Page 43 of We Are the Match

Her fingers trail down, cupping a breast, tracing a path on my stomach, featherlight. And then, harder, the heel of her palm grinding against me between my thighs, her rings cold against my skin. And then fingers, lean, strong, deft fingers , good with a blade, and better yet—with me .

“What do you want?” I gasp against her mouth.

“You,” Paris answers roughly. “At my mercy.”

I arch against her fingers, the cold metal of her rings teasing the edge of my clit as I do. “You have me,” I tell her.

“I have seen you unmake buildings and alliances and men,” Paris whispers against my throat, one hand cupping my breast, the grip bruising and beautiful. “But can you unmake a god?” Her breath is hot against my skin. “Because I can.”

Paris strokes the edge of my clit, every bit of movement controlled, intentional, meant to make me come apart.

“More,” I demand, arching my hips against her fingers.

Her other hand slides up from my chest and wraps around my throat, just lightly. “The same rules as before, Princess,” Paris says, a wicked glint in her eyes. “You say ‘red’ if it’s too much. ‘Green’ if you’re good.”

I moan, arch my neck against her hand, desperate for more pressure. “Green,” I say. “ More. ”

Her grip tightens just slightly, just enough for the pressure on my throat to make the rest of the world drop away.

There are no wars and no gods. There is no world waiting for me outside this bed. There is just this woman holding me. Paris. My Paris.

“Paris,” I say.

She grunts, her whole body reacting to the sound of her name in my mouth.

“Beg,” she says, leaning in and pressing a searing kiss against my lips. The hand around my throat loosens, slips down to cup one of my breasts.

“Please, Paris.” Gone is every ounce of trained self-control. Gone is any inhibition. “Please, Paris, fuck me with your fingers. Please. ”

She laughs. The sound of it is cruel and sacred.

“You want this?” she asks.

And then her hands, strong and deft, are spreading me. I am soaked with pleasure, and Paris slides two fingers inside me with ease.

At the sudden fullness, my body contracts with pleasure.

Paris moans, the sound half pleasure, half pain, and I realize I am clenching hard enough to hurt her, crush those perfect fingers a little, but the pain seems to make Paris only wilder.

A third finger, and then she is fucking me hard, so hard it hurts in every way I have always wanted it to.

“Take that hand,” Paris orders, pinning one of my hips with her injured hand, keeping me spread for her on this bed as if pain is not a consideration—her pain or mine. “And touch me, Princess.”

I obey eagerly, letting her guide my hand to her clit. I stroke the outside of her clit reverently. Hesitantly, I draw my hand back and lick my finger, drawing a gasp of pleasure from Paris.

“Good girl,” Paris growls.

Good girl.

My vision goes white.

She pushes her hips forward, thrusting her fingers deeper inside me as she does, and my head falls back on the pillow, barely holding myself together.

“Enough,” Paris says. There is a note of sternness in her voice that only adds to the slickness between my legs. “Let go, Helen of the gods. You are mine .”

And then I do, we both do. Paris is coming apart on top of me and inside me, I’m clenched around her fingers, and she’s thrusting against mine, my body trembling on and on, uncontrollable waves of pleasure that do not stop, do not falter until we are both sated, exhausted, tangled up in one another.

Hours later, when we are lying together beneath a mess of sheets, Paris props herself up on her elbow and looks down at me. “Helen,” she says.

I blush, the sound of my name in her mouth an unholy thing after—all this.

She grins, but her expression sobers a moment later. “Helen,” she says. “After—after tonight.”

I stare up at her, waiting. “Who will we be when all this is done?” I ask her.

“I don’t know.” She is here with me, my head pillowed on her lean, muscular shoulder, my hair strewn across her chest, half-covering her breasts.

“I—I don’t know what Eris deserved. Not really.

She was no worse than the rest of us. No worse than me.

Did she—did she really have any choice in the things she did? ”

It aches in my chest. “Did any of you?” I ask.

Her eyes cut to mine, dark with the weight of it all.

“It feels like a choice,” she says finally.

“When I crawled over my dying sisters to reach safety. When I saved myself first. I tried, after. To go back for them. To carry them out. The only one I carried from the flames was Kore, and even then ... even then I was too late.”

I go silent and still, waiting for Paris to tell me it all. “Thank you,” I whisper against her. “For telling me.”

Kore.

The name is a gift, a piece of vulnerability, a piece of Paris she has never shared before.

“Our birthdays were the same week,” Paris tells me, running her fingers up and down my shoulder absentmindedly. “We snuck out together every Friday night and borrowed a boat and cruised around the harbor until we ran out of gas, and then we swam to shore.”

The laugh bursts out of me. “Have you ever taken the subtle approach?”

Her fingers wander lower, trailing a line down my stomach to my entrance, which is still slick with pleasure and tender, too. “You wouldn’t want me to be subtle,” she says.

“Tell me more?” I ask after she lapses into silence.

“She died on a Thursday,” Paris says. “We were going to take a speedboat the next day. We were going to bring her favorite chips, and do our nails bright red, and after we went out on the boat, we were going to one of the bars.”

I have never seen Paris cry. Never imagined I would, or that she could, even.

But one tear snakes a line down her face, dripping off her jaw before I catch it.

I hold her, until she sits up, taking my hand. “Years ago,” she says. Her voice is impossibly tender. “When I had lost everything to the flames, I had three rings made. I melted down a fragment of the bomb that killed us, and I made them from that.”

En morte libertas . One word on each ring, a flame within each band.

“One for myself and my will to survive,” she murmurs, twisting the first. “One for the sisters I could not save.” She twists the second, and then looks at me. “And one for the gods I hated.” Paris pulls the third ring from her finger, the one that reads libertas . Her dark eyes are impossibly soft.

I inhale, sharp and sweet. “Paris.”

Paris hesitates until I hold out my hand to her.

“Wait.” I pull the bracelet from my wrist, Méchri thanátou and hold it out to her. She slides her hand through, eyes shining brightly.

My father gave this to me, after our home burned. I thought, then, that he was right for fighting back, for doing what he did on Troy.

But I know another side to this now. And I know my father cannot be allowed to do what he has done.

“Paris,” I tell her softly. “It has my mother’s slogan on it: Méchri thanátou . Unto death.”

“Helen, I—”

“Let me finish,” I tell her. “It is also the access code. The only access code to the cliffside entrance beneath my quarters.”

Recognition flashes in Paris’s eyes as she runs her finger along the edge of the bracelet I have given her, and then she places her ring on my finger, her hands devastatingly gentle where they touch mine.

Paris of Troy has wanted to kill my father since the day he rained down fire and fury upon her sisters.

And I have just given her the key to do it.