Match

I am as sure as I am of the memories: Cass climbing into my bed instead of hers, curling up beside me, dark hair spilling across me as she spun stories of all she had learned and all she had seen.

And, oh, Helen can never imagine the side of this world I have lived, or how well I know the mother she still speaks of with so much love.

Lena used my sisters, and when it was convenient: she let them burn.

When we reach the island Cass spoke of, it is nothing but a dark slab of land rising from the nearby choppy sea, a few long, low buildings sprinkled across it.

The first is empty, a storage facility with abandoned lockers hanging open.

The second looks more like a warehouse, but as I approach the door, Tommy’s hand stops me, drags me backward.

“If these housed a bomb-maker,” he says sharply. “They will have this door rigged.”

“They don’t,” I tell him.

I would know if they did.

I would smell it; I would be able to taste it, ash coating my tongue again. Perhaps it is part of what helped me survive the flames of Troy. Perhaps it is why I ran for the window when everyone was running for the doors, clambering over each other when it was already too late.

“How the fuck do you know that?” Tommy demands, guiding Helen behind him.

If it all burns, he will stand in the way of those flames. He would die, if it meant she would live.

It cuts me somewhere deeper, some soft bit of me that I did not know I still had, to think of having someone like that. Something we never once had on Troy.

“Trust me,” I tell him, and then I kick through the door, just above the handle, before reaching through the gap in the splintered wood and turning the handle from within.

The door swings open with a creak, and I step through, flicking a switch. The building lights up, dim light bulbs swinging gently from their chains in a row all down the room.

I comb the warehouse from front to back and then over again, Helen joining me at the far end of the room where barrels line the wall. At the bottom of one—the one tipped on its side—is a handful of dark-gray grounds, the scent of them overwhelming.

“Solidox,” Helen says, the most confident she has ever sounded.

I turn on her with a snarl. “How do you know?”

She looks taken aback at my ferocity. “We all learned what we needed to, Paris,” she answers finally. “I was not as good as my mother or her assistants. But I know what I am looking at.”

“Did you—” I cannot quite get the sentence out.

Her assistants . Was it Cass, assisting Lena here?

Or was it one of the queens—Hana with her long-held love of a woman whose supposed death she seems to grieve?

Frona with her empire of secrets, seeking more power than the secrets can provide?

Or is it Altea, branching from trading guns into something more incendiary, beginning with a move against Zarek himself? “Did you help her?”

“I did what I had to,” Helen says, drawing back a little.

I might throttle her right here, right in this warehouse, the rest of my plan be damned. No grand ending to the Families, just Helen dead in a bomb-maker’s warehouse.

“Did you ever make explosives for your father’s Family?”

Helen takes a step back from me, her eyes darkening. “No,” she says. “No, I never did.”

It does not ring true. Not that much she says does.

“Would you?” I close the space between us, my hand drifting toward her throat but landing on her collarbone instead. I slide my thumb along her collarbone slowly. Let it drift to the hollow of her throat, where her pulse is beating wildly. “Would you if he asked you to?”

She does not break eye contact. She does not back away. Instead, she leans in, deepening the pressure against her throat willingly. “No,” she murmurs, her breath warm against my jaw. “No, Paris, I would not make bombs for him.”

I let my hand fall to my side. “You are lucky I believe you.”

It snarls in me all the same. She could have. She is a bomb-maker like her mother, a player in the wars I am supposed to die in.

Who was his bomb-maker when he cleared Troy off the map? Was it Lena’s explosives, left behind when she faked her death that were used against her own people?

Helen huffs. “There is nothing here,” she says. “Just a bit of solidox and sugar, and what can you really do with all that?”

Kill a houseful of girls.

Bomb a party.

Any number of things.

“Would your father?” I ask, “Blow up his own party?”

“Careful.” Tommy’s voice cuts through the silence.

When I look at him, he shakes his head.

“Kid, don’t go saying things that will get you killed,” he says.

“He wouldn’t, anyway,” Helen says. “It’s not that he’s above staging something he wants staged. But he’s embarrassed that this happened, and angry that it happened under his nose. This wasn’t him.”

In the silence of the warehouse, we are left staring at each other, both of us holding back. Zarek’s rage tells me there is truth in what Helen says, but my gut tells me there is more to this recent bombing than we yet understand.

The warehouse shows nothing—there are footprints outside leading to the door, telling me that there have been visitors since it last rained a few days ago, but it has been cleaned—or at least visited—fairly recently.

“Tommy,” I say. “You’ll need to get the boat moving as soon as we’re done here.”

“Whatever it is you’re planning,” he begins. “Is it going to get you both hurt?”

“I’m going to blow this place up,” I tell him. “And leave a message for the queen.”

Helen’s eyes light. “I can help,” she says.

“I know you can, Princess.” I grin at her, enjoying the blush that answers my use of the word princess .

Helen runs a hand down her face as if she can wipe away the heat there, and turns to Tommy abruptly, hiding her face from me.

“Tommy,” she says. “This is the fun part.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, shaking his head. “You two,” he says. “Are going to be the death of me.”