Page 119 of We Are the Match
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 Iwilllose, 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.
Act Four: Burn the Ships
Chapter 44
Helen
I left my mother the detonator, in the end. I left her with her war.
Because if she wins—if we rule—and I do not have Paris at my side, how can it be any victory at all?
I wanted Tommy to be here, telling me this is okay.
Promise?
Promise.
But I am grown, I amHelen, and I push my ghosts aside and let the breath expand deep inside my chest, straining against my ribs.
Paris holds her hands out to me now, in the darkness of this little bunker.
“You—you’re here?” she says breathlessly.
“I’m here.”
She kneels, right there at the edge of the water. She smells of gasoline and fury, but she holds the lighter up to me, a promise worth more than any ring.
“Tell me to go,” Paris says. “Tell me to run, and I will leave it behind. Tell me to run, and we will abandon revenge and ruling. Tell me to run, my love, and I will take you with me.”
I tug at her hand, pulling her to her feet. “I came,” I tell her, my voice trembling with the weight of what we have both done. “I came for you, Paris.”
“I was coming foryou,” she says, eyes bright. “We don’t have to wait until all this is done. We don’t have to hold so tightly to the roles we played. We can be—we can bemore.”
“I thought we couldn’t,” I say breathlessly. “I thought there was nowhere we could run to escape them. I thought—”
“You thought right.” My father’s voice rips through the darkness, and then he is there, his men surrounding him, guns trained on us. I am on the roof and Tommy is dying. I am in the water and Erin floats beside me. I am in this cave, and Paris is holding fast to me.
He steps forward, my father, rage in his eyes and a knife in his hand.
