Page 32 of We Are the Match

Helen

I leave the bunker in the early hours of the morning, and I fall into a restless sleep at last. My father came to my chambers, only briefly, to tell me that his belief in Marcus’s loyalty has been restored.

He does not say Altea’s name.

The rest of the house is livable; the only wing destroyed my father’s.

We are safe, he tells me.

I do not tell him he is not, not anymore.

I wake early the next morning, the sun still new in the sky. Erin wakes when I do, fetches a tray for breakfast. When she returns, she is pale, quiet.

“Any word from Paris?” I ask her.

I was wrong last night—to bring up Troy. But so was Paris, to dismiss my concerns about Altea. To dismiss me the way I have always been dismissed.

“Would you like some water?” Erin holds out a glass to me, ignoring my question. Her face, her voice, her mannerism, as pleasant and distant and calm as ever, but her eyes betray her.

I take the water, my hands trembling. “Can you send for Tommy?”

Tommy.

Tommy will know.

He will know if my father has already taken his vengeance swiftly.

Erin does not meet my eyes. “Your father has responded to Altea’s attack. And Tommy ... Tommy was assigned to work with your fiancé’s brother this morning. A special project for your father.”

The cup slips from my hand, water spilling across my legs, the glass shattering on the floor. “What special project?” My voice is splinters and sandpaper.

Erin turns away from me. “I do not know more than that,” she says. “I apologize, ma’am. I could ask your father—”

“No,” I tell her.

Because we do know. We both know what kind of special projects my father sends men on. What kind of bloodshed Marcus has been known for ever since he was a boy.

My father’s response to Altea was always going to be personal, his violence scorching—and Marcus is just the man to lead it.

And I know, I know Tommy has been sent along as a punishment for me.

It has always been this way: since I was very small, Tommy willingly killed to keep me safe. But the rest of the violence? He never had the heart for it.

So this, then, is what my father meant about Marcus restoring his loyalty. It is how Marcus made a name for himself, how he solidified a place for himself and his family among the Families.

I reach down to pick up the glass, and Erin brushes my hands away.

“You’ll cut yourself, ma’am,” she says.

But perhaps I want to feel. Perhaps I want to bleed for my own mistakes, just this once.

“Leave it,” I tell her, but she does not stop, and she does not let me help, and I sit there at the edge of a luxurious bed in a mansion I did not earn.

The only thing I have ever caused is bloodshed.

I push myself to my feet, avoiding the glass.

Erin is humming under her breath as she finishes cleaning.

“I need a motorcycle,” I tell her. “And I need to go unnoticed.”

And I need a handgun, though I am not sure whether or not I should tell Erin that part.

She freezes, her shoulders still hunched over the mess I made, but the song she was humming disappears into nothing against shattered glass and marble.

She stands finally, her mouth just slightly ajar as if she is about to ask what ill-advised plan I’ve concocted this time.

“And send a car for Paris,” I say. “Someone you trust. Tell no one else.”

But do I damn her with this? Working behind my father’s back, asking her to do the same? When I am afforded protection and she has none?

Erin moves with more urgency than I have ever seen. She pauses at the door, something wild in her dark, ever-serene eyes. “You will do what you have to, Helen,” she says, but I can hear the question in her voice. “You will try.”

“To stop this?” I say. I could not stop my father’s carnage on Troy, child that I was—but perhaps I have a chance at stopping this one. “Yes. I will try.”

And so she goes to do as I have asked of her and—perhaps for the first time in years—I choose my own clothes, and I dress myself.

White jeans, torn at the knees, buried at the bottom of a drawer at the very back of one of my closets.

A soft red top that hugs the rolls and curves of my soft, pale stomach beneath, with a bird taking flight across the front.

Combat boots from the very back of my shoe closet. A black leather jacket to cover it all.

It feels like something Paris would wear to a party where cocktail gowns were expected, and the thought of her gives me strength.

I have always been dressing for war, but this time I am slipping into a different uniform.

I go to my father’s study. He is pacing at the windows, staring out over the sea.

“Helen.”

“Father.”

“Was it your fixer?”

I steady myself on his desk chair, my hands closing over it tightly. No. No.

He cannot possibly know—because if he does, Paris is already dead, and that I cannot live with, no matter how many times I have tried to convince myself that I could.

“No,” I tell him, with as much certainty in my tone as I can muster.

“Why didn’t you send me along on the project this morning?

I have asked you for a greater role. This would have been a chance to prove myself, and you wasted it on a man like Marcus. ”

There was a time when I would have chosen the violence. Laid explosives myself. But pretending to care about my father’s business seems to be one of the only things currently keeping Paris alive—so I will do what I must.

He turns at last, raising an eyebrow when he sees what I am wearing. “You are dressing like her now?”

“I am dressing comfortably. And you didn’t answer my question,” I say, but what I mean is Am I already too late? and what does it say about me that I am more worried it is Paris he killed this morning, and not Altea’s entire household?

“I sent Tommy,” he says. He watches me carefully, searching for some reaction.

“Helen, this kind of upheaval is a threat to our power. Not theirs. When you rule, any war is a reason for the people who follow you to leave, or betray you, or question why you rule. You have always been impulsive—you have been kept out of the Family business for years because you couldn’t stop yourself from blowing up marinas when the whim took you, Helen.

Is that what you’ve been doing this time?

When your fixer was poking around, did she offend Altea enough for that bitch to fire upon me ? ”

I hang on to the back of his chair and let out my breath slowly. So not Paris.

Not yet.

“I’m not sure what Paris has to do with it,” I say. “Altea had the weapon, not my fixer.”

My father’s eyes are cold when they meet mine. “Maybe so. And maybe not. Either way, you have allowed her too close to you,” he says. “You have allowed her to mean too much to you, little girl, and that is always dangerous.”

“I allow nothing,” I tell him coldly. My heartbeat is thundering in my chest, nearly drowning out my ability to hear my own words. “Paris is nothing to me.”

Paris is everything. Paris laughing on the open water. Paris with a blade to my throat. Paris’s hands—

“If that is true,” Zarek says. “Then finish this fling with her and let me take care of things.”

“Let me at least have until the marriage.” I try to make my words sound casual, careless, as if she is just a plaything and killing her too early would be an inconvenience, nothing more.

His eyes narrow. “That does little to convince me she means nothing to you,” he says. “If she does not matter, you can have a new toy before the wedding. Let this one go.”

“Then let it be Tommy,” I say, and I taste ash on my tongue as I say it. “Offer me that much, Father. I have asked for so little. A quick death for Paris.”

He nods, just once. “Very well.”

It is acknowledgment and dismissal, and I turn to go.

I stop at our private armory and gather a handgun and a few magazines, packing them in a holster beneath my jacket.

Erin is waiting for me at the garage.

She helps me put the helmet on and tucks in the strands of my dark hair beneath it, and then we walk together, our strides matching, to the motorcycle that waits for me. There, she presses the key into my hand.

“Shall I send a guard behind you?” Erin asks.

I shake my head and swing my leg over the motorcycle. “I am going to find Tommy,” I tell her. And even to Erin, I do not tell the rest: I need to save Paris.

And then the motorcycle roars to life beneath my gloved hands, Erin opens the garage, and I am gone, speeding across the island as if I was born for this.

I do not stop the gods today.

I do not stop the carnage or the cruelty or the despair.

I do not arrive in time to save innocent staff, and I do not arrive in time to save Tommy.

I do not arrive in time to save anyone at all.

There is blood spilled across the gate, and a guard who looks like a boy impaled there, his blood still leaking out of him in slow, steady drops.

His brown eyes are fixed on the sky, waiting for a rescue that never came.

His stomach is open, and parts of him are spilling out that are supposed to remain inside.

I slow my motorcycle, and every muscle in my body aches to escape. I could just let go, could leave my body, could leave all this horror behind.

But the boy at the gate, his body bent back, his mouth open in one last gasp—the boy says I must stay.

That I must witness this, even if I still struggle to look upon it.

That I must let the blood flow beneath my feet as it always has.

The iron gates are bent inward, his youthful body arched over them. As if explosive force blew them in.

As if Marcus did not once try to negotiate or ask or knock. As if he came here only to do what he does best: to make them bleed.

I drive through the gates slowly, past two more guards laid out just inside the gates. There are weapons beside them, but there are knife wounds, slashes on their faces. As if Marcus had his fun before he killed them.

And then there are twin bullet holes, one in each of their foreheads.

They, too, are still bleeding.

And this I recognize as Tommy’s work.

Ending their pain without the torture Marcus would have asked of him, defying Marcus. I wonder if Marcus has made him pay for it yet, if he would dare. Fury and fear thread together through me, winding around my spine and reaching up to wrap cold fists around my throat.

Marcus.

The name is a destructive promise echoing in the back of my mind.

Farther I go, past more carnage.

Was it a mistake? To come here first?

There are no right moves, it seems. There is no path I take that does not end in blood and loss and horror.

Altea’s drive is long and winding and bloody, and I pass a guardhouse and a dead woman my age, gun still in her hands.

I pass the inner gates, blown in like those at the road.

Another guard, older, maybe Tommy’s age.

The kind that has survived so long as a guard he was probably like family, at least to Altea.

This man has a hole through the center of his chest.

Shotgun blast, point-blank.

Marcus.

I round the last bend and, finally, there is Altea’s mansion, stark white against the bright sun, incongruously beautiful against this nightmare.

I stop the motorcycle, gasping.

I can smell blood in the air as I dismount.

And then I see it as I walk toward the house: the first sign of life. North of the house, on a smooth white stone terrace, beside a fountain that gurgles gently.

Six of Marcus’s men—or my father’s men—and in front of them, three women. Even from this distance, I know what I see: a young woman in a maid’s uniform. And on either side of her, two of the women who have been Altea’s personal attendants for years.

Run, one of the men says.

I am close enough to hear the taunt.

I know this game.

The women do not move. They do not play the game.

They stand with jaws set, shoulders back, defiant and proud even when they are past hoping for survival. Even the young one, the maid.

They are Altea’s women, through and through.

The men raise their guns, and I am running toward them, running—

“ No, ” I shout, and I raise my hands, waving desperately to stop them.

The guns fire.

Three splashes of blood across white stone.

And they fall, beautiful and proud and fierce to the end, into the fountain, red blooming in the water below them.

The men with the guns turn to me, all six of them.

There are tears cutting my cheeks beneath the motorcycle helmet, and something beneath my rib cage cracks open.

“ Run, ” I shout as I shove my helmet off.

They raise their guns, confusion as clear on their faces as violence.

I draw my gun, and they hesitate, because they see me, they know who I am, they cannot fire upon me.

It is not a fair fight. It has never been a fair fight.

I am my father’s daughter.

And I kill every last one.