Page 15 of We Are the Match
Impulsively, I take her arm. Perhaps this one woman, sharp edged as the grenade that blew up my party, I can save.
She looks at me with something akin to shock, but she shifts her balance so that she can hold me up.
“What do you think it means?” I ask her.
We stare at one another, Paris and I. She is furious and dangerous. She is the edge of a cliff. She is a mistake.
I want to draw closer.
“I can investigate this,” Paris says, twisting one of her rings slowly.
She is looking at me, and only me.
I turn my gaze to my father. “She’s a fixer,” I tell him, loud enough that the men nearby and anyone standing just beyond the ring of guards can hear. The dead boy and the serving girl and Mama, they can hear, too. They are all holding their guts in with bloodied hands, and they watch me defy my father. If it was not true before, it is now: she is a fixer because I said she is. “Father, we should let her help.”
Father’s eyes narrow. “We have our bomber,” he said. “Helen—”
“The queens,” I murmur. “Father, it saysfrom the queen.”
“I saw.” His eyes sweep the crowd.
The three queens arehere.
They are all watching us with great interest, and all three of them are far from the source of the explosion.
“I can vouch for Paris.” Thea has breached the ring of guards, slipped right past them. She is standing too close to the blood, so I cannot look at her, cannot look at her straight on. There is a smear of red on the edge of her pink tulle engagement dress. “She has solved more than a few problems for me.” She stares straight at Paris, something almost like surprise on her face.
Paris holds Thea’s gaze unflinchingly, a moment passing between them that is entirely their own.
They are saying something to one another, these strange blood-drenched women at my party, if only I could decipher it.
“We need someone far from the usual circles,” I tell my father, soften my voice so that the tone—gentle, demure—is one he can hear without rage.
Because if Paris is working, Paris is alive. Because if Paris is alive—maybe she can be my way out.
“Paris is welcome to assist, then.” My father’s shoulders are perfectly relaxed, his hands open. He is the picture of ease, of calm in the chaos. Only in his eyes do I see the storm still rages. “Find us this queen.”
Paris’s eyes flick to the queens, one by one, but she knows as well as Father and I do that even in his house, we must use a subtler hand with the queens than outright accusations. Powerful as my father is, a war with them would be bad for business.
Where most people would look frightened, or at least intimidated at the idea of going toe-to-toe with those more powerful, Paris has a flicker of excitement in her eyes. As if she has gotten something she wanted.
Thea taps the heel of her boot against the floor. “Good luck, Troy,” she calls. Paris’s shoulders tighten imperceptibly at the word.
Tommy wedges his way between Paris and me, but the look he gives Paris is one of grudging respect.
She takes the grenade from me gingerly, as if expecting it to go off again in her hands.
It is nothing but a shell, though.
From the queen.
There was only one queen on this island. My mother, Lena. And their bombs incinerated her ten years ago today, Troy betraying their own because she favored my father over the Family she was born to.
The room is a tomb around us. There is blood on the floor, and I cannot tell if it is my own, or from the girl who carried the grenade, or the boy my father killed. Or after all this time, if it is still Mama, the little that is left of her bleeding at my feet. I cannot tell if I am a woman standing here for all to see, or a little girl who just found her mother’s body.
But I stand tall, my bleeding shoulders rigid like the queen my father expects me to be. In this moment,needsme to be.
“Now,” I tell Milos. “The people need their moment.”
