Page 28 of We Are the Match

Helen

I arrive to the shooting range dressed in black silk and, like most women in a dress like this, ready for war.

“Darling.” Altea greets me with a kiss to my cheek and a rifle held out for me.

Paris ducks her head. “Zarek is coming later, is he not?” she asks.

Altea nods. “When he finishes with those brothers,” she says carelessly. “Do you really think they did it, Helen? Do you think a man like Marcus is capable of a bomb so beautiful?”

“That is for my father to ascertain, I suppose,” I answer—or give her a nonanswer, rather.

Paris withdraws gracefully, making some excuse that she would like to give us time to talk, just Altea and me.

I wait until she is gone before I take the weapon from Altea. It is heavy in my hands, smooth and cold and beautiful.

I have not fired something like this since my mother taught me almost fifteen years ago. We have a beautiful shooting range on a lower floor of my father’s mansion, a wing reserved just for family—my mother and father and me, once. Now just my father and me.

“But what do you think, Helen?” Altea asks me thoughtfully. “About the new blood?”

“I do not think Marcus capable of that explosive, no,” I tell Altea. “But he is capable of hiring someone.”

“Why?” Altea asks bluntly. “Why would Marcus want to destroy what is very nearly built?”

It is an honest conversation between Family, something I have not yet experienced, daughter of Zarek though I may be. It makes my whole body feel light.

“Marcus came to my room the night of the bombing,” I say.

I had not believed him capable of it, then—there was a wildness in those beautiful eyes that told me he wanted to know his brother was safe, and nothing more.

Still, the story I can spin for Altea can be something different, and her answer can show me something about her . “He seemed frenetic, unbalanced.”

“Like others in the Family, then.” A smile plays across Altea’s lips as she lifts her rifle and begins to fire.

Beside her, a used paper target lies discarded.

When she sees me looking, she nudges it behind her with her foot, pushing it out of sight.

“Indeed.”

“And will you match that instability if you marry his brother?” Altea asks.

It is a weightier question than it sounds: it is not a question about Marcus.

It is Altea asking, with the usual subtlety of these queens, if I will rule like my father—or if, instead, I will follow in the footsteps of my mother.

“My mother had a different touch,” I say. “I would follow in her footsteps, if I could.”

Altea nods to me, stepping back from the shooting range.

I lift the rifle she gave me to my shoulder and step forward. I fire, each bullet unerring. Each finding its target.

When I turn back to her, Altea’s eyes are glinting, and I know I have found my first ally.

She ducks her head to me, the gesture nearly deferential.

“Welcome to the Family, Helen.”