Page 50 of We Are the Match

Paris

The gap in the cliff is narrow, scarcely visible in the half-light beneath the gathering storm clouds.

Above me, Zarek’s mansion towers on the cliffside, an affront to the sky and the sea and the island itself. The wing of his house that I shot with Altea’s weapon is marked off, reconstruction already begun.

I reach the place in the rock where Helen held up her bracelet. I hold it up now. Méchri thanátou.

Unto death.

The door slides open, and I pull the boat in.

It is as much a homecoming as it was to return to Troy. I take a half-filled can of gasoline from the bottom of the speedboat and I climb.

Past the blood spatters Helen left here.

I climb and I climb and I climb, and I realize as I do that the girls I left in the group home, the burning girls, are all climbing beside me.

I am more like Helen than I want to be right now, Helen who stayed behind to make the war her mother wants her to make.

I am carrying all my ghosts with me in my mutilated hand, on my unburned back. They are beside me, skin hanging from exposed shoulders, hands melting even as they reach for me.

I will take his whole fucking hand.

My knife is sharp, and it is ready.

I have been born for this.

Any other life—one with Helen, one far from here—was never anything but a dream. Maybe for women like Thea, who escaped before the bombs. Maybe it was not too late for her.

Live, she told me.

But how could I?

Without my sisters. Without Helen. Without anything at all.

In a group home, surrounded by other girls that no one wanted, I became a blade and war unto myself. I became the worst nightmare of the man, crime lord, god who has killed so many innocents.

I took his daughter, if not in the way I expected.

And it is almost, almost over.

What will it be, not to carry the weight of being the last survivor? The only one to remember?

They are all screaming around me, and maybe I am screaming, too, but at least I have my blade.

I push through the trapdoor beneath Helen’s floor and step out into her room, blinking at the sudden light. There is a smear of blood where Milos was, where Helen killed him and set herself free.

We used one another. We did.

But for a handful of moments, on rooftop gardens and runaway boats, we were something more.

And I loved her. Enough that now, even now, I come to finish this for the girls, for me—for—for—

I stop there, in Helen’s room.

Helen, my Helen.

Blood and silk. Poppies and ash.

Revenge in my hands, and it is hard to summon any thought but one of Helen.

If Kore were here, would Kore be climbing beside me with gasoline and a lighter?

En morte libertas , she is whispering to me.

And I do not imagine her burning, just this once.

Instead, I imagine her free. I imagine her on a boat, not confined to the harbor, leaving Troy behind. I imagine her in a little apartment in Spain, like she dreamed of, cooking with a roommate and weaving ribbons into her hair.

I imagine her the way I imagine us all—

Free.

Revenge is in one hand, and Helen in the other. Gas can and lighter. Flame and fury.

And if I choose to burn, again, instead of taking my shot at being with the woman I—the woman I love , I will be letting the girls of Troy down one last time.

Kore is beside me. Milena and Cass, too. Jasmine and Yara. So many of us, so young.

We just wanted to live.

Helen’s bedroom is a battlefield—blankets still in disarray, bed never made from the last time she slept here. The person who usually made the bed—Erin—dead at my hands. Milos’s blood is smeared wherever Helen walked.

There’s an option where you run, Thea is telling me.

En morte libertas , we said on Troy.

But what if there was another choice?

What if, like the choice I made at the party—to save Helen from a bomb, the way I could not save my sisters—I could make a different kind of choice now?

I look at them all around me. Memories of girls I lost forever. Memories of a woman I will lose, if I cling so desperately to my own plan for revenge.

My vengeance is finally in the palm of my hand, and I choose, instead, to live.

If Helen will have me—if after all I have done, she will have me—I will lay my lighter at her feet and tell her it is time to be free.

I leave the gas can there, leave the bloodstains and bed, leave it all.

And when I reach the bottom of the stairs, there are two boats waiting, not one.

And Helen, my Helen, looking more wary, more hesitant, more afraid than I have ever seen her, but here all the same.

“Helen,” I say, my chest expanding with joy—and when I stretch out my hands toward her, she takes them.