Page 117 of We Are the Match
“I will not recover from any of this,” I snap. Not from Paris, not from this life I have lived or the violence I have done.
“Youwill,” my mother says. Lena. Lena, my mother. Lena, who wants me to destroy every living soul on the fleet that comes for me. “You will survive, and you will rule, because you are Helen,myHelen. You came from me, and Iknowyou.”
Not like this.
It beats in my chest, as sure as anything I have ever known.
As sure as I was last night when Paris askedWhat do you want?
And I answeredyou. You. You.
A sharp rap at the door interrupts us, and I rise, my legs still weak from adrenaline. I know what I must do.
Paris’s ring is cold on my finger.
“The first boats are on the horizon,” Altea says.
“Good,” Mama says. “Helen? Are you ready?”
I can see them now—burning girls, and the mother I thought I had lost and Erin and Tommy, his face weighted with sorrow when he looks at me. They are all around me.
You are the power,Paris is telling me. She is killing my father. She is kissing me. She is leaving me behind.
I am meant to uphold Mama’s rule.
I am in the ballroom, speaking gently to survivors of a queen’s grenade. I am taking a husband. I am solidifying someone else’s alliance.
I am meant to support Mama.
You are the power.
“I will,” I promise them. I promise Paris. “I will make sure we are free.”
Chapter 43
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.
