Page 34 of We Are the Match

Helen

I find Tommy hours later, pacing the cliffs at the edge of my father’s property. His clothes are still bloodstained, and there is a look on his face that makes me want to drag him away from the edge of that cliff.

He looks up at the sound of my steps, soft as they are.

I have changed back into a dress, a wicked, scarlet thing.

I have not been able to wear it before. It had reminded me too much of blood.

But now?

Now I wrap myself in blood and pace the cliffs.

I have had enough of grief and waiting and hiding. I have had enough of doing as I am told.

“Tommy,” I say fiercely, and he breaks.

He hugs me to his chest, and then his own shoulders are shaking with a violence I have never seen.

“Kid,” he says, and then just as suddenly he steps back, his hulking form still trembling. “ Jesus. You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t be comforting me. Not after what I’ve done.”

“Marcus’s men,” I tell him, ignoring his words and taking his hand in mine, squeezing it. “The six that did not make it back.”

He stares at me, and then recognition dawns, brutal and beautiful, across his face.

“They killed those women,” I tell him. “And then I killed them.” I pause. “I am sorry I was not there in time to stop it. To do more.”

He shakes his head. “Kid,” he says. “I made a choice. I always have. I always will.”

“But what kind of choice was it?” I ask the question rhetorically, because I know my father, and I know he gives orders no one disobeys. At least, no one disobeys and lives. But Tommy answers me, quiet and heart-shattering.

“He said,” he tells me softly, “‘Who will it be tonight—Altea or Paris?’”

I inhale sharply. “No,” I say. Because I can save them both. I can .

“Because he knows,” Tommy says, and then that is all he says. “He knows Paris is not and has never been his, and the only reason he has not yet moved on her is because she is yours . Your plaything. But his patience will not last forever, Helen. And how will I do it?”

His eyes are haunted.

I sit down on the white stone, my palms flat against them. “Sit with me,” I say.

He obeys.

“That was no choice at all,” I tell him.

But he does not look at me.

He does not believe me.

“Tommy,” I say, because I cannot bear to tell him what my father is about to ask of him. “It will be okay.”

He stares out at the wild sea, crashing below us, echoing the thing inside me that came untethered today. Finally, he opens his mouth. “Promise?” he whispers.

There is blood caked beneath his fingernails.

“Promise.”