Page 5 of We Are the Match

Helen

The woman is on top of me, and the shards of glass are in her back and her neck and her head and in my bare arms and I am bleeding and I feel it. I feel it.

I feel, for the first time in years.

I feel her .

Paris on top of me, her body covering mine in a wall of lean, hard muscle. Her hands are braced on either side of my head, her knee digging into my thigh, pinning it to the marble floor beneath her.

There is screaming, incoherent and distant. The only thing in the world is Paris, is me, is glass on the floor and the storm outside now audible, now raging at us for believing we could keep it out.

Her eyes are blazing.

She is furious .

All the chaos around me, and that is the only thing real, the only thing I am sure of. That Paris is as furious as I am, and that she is furious with me .

And then hands drag Paris from me, Tommy’s hands. Tommy tosses her aside carelessly, as if she is nothing, this woman who stole my drink and laughed at my Family and saved my life.

He kneels over me, hands gentle as he checks each place the glass has marked my skin. “Kid,” he says. “You okay?”

I nod my head.

My neck is sore, a bit of glass has scraped my arm, but there is no head wound, no scorch marks, no jagged gash in my chest.

No blood spooling across the floor where Mama died. Where, tonight, I was meant to die—and not the false death I had planned, the escape to freedom.

I become conscious of the rest slowly:

The guards are holding the crowd back, weapons drawn. They are keeping the peace with the threat of violence, my father’s usual solution. And then Father is rushing down from the dais, arms outstretched to me. My almost betrothed, Milos, is behind him, concern flashing in his blue eyes.

Paris is on her feet, staggering but still standing.

I look at her there, wavering, bleeding, and I get the distinct feeling that she would still be standing even if her wounds were much deeper than the surface injuries she sustained.

Blood runs down the sharp line of her jaw, but she barely grimaces.

“You okay?” she asks. Her voice is unrefined, a jagged thing that does not belong in a place like this.

I stand.

I am still the one they all came to see.

Every head turned to me, all eyes on me.

Your place, Father said to me.

If my mother was here—well.

If my mother was here, the air would not smell like ash and soot and destruction. As long as she was alive, it was only ever our enemies who suffered like this. It was only ever them who burned.

Now, I lean hard on Tommy’s arm, and I do not tremble. “I’m fine,” I tell Paris, because if I look at my father or if I look at the man he’s marrying me off to, everything in my perfect facade will crack.

But Paris.

Paris, the woman who met my eyes and did not look away. Paris, who told me exactly what she thought of me, of all of us. Paris, who does not belong at this party and walks like royalty despite that.

Paris, with the lighter in her hands and the smirk on her lips.

I am going to die tonight, I had told her.

My gaze falls on the shattered glass, the windows wide open. I could pull away from Tommy and step through them now, waver at the cliff’s edge and then fall.

Few could survive that kind of fall, but I could. It is a hard dive, but not an impossible one. Not if you know there is a gap between the rocks below, where the landing will just be the hard slap of water and not the breaking crush of the rocks.

And it is the only way I will ever be free.

“What the hell happened?” Milos asks my father, who looks to Tommy and then me and then Paris.

There is a hole in the wall, and the storm is still raging, rain and hail falling through the gap in the glass, the floor slick as blood. The metal bars that held the windows are bent outward, warped from the heat of the bomb.

My father has that look in his eyes, that barely caged thing in him that came out when the blast killed my mother ten years ago, a mixture of raw violence and determination.

“I intend to find out.” He wheels on another guard, one holding an assault rifle. “No one leaves,” he hisses. “Not until you have searched and questioned every single person.”

I place a hand on my father’s arm, firm and calming. I can feel that, too. I can feel every sensation in my body. I have been able to feel ever since Paris touched me, tackled me to the ground and covered my body with her own.

It was her touch that shocked me back into my body, and I am not sure yet if I missed feeling or if I would like, now, to return to its absence.

I sway a little on Tommy’s arm, and he shifts to support me. “Come sit,” he says quietly. “The physician will be here soon.”

“Marcus,” my father snaps at the man beside my almost fiancé.

I suck in a breath, trying to still the raging beat of my heart.

Marcus ducks his head toward my father.

“Gather my fixers.”

Many in the room are already cowering.

My father will do what he does best—rule. And after he lets the party guests sink deeper into their fear, after he reestablishes his own power however he needs to, I will step in and I will pick up the pieces and I will make them feel as if all is well again.

Unless I—unless I jump.

I look out the ravaged windows to the storm raging outside, the sea below calling to me. I could do it. I could make it. I could make it to freedom. Or I could break on the rocks or be lost to the water, tangled in my gown in the perilous sea. It would be freedom regardless.

The fixers surround my father within seconds—half a dozen of his most trusted employees, brutal people who have served him for years.

“Should we evacuate, sir?” Tommy asks. “There might be another explosive.”

My father’s face hardens. “No. No one leaves. Sweep the room and remove my daughter if you deem there to be a security threat. But everyone else remains until I find the person who did this.”

No. The shattered glass, the shattered daughter, all of that can be swept up later. My father must have his blood.

“Look.” Marcus’s voice cuts across the chaos of the room and splits the crowd in two as surely as if he were carrying a blade.

He is holding two halves of a round golden object that fits in his cupped palms. “By the window. Someone blew out the windows with this .” He holds it out to Father, who nods to one of his fixers to take it.

It is a grenade, not the kind of complex explosive I am used to laying. If it were, if I had been the one laying the explosive, this whole room would be in the Mediterranean.

There are too many people between me and the gap in the wall now. I could run for it. I could force them to move if I wanted, cut my path with the brutality befitting my father’s daughter.

They expect it of me, even if I am no longer brutal enough for my father’s liking.

The investigators gather around, but with a look from Tommy, they take a step back.

Except Paris. Still bloody. Still furious.

If I jump—

Paris moves into my path, solid and real.

Everyone else might move from my path if I made for the windows, but not Paris. She watches me with cold, immovable disinterest.

I shiver with the weight of her gaze but turn back toward Marcus and the grenade.

“Careful,” Father snaps at his fixers now. “That could still—”

“It did its damage,” I tell him. I step back toward him, toward this life, toward the fragments of the grenade. The sea behind me mourns my choice. “Let me.”

When my mother was alive, she taught me what she knew, let me pore over the materials in her workshop.

Let me set them off on the small, uninhabited islands around us.

The shards of the grenade are hot to the touch, the twisted metal singeing the pads of my fingers.

It is beautiful: even warped, I can see it was made in the shape of a golden apple, lettering engraved on one side that somehow survived the flames.

I lean closer, awe and horror at war inside me.

This is a grenade even my mother would have been proud of.

“ Careful. ” This time it is Milos, back with the doctor, lecturing me as if he has any right to tell me what to do. As if he is anything but a man my father is selling me off to. He hovers at my elbow. “Don’t hold it so close to your face.”

Anger uncurls beneath my ribs so quickly I nearly strike him with the remnants of the bomb. This man, this man from the world of finance and ships and business , knows nothing of explosives like this. This was my world, mine , long before it was ever his.

I bring the grenade closer, turn it over to see a message engraved on the other side.

From the queen.

“From the queen,” I whisper, and Paris surges forward, a strange, knowing expression in her eyes.

She looks as curious as any fixer now, hungry for answers. “Is that what it says?” she asks. “From the queen ?”

Father’s gaze finds Paris. “Who are you?” he asks.

I can see it on the tip of his tongue, the thank you he knows he owes her, but he hesitates.

There is suspicion in his eyes, and for good reason.

No one ever does the Families favors without expecting something in return.

And sometimes—sometimes the circumstances around those favors are staged.

“Paris,” she tells him, with no further explanation. Something strange and unsettling flickers in her eyes, but she does not move closer to him, does not speak further.

The corner of my lip quirks toward a smile. I have never heard someone speak to my father with such minimal deference.

Just briefly, she looks as if she belongs among the gods, despite the black jeans and scarred knuckles. The set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head, the thing in her eyes that tells me she, too, has stood too close to death too many times—

A scream cuts the air before either my father or Paris has the chance to escalate the tension rife in the air between them.

Near the bar, the guards sweeping the room have stopped a young woman in a server’s uniform.