Page 45 of We Are the Match

Paris

Home lies ahead of me, a burned-out husk, the bars still on the window.

Troy.

Home.

I have lived a hundred lifetimes since the group home on Troy, but never once have I escaped it. The smell of flesh burning, of small, charred, reaching hands—it has been the only thing I can smell for years now.

Until Helen, of course.

Until Helen invaded every sense and pushed a poppy into my hand and ran away with me to Troy.

But this building, these barred windows, they have always been here waiting for me. They have always been standing at the end of this path, inevitable and inescapable.

En morte libertas .

Lena is here. I have known this for years and hated her for it, too—though if I had known all along that it was her bombs, I would have taken my revenge long, long ago.

If what Thea told me is true, the three queens have been helping her all this time as she rebuilt her empire and plotted against Zarek.

The group home at Troy stands silent and dark, forsaken at the edge of the water. Below me are rocks and the dark stretch of beach and the restless, raging sea.

And beyond that sea, Helen’s island and Zarek and Marcus and the army they must already be raising to find Helen—and control her again if they can, or destroy her if they cannot.

I can see it now that I stand before my home. They must have reinforced the structure slowly, quietly over the years, building a base out of the ashes of my beloveds.

They have left the building that sagged and crumpled with all of us inside, but beyond those walls there is something entirely new, a hiding place for three queens to convene without watchful eyes, to expand their empires in weapons, in secrets, in pleasure until they were ready, together, to take on Zarek.

But more than that, a hiding place for just one.

En morte libertas .

I will have to face Lena when I do this, to face what she did to my sisters, and hold fast to my plan to free Helen. Live, Thea had said.

And will it be enough, to have our safety and freedom if I cannot have my revenge?

I lift my fist and knock.

A girl from Troy, home at last.

It is an attendant with Hana’s colors who opens the door, but all four of them are inside: Hana and Altea and Frona and, of course, Lena.

I step inside my home, still wearing that worn leather jacket, the ghosts of my sisters clinging to my skin and ash coating my mouth as I speak.

“Lena,” I say her name as if we are equals. “I have come to make a deal with you. A god for a god.”

Helen

The path up the gravel road is a lonely one.

Troy is nothing like my home island—everything here is rugged, wild, sharp as the woman who survived it.

The sun is beginning to peer over the horizon when I arrive, the light just touching a brick structure that looks more like an asylum than it does a home.

I imagine her here, my Paris, growing up inside this place, her hands smaller than they are now, wrapped around the bars on the windows.

Her hip leaning against the concrete windowsill, her face gaunt, her eyes shadowed.

Blood pools around my feet, and Mama is beside me. She is dying in this house. I am dying in this house. Paris is dying in this house. All of us over and over, again and again. We cannot stop it. We cannot stop my father’s war.

The door swings open before I knock, and they are all there together, Paris and Altea and Frona and Hana and there, at the center of them, not Erin or Tommy, who loved me.

No.

No, at the center of it all, eyes blazing, stands the person I have been grieving for ten years.

Bomb-maker, mother.

Queen.