Page 106 of We Are the Match
En morte libertas.
The phrase on the three rings she has always worn.
I pull her ring from my finger and turn it over.
She left melibertas.
Freedom.
And then I see it, in handwriting neater than I would have expected from Paris—a note lying on her pillow.
I have one last thing to do. Don’t follow. Stay alive.
But I know where she has gone, even if I do not know what I will find there—because I knowher. I have seen her rage and I have seen her joy and I have seen her love, all of it leading her back to Troy, this path as inevitable and brutal and beautiful as Paris herself.
And I know what I need when I follow her there:
A gown and a bomb.
I choose the gown first, from the safe house closet, something rose gold and silk that slides over my curves and hugs them exactly where I want them to.
Then I dig through the kit Paris salvaged from the wreck, and I build—a fail-safe.
Solidox and sugar, the weapon of a woman who now knows scarcity.
If I find three queens, united against my father, I can help them plan their next move. If, like Erin hinted before she died, one of them has been leading and that she has a plan for me, too, I can see what help I can offer.
And if it all goes to hell, I can clear a path to freedom with my grenade.
A flash of red catches my eye as I open the door. The remains of the gown Paris ripped off me only hours ago? I look closer.
It is a poppy on the nightstand, faded and drying there, wind ruffling the remaining petals. Has she preserved this since the party? Has she kept this flower since the night we met?
When the whole world was watching, and somehow she was the only one I could see. When I stayed beside her all evening at my engagement party, when she threw me to the ground to save me from the blast, when she made me laugh for the first time in months. When I pressed the poppy into her outstretched hand and changed her fate and mine.
Now, I pin the flower Paris left for me above my heart.
And I go to war.
Chapter 38
Paris
Home lies ahead of me, a burned-out husk, the bars still on the window.
Troy.
Home.
I have lived a hundred lifetimes since the group home on Troy, but never once have I escaped it. The smell of flesh burning, of small, charred, reaching hands—it has been the only thing I can smell for years now.
Until Helen, of course.
Until Helen invaded every sense and pushed a poppy into my hand and ran away with me to Troy.
But this building, these barred windows, they have always been here waiting for me. They have always been standing at the end of this path, inevitable and inescapable.
En morte libertas.
