Page 7 of We Are the Match

Paris

It is Helen herself who gives me the idea for her own destruction. I watch her intently as she mends the party back together in front of me until her guard guides her away. I saved her. Somewhere in that split second when I knew it was a bomb, I decided to save her.

It was not any sense of goodness left in me, no: Helen of the gods is my kill.

The Families—whoever is playing a game at this party, Zarek included—are going to topple.

And Helen is going to help me do it.

I may have lost my window of opportunity tonight, but if I am Helen’s fixer, working this case, finding this bomb-maker, I will have another. And when I have her, and an audience to boot, I will carry her home to Troy.

Helen’s path takes her past me, her eyes on me as if she is riveted.

She stops her guards with a hand, and then pulls off the flower that was pinned to her gown. Despite the bomb, despite the hard landing on the marble beneath my body, it is perfectly unruffled.

A poppy, the flower of remembrance.

Kore had said she would grow them for the lost girls of Troy. It was the last thing she told me as I dragged her out of the rubble, the last thing she told me as the last breath left her body, soot still in her hair and ash dusting her skin. It was the closest thing to goodbye I ever had from Troy.

En morte libertas , Kore had whispered in my ear before the end. It was the words engraved above the door to the group home, a building that had once been a church. In death, liberty. We had joked about it, when we had all lived there together. When we had all lived .

Now, Helen leans close, presses the flower into my calloused palm, her thumb brushing my hand.

And then she is gone, and I am left with a poppy in my fist, glass embedded in my skin and hair, and Thea’s warning thundering in the back of my head.

Helen is dangerous.

Oh, and she is. Whiskey and vanilla. Poppies and blood and rain.

But it is already too late for me.

“Fixer,” Zarek calls me over to him now.

I step forward as the guards guide other party guests away for questioning.

Once we are out of the ballroom—up the stairs, down a long corridor—he pauses in front of his office. “What use are you to me?” he asks.

“You want me to find you a queen,” I answer.

Zarek tilts his head, surveying me intently. Behind me, his guards step closer. “So find her.”

“Hana, Altea, Frona.” I pause, Thea’s name next on my lips—she is the fourth queen, after all, rising through the ranks like a meteor, and just as destructive. Loyalty stops me, as much as I have tried to cull personal loyalty and feelings over the years.

“Those three,” Zarek says. He is standing close to me, so close I can smell expensive cologne and the faint scent of woodsmoke. “And only those three.”

“Yes,” I say. Not because Thea is loyal to him—I am not even sure she is loyal to me , not even after all these years—but because she loves Perce.

“Tell me why those three.” He moves again, his steps quickening as he enters his office. “And why not Thea.”

Hana controls elected officials, swings local elections, and influences national ones. She has been gathering more connections, more power.

It was only a matter of time before she moved on Zarek.

Altea ran weapons for one of Zarek’s rivals before he decimated them in the last round of brutality. She runs weapons for him now, but it has always been an uneasy alliance.

Frona is the fixer, the one with a whole team of people like me.

They were all complicit in the war that killed us, even if only tangentially—though none of them matter as much as Zarek and Lena and Helen.

“Because Thea loves who she loves,” I tell Zarek. “Because she doesn’t want to find his head in a bakery box.”

“Then why those three? Are they not my loyal allies?” Sarcasm is thick in his voice.

“The three queens were never your first choice—not for connections, not for weapons, not for information and fixers,” I answer bluntly. “And you were never theirs.”

“Wasn’t I?” Zarek stops, turning to me so sharply he nearly elbows me in the face.

“No,” I say. “They saw you take Troy and knew they could be next or they could be yours. The question is—which of them has decided to move on you now?”

Red blooms in his face, but then he shakes his head. “I appreciate honesty,” he says finally. “But you would do well to remember your place .”

“Of course, sir,” I say, dipping my head in his direction.

The guards part for someone. Zarek raises an eyebrow at the commotion.

Helen’s new fiancé, Milos, stands behind me in the doorway, and behind him, his brother Marcus. Zarek nods to them but looks back at me.

“So, fixer , why would she sign the explosive, whoever she is?” Zarek asks me. “Why would she blow up my party and risk being caught or killed by her own bomb?”

I snort and then pretend to cough into my arm to cover it.

It is unwise to let the gods know you are laughing at them, especially when you are in the belly of one’s mansion.

“Of course she wants you to know who she is,” I say.

“She wanted a spectacle, and she got one. Hel—your daughter salvaged it, so whoever sent the bomb will want a second chance. They want something you cannot walk away from.”

A decade of hating him, a decade of imagining revenge, and I am an expert at how someone would go about it. I am well versed in ripping power out of the hands of a man too used to having all of it. And I know exactly what someone who hates Zarek would want when formulating a plan to destroy him.

It is a question, now, of who thinks they can throw a grenade into my plan for revenge, if they are working together, if we share the same hatred—and if I can use them to speed my own plan on its way.

Milos’s gaze lands on me squarely now.

“I have never heard of you,” Milos says coldly. “Until tonight. What are you to Helen?”

What am I to Helen? Is that jealousy I hear in his voice?

I push the poppy deeper into my jacket pocket. “I am nothing to Helen. Just a body that stopped her from dying.”

They saw her rip the flower from her dress, press it into my palm, sweep away across the ballroom, away from all of us as if we were nothing. As if they were nothing, but not me. With me, she left the flower.

Marcus laughs. “We are all nothing to Helen,” he says. “Even you, fiancé .”

“Marcus.” Zarek’s voice is a whip.

To his credit, Marcus turns his head slightly to listen to Zarek, his only reaction to the harshness and fury bound up in Zarek’s voice. A lesser man would have flinched.

“Find my daughter,” Zarek commands. “See to her. I have no further need of either of you.”

Milos’s disappointment is evident in both the slump of his shoulders and the disappointment in his face as he and his brother turn to go.

“Do you trust them?” I ask Zarek as soon as they leave. “Because other than the three women downstairs, they are the only ones who might be foolish enough to challenge you.”

Zarek turns to me, eyebrow raised.

“Sit.”

I consider, just briefly, that I could comply by dropping into the spacious desk chair behind his mahogany desk and sitting in his seat.

Instead, I sit in the chair he motions to, a guard dropping heavy hands on my shoulders as soon as I do.

Zarek pulls his chair forward and sits opposite me, his knees almost touching mine.

I taste ash and soot and bomb.

I bite down hard on my tongue.

“Tell me,” he says softly. “Tell me the truth.”

I meet his stare. I will not fear. I will not allow my hands to tremble. En morte libertas .

“The truth?”

I lean forward, and the guard jerks me backward, my shoulder blades slamming into the wooden back of the chair.

Zarek’s lips tip upward in a smile. “The explosive,” he says. “You knew. You knew before it went off. Tell me how.”

Because this is not the first time for me, because I am a survivor of his violence, because flame is as natural to me as breath. Because I crawled over girls who deserved to live, girls who burned in flames that did not manage to kill me.

I cannot lie, cannot hide that much. So instead I offer a manageable truth.

“Because I am shit from Troy,” I tell him, baring my teeth as I do. “And I remember the stink of your bombs.”

Surprise flashes in his face, and he leans back in his chair, satisfied.

“Your honesty is refreshing,” he says. “So tell me, Paris of Troy. Do you blame me for those bombs?”

I shrug one shoulder. “They didn’t kill me ,” I say.

This time, he smiles, and for the first time I can see his resemblance to his daughter. “You have the spirit required for the Family,” he says finally. “Very well, fixer. Why would the brothers challenge me? They are about to join me. Helen solidifies that alliance.”

He must have used her for just such a purpose many times over the years—because who has seen Helen of the gods and not tried to use her?

There is war in the tilt of her jaw. There is power in the red of her lips.

There is violence waiting in the hollow of her throat.

“If they have Helen, is she really your asset anymore?” I ask him.

“Or is she Milos’s bargaining chip? Is she the face of his endeavors? And what of his brother?”

It must twist in his chest, that this was exactly the case with Lena all those decades ago. The marriage was meant to be an alliance, an end to the squabbles. Lena’s Trojan family and Zarek’s family united, and more powerful for it.

Except Troy didn’t want Zarek, something he could never forgive.

Zarek stands, pushes his chair back to its proper place. I get a look around me for the first time as he does.

The office is as opulent and pristine as the rest of the house, with high vaulted ceilings and a hand-carved desk that probably cost over five years’ living expenses for the entire group home back on Troy.

Zarek waves a hand to his guards, who step out of his office, their obedience silent and immediate.

The door swings shut with a heavy thunk .

“Do you know why I brought you here?” he asks softly.