Page 121 of We Are the Match
And so he does not understand the way I smile at him, does not understand that I am not here for their wars or their power. I am here for Helen, but more than anything I am here forme.
If he will not let us go, then I will end what he began.
One guard—just a boy, just a boy, like all of them, I realize—sloshes the gasoline. It soaks my jacket, soaks my boots and my hair and my skin, every inch of it. I let them take my knives, and I do not struggle.
So when I stand and step forward slowly, they do not think to stop me.
I am not a threat anymore; of course I am not.
I am a girl, I am shit from Troy, and it is only as I embrace Zarek, wrap my arms around him as if he is a long-lost family member and I am but coming home, that they realize what I intend to do. The gasoline I am covered in soaks his clothes, soaks him and me and everything, everything, everything.
Beside me, the burning girls are smiling, skin dripping from their exposed jaws.
My rings must feel cold on the back of his neck when I pull him close. One for the girls I lost. One for my forceful will to live. I whisper in his ear:“En morte libertas.”
I look to Helen. She is standing, too, her eyes flickering as she looks at me.
“Helen,” I say.
She nods.
“No—” Zarek says, and there it is, there itis, the whimper of fear in his voice and—
I flick my lighter open.
Chapter 46
Helen
My father’s men run while he burns.
He takes a flaming step toward the water, and he is screaming, and he calls my name—and he falls.
I grab Paris’s hand, the flames licking at me, and we plunge into the cold water, together.
When we finally emerge, holding fast to one another’s hands, Paris leans her head against me. She pushes the lighter into my hands once more.
“Keep it,” she tells me.
And I do.
She is hurt, badly enough that I half carry her up these marble stairs where Tommy once had to carry me. Where Paris and I once carried Tommy.
I lay her on my bed, peel the flame-resistant jacket from her body, clean the burned patches of skin on her legs and neck.
“I will go for the doctor,” I tell her. “Now that my father is dead, his physician has nothing to fear if he treats your injuries.”
“Together,” she says wearily. “We go together.”
And she is right. Despite it all, Paris and I?
Where we go, we go together.
There is screaming below, and gunfire, so when I help Paris down the corridor, I cut away from the sounds of it, toward the ballroom.
If Mama is here—
“Forget my injuries,” Paris says firmly as we reach the top of the stairs.
