Page 6 of We Are the Match

She is tall and lean, her hair dark red, her skin freckled. Her green eyes are snapping with a fury that reminds me of Mama. Fiery, and then gone.

Two of the guards are holding her while a third searches her, and my stomach tightens.

They will kill her. Or my father will.

She will die.

She will die, and she is so young, and she is furious, and someone so young and so furious should not die here.

“She has the pin,” one guard says. “She has the pin to the grenade.”

And then everything—

Everything happens too fast.

My father, raising a hand and shouting wait , and Tommy moving in front of me, wrapping his body around me to protect me, and then: a gunshot.

Nothing about it feels real—not the screaming, not the surge of the crowd like a frantic wave, not the shots that follow, not silence settling over the crowd again. The fear, though. That pulses in the air.

That is as real as my own heartbeat.

Beside me, my father is trembling with rage.

Beside the bar, the girl’s body is splayed across the floor, blood still leaking from her temple.

Paris’s face is a hard mask, my father’s face a twist of fury, his stare deadly as he looks at the guard who shot the girl.

“Bring. Him.”

His words are quiet, but they are a thunderclap.

I force back a flinch, drop my hands to the bracelet from Mama instead, rub the pad of my thumb along it, over and over. It is a thin black metal band with words engraved on the inside, an oath we took so many wars ago.

Méchri thanátou.

Unto death.

Unto death, Mama would say as we lit a charge together. Unto death, she would say as she taught me to fire a gun. Unto death.

They drag the guard who fired the shot before my father.

I should have chosen the jump, the sea below, the chance of escape, because I do not want to watch the rest, do not want to see, do not want to see —

“Helen.” Paris is beside me, her voice soft, her eyes furious. She will not let me leave my body behind. “Looking away changes nothing.”

“How,” my father asks quietly. “ How am I to question a corpse?”

The guard is trembling.

He is so young, and he is so terrified. And someone so young and so terrified should not die here.

But I cannot stop them from dying. I can never stop them from dying. I look out toward the storm. I beg it to drown out the noise, but even the storm’s rage is dying, rain slackening at the blown-open gap in the window.

The boy does not answer my father.

There is a crack. Ringed fingers against bone. Cartilage and bone breaking.

There is more blood on the marble.

There is Mama’s blood on the ground, and the girl’s, and they have bold, furious green eyes, and they are afraid like the boy and they are all dying, they are all dying—

Paris’s hand closes over my arm, so hard her fingers dig into my skin. “No,” she says.

Tommy is watching her carefully, but he is not moving, not driving her backward or holding a weapon to her face. He appears, for half a minute, strangely hopeful as he looks back and forth between us.

Another crack, and a low moan, and beyond Tommy and Paris the guard is kneeling before my father.

The others in the room are kneeling, too. They are all kneeling.

Just not me or Tommy.

Or Paris.

“ How, ” my father repeats, his voice a snarl now. “ Am I. To question. A corpse? ”

“I—” the guard attempts, finally, too late, too late. “I am—sorry—”

“No one dies unless I say they do.” And then my father crouches, and it is over, it is over, and I am a coward, so I do not watch.

If I were braver, I would choose this moment. I would walk to the edge of the wound in the wall and I would say I do and step off.

But instead, I am frozen, and Paris is holding me fast.

I look at her, look at the sharp angles of her face, and I tremble on Tommy’s arm, and Tommy and Paris, who are not cowards, watch my father and the knife and the boy.

They watch the slash of his blade as it opens the boy from his diaphragm down to his abdomen, and they watch as the boy tries, just briefly, to hold his intestines inside his body, and then. Then they watch him die.

Paris releases my arm and steps back, and the instant she is no longer touching me, no longer holding me here with the ferocity of her grip, I—I leave.

The noise is muted. The colors are blurry. The red of the blood is not quite so violently bright. Not quite so harsh.

My father strides toward us, the body behind him inconsequential already.

“Why are you here?” he asks Paris, that dangerous edge still at the forefront.

If I were here, if I were in my body, I would feel the fear churning inside me.

The guards shift, ready for the command to take Paris, to put a bullet in her, or to hold her while my father guts her.

And I, I may be nothing, I may be unable to stop anything, but I—I make another choice. I chose not to jump. And now I choose—

Paris.

Impulsively, I take her arm. Perhaps this one woman, sharp edged as the grenade that blew up my party, I can save.

She looks at me with something akin to shock, but she shifts her balance so that she can hold me up.

“What do you think it means?” I ask her.

We stare at one another, Paris and I. She is furious and dangerous. She is the edge of a cliff. She is a mistake.

I want to draw closer.

“I can investigate this,” Paris says, twisting one of her rings slowly.

She is looking at me, and only me.

I turn my gaze to my father. “She’s a fixer,” I tell him, loud enough that the men nearby and anyone standing just beyond the ring of guards can hear.

The dead boy and the serving girl and Mama, they can hear, too.

They are all holding their guts in with bloodied hands, and they watch me defy my father.

If it was not true before, it is now: she is a fixer because I said she is. “Father, we should let her help.”

Father’s eyes narrow. “We have our bomber,” he said. “Helen—”

“The queens,” I murmur. “Father, it says from the queen .”

“I saw.” His eyes sweep the crowd.

The three queens are here .

They are all watching us with great interest, and all three of them are far from the source of the explosion.

“I can vouch for Paris.” Thea has breached the ring of guards, slipped right past them.

She is standing too close to the blood, so I cannot look at her, cannot look at her straight on.

There is a smear of red on the edge of her pink tulle engagement dress.

“She has solved more than a few problems for me.” She stares straight at Paris, something almost like surprise on her face.

Paris holds Thea’s gaze unflinchingly, a moment passing between them that is entirely their own.

They are saying something to one another, these strange blood-drenched women at my party, if only I could decipher it.

“We need someone far from the usual circles,” I tell my father, soften my voice so that the tone—gentle, demure—is one he can hear without rage.

Because if Paris is working, Paris is alive. Because if Paris is alive—maybe she can be my way out.

“Paris is welcome to assist, then.” My father’s shoulders are perfectly relaxed, his hands open. He is the picture of ease, of calm in the chaos. Only in his eyes do I see the storm still rages. “Find us this queen.”

Paris’s eyes flick to the queens, one by one, but she knows as well as Father and I do that even in his house, we must use a subtler hand with the queens than outright accusations. Powerful as my father is, a war with them would be bad for business.

Where most people would look frightened, or at least intimidated at the idea of going toe-to-toe with those more powerful, Paris has a flicker of excitement in her eyes. As if she has gotten something she wanted.

Thea taps the heel of her boot against the floor. “Good luck, Troy,” she calls. Paris’s shoulders tighten imperceptibly at the word.

Tommy wedges his way between Paris and me, but the look he gives Paris is one of grudging respect.

She takes the grenade from me gingerly, as if expecting it to go off again in her hands.

It is nothing but a shell, though.

From the queen.

There was only one queen on this island. My mother, Lena. And their bombs incinerated her ten years ago today, Troy betraying their own because she favored my father over the Family she was born to.

The room is a tomb around us. There is blood on the floor, and I cannot tell if it is my own, or from the girl who carried the grenade, or the boy my father killed.

Or after all this time, if it is still Mama, the little that is left of her bleeding at my feet.

I cannot tell if I am a woman standing here for all to see, or a little girl who just found her mother’s body.

But I stand tall, my bleeding shoulders rigid like the queen my father expects me to be. In this moment, needs me to be.

“Now,” I tell Milos. “The people need their moment.”

Understanding follows confusion across Milos’s face, and then a hurt deeper than I imagined I’d see. “You want to make our announcement now ?”

How could he have confused the state of this union? Has he thought, all along, that he and I were anything more than an alliance?

I squeeze his hand, offering what reassurance I can. “We have an announcement.” My voice carries. Every head turns. “I know tonight’s events must have shocked you. Terrified you, too. And for that, I grieve deeply.” I hesitate, and they lean forward, eager, desperate.

The bodies are already being carried away, and the people in this room are already looking past them. They are looking beyond the smears of blood on the floor. They are looking to me .

I brush my thumb along the bracelet again.

Méchri thanátou.

I am their safety. I am everything they think they need. I almost went over the edge of this cliff tonight to buy my freedom. “I cannot imagine your terror. No, perhaps that isn’t true.”

I do not have to force my words to falter, my voice to tremble.

Mama holds her guts inside her body, hands weak and then slackening entirely. Blood spatters the edge of my soft silk slippers.

She has fury in her eyes. She is afraid.

And then Mama’s body burns.

There are ashes all around me.

The crowd, the real, the now, all blur before me.

I want Paris to take my arm so that my body does not forget to hold on to me.

I want the force of her colliding with me, the pain of her knee jamming into my thigh, the fury of her eyes staring into mine.

I want her fingers to dig into my arm, closing over my skin hard enough to bruise.

I waver on my feet.

Milos steadies me, and I do not feel his touch.

“I can imagine it,” I breathe, but the room is so quiet that I know it carries to every person in this room.

Even the guards, the ones who must detach from it all, the ones who must pay attention to threats and not to me, have their heads tilted toward me, listening even as their eyes scan the crowds.

“I was here, in this room, the last time someone hated my family enough to attack us.” I stand taller, but I allow Milos to continue to support my arm. “The last time this happened, it did not go unpunished.”

I look to my father, whose face is a hard mask. He will spill more blood tonight, a thought that should give me pause.

It is my words, power cloaked in civility, that enable and embolden him in that brutality tonight, makes him almost sympathetic to those watching.

You are the power, Paris said so viciously. You.

I catch Thea’s eyes, stone cold, boring into mine.

Well, sympathetic to most of them, that is.

“And I am here to tell you that hatred will not stop us.” I lift my chin. “Milos and I have something to tell you.”

That girl, with the bright eyes and the rage, holding the pin to the grenade. She may have been hired for a job or played like a pawn. But she hated us. That hatred was all her own.

I look back at Milos.

At least I will allow him to tell them. I can grant him that.

“Helen and I are engaged to be married.”

The crowd sucks in its collective breath. I should smile up at Milos, the picture of love and devotion, but this was always for our audience, and not for him, so it is our audience I turn to. Most faces hold surprise, excitement, joy.

Among them, I find the three queens, their expressions pleasantly neutral, because even now, they mask.

I imagine they are calculating what this means for their alliance with my father.

Do they wonder, now, if those alliances are coming untethered, their place in Zarek’s family made unimportant by the arrival of Milos and Marcus?

I should care more.

But I am watching Paris, watching her stone face. She is framed by the storm and shadow of the sea beyond as she cradles that grenade in her hand and stares back at me with unmistakable violence in her eyes.

Violence, and something else.

I have let her in, and premonition tells me everything will change because of it.

And then Milos tilts my chin toward him, and we kiss there in front of the watching world, the gathering sea.

The crowd lets out a breath.

We are beautiful, defiant but not enough to give anyone else ideas that they, too, could defy their circumstances.

I close my eyes, an illusion of pleasure for the crowd and an escape for me so I can imagine how it would feel to step off the edge of this mansion and choose freedom.

I close my eyes, and I feel nothing at all.