Page 48 of We Are the Match

Paris

The ships are coming.

The ships are coming, and I must go.

“Helen,” I tell her. “Stay alive.”

She nods once, index finger tapping the ring on her left hand. “Paris—do you want it back?”

I look down at my own hand, at the two rings remaining.

One for loss, I keep that.

One for the gods-cursed will to live, I keep that, too.

But the last one, the one that promised revenge, the one for the gods I hated—that is Helen’s to keep.

“I would have left my revenge behind,” I tell her. “If you had asked.”

There are tears in her eyes. “We could never have run from this.”

What do you want? I had asked Helen so many times, but I had not stopped to ask myself. Perhaps if I had, perhaps if I had listened to all the times Thea had asked me the same, I would have been able to answer that in time to save both Helen and myself.

But as it is—as it is, we are only the sum of the choices we have made. Helen the god, and I the nonbeliever.

Helen is Lena’s.

And I?

I have what I have always had: myself, my will to survive, and a fury that not even the weight of a sagging building, of dozens of dying sisters, could crush.

After all of it, after everything I tried to do to change course and seek my own freedom, I come back to the only thing left. The path I almost abandoned: revenge.

“I will not come back to this beach for you, Helen,” I tell her.

Everything, everything flashes across Helen’s face. She is as raw as I have ever seen her.

“And I will not be waiting on this beach for you, Troy.”

“Goodbye, Helen.”

She stares at me for a long moment. “My mother will kill any threat to me,” she says finally. “I have always known that to be true. So go, before she decides to put two bullets between your eyes.”

Helen says the words so coldly they scarcely sound like her, but her dark eyes still flicker with emotion. It was what drew me to her at the party: that although she could manage her body language and expression with such perfect control, the look in her eyes was still so uncontainable.

“Helen—”

“No,” she says. “I will keep her busy in the office. You leave through the window.”

It is not a goodbye—just like with my sisters, I do not get a goodbye.

I leave through a lower-level window, as I often did when Kore and I would sneak out to the boats, and Helen returns to her mother, to the war we began and she will finish.

I go now to finish what I began when I crawled out of half-melted bars on the windows ten years ago.

I will take his whole fucking hand.

I was a woman with nothing, once. Nothing left but revenge.

And then, for a few brief moments, I had everything: Helen, and a chance at freedom.

I am something new, now, as I leave my home one last time. I have lost my sisters, yes—but I have also lost Helen.

And the only thing left for me is this path I walk to Zarek and revenge.

The walk down the narrow gravel road to the marina is a short one. It is closed, of course, if you are a law-abiding citizen, but even in my days as a girl in the Troy group home, I knew how to hot-wire a boat and take off across the water.

It was usually Kore, on Fridays. But even when Kore was not there to do it, there were girls to go with me, girls with fair skin or brown skin, girls with brown and blue and green and black eyes, girls with shaved heads or long brown hair or tight twists. Girls and girls and girls.

Girls who wanted to steal across the bay under the moonlight, taste the waves and the wind and come back wilder than before. Girls like Helen, used by people who were meant to take care of them.

Girls who burned.

Girls I crawled over to escape and survive.

Girls and girls and girls.

The marina should be empty, but two people wait for me on the long dock, two people framed against the gray-blue water and grayer sky. I brace for a threat—and then I cannot catch my breath, because after all this time, my family did not leave me behind.

It is Thea at the marina, Perce beside her.

“Troy,” she says.

“You—”

I stare at her.

“Yes,” Thea says. “Where are you going?”

“Are you getting out?” I ask her. “The ships are coming.”

“We know,” Perce says. “We’re trying to evacuate the island.”

“The whole island ?” I ask them.

“It’s a small island. And not many of them left. All the same, you could stay and help,” Perce says.

Thea shakes her head before I can.

“She has business with the man on the hill,” she says, resignation mixing with the sadness in her voice.

Helen of the gods will be the death of you.

But I had never cared much about that, had I?

Had never cared much if I made it through any of this alive. I had imagined stealing Helen from that party, dragging her to Troy and watching Zarek and Lena crumple as I killed their favorite bargaining chip. But I had not planned for an after .

I twist my rings on my fingers. Only two rings, now. It is a different grief, a different hollowness in my chest that spurs me on now.

Thea’s face twists. “You know, don’t you? That I grieve them, too?” she asks. “Our girls. I wanted to take them all with me. I wanted to save them. I wanted to save Jasmine . And I didn’t. But I can’t bring them back. I can only live, and hope I honor them by remembering them.”

“And by the way you cared for the living. Like me. I know you looked out for me,” I say. “I know you tried to warn me—about all of this. I wish I had seen your kindness for what it was.”

There is no anger in her eyes when she looks back at me. Just sadness, a decade of it. “I always thought if anyone could make it this far,” she says softly. “It would be you.”

“Live, Thea,” I tell her finally, stretching out my hand toward her.

She clasps it, her grip firm. “You too, Troy.” She hesitates, and then pulls me in, her hug fierce.

Family, after all this time.