Page 41 of We Are the Match

Paris

I killed her.

Erin killed my sisters—Erin and Lena killed my sisters.

The shock of it is colder than the sea I have been tossed into. Colder than the first night on the street, concrete hard beneath my shoulder blades before I learned to sleep on my side, to let the least amount of my body encounter the cold ground.

I fight my way upward, choking on icy salt water.

And then, at last, a stillness as I breach the surface.

En morte libertas .

Helen is floating, the tide pulling her away from me.

Tommy is not here to swim toward her, to keep her safe while the rest of us bleed. He is not here to call her back to herself, so I must do it.

I am a poor substitute, my voice rough where his would be gentle, but I call her name.

“Helen,” I say. “My Helen.”

Helen’s body goes slack, her eyes toward the sky as if she can see nothing and no one.

The boat is capsized, our plan blown apart, everything I thought I knew flipped on its head. Because Erin, Eris , was a bomb-maker. My sister, and a bomb-maker.

My sister, and she helped to kill so many of us.

At least Helen is alive, and Erin can use us as pawns no more.

I pull Helen onto the capsized speedboat—little bigger than a fishing boat, really—and then I strike out for land I can just barely see.

Troy.

We will arrive in splinters, leaving blood behind us.

The husband Helen killed.

The sister—the bomber—I did.

Helen and Paris, running away to Troy and leaving destruction in our wake.

And what was it all for, if it was never Zarek to blame for the murder of my sisters?

And what does it say that despite this new knowledge, I still want to take his hand from him for what he did to me?

It takes nearly an hour to swim all the way to shore, and Helen does not move, not even when my muscles are aching and I shout her name in frustration.

Nothing.

Eyes wide, staring at the sky. Her lips move, as if in prayer, but she makes no sound.

But I didn’t start the war, Helen.

I was just tired, so tired, of dying in them.

I left Erin’s body behind where the boat capsized, and I wonder if it floats there still. If it sank, weighed down by the leather she wore. I wonder. I wonder until it claws at the fraying edges of me, the wondering and the if s.

We reach land at last, a narrow strip of it covered in underbrush and broken glass.

I pull Helen to shore, and she shudders. She sits up, but her eyes focus far beyond us, unseeing, and then she stands, staggers back toward the sea as I clamber out, exhausted, dripping.

She does not see me.

She does not see anything.

The ground beneath her feet seems to shake, her first footsteps on Troy already destructive.

But no, no, that is just the vertigo from being violently capsized when Helen slammed into the edge of the boat.

Still, it feels like an omen of worse ahead of us, this feeling of the earth shaking and spinning when we arrive on Troy.

“ Helen. ” It is my voice that stops her, splits the air like a gunshot.

She pauses, and then finally, finally, her eyes find me.

We are facing each other, two killers, and we are blazing, faces inches apart.

“ Paris, ” she whispers. “What did you do ?”

Helen is dangerous, Thea had warned me, just weeks ago. Centuries ago. Eons ago.

Helen is as she was then: dressed in luxury, smelling of rain.

Blood and beauty. Grace and grief.

I am the one who is different: bloody hands, sister-killer, loving the god I swore to kill.

It has always been too late for me.