Page 16 of We Are the Match
Understanding follows confusion across Milos’s face, and then a hurt deeper than I imagined I’d see. “You want to make our announcementnow?”
How could he have confused the state of this union? Has he thought, all along, that he and I were anything more than an alliance?
I squeeze his hand, offering what reassurance I can. “We have an announcement.” My voice carries. Every head turns. “I know tonight’s events must have shocked you. Terrified you, too. And for that, I grieve deeply.” I hesitate, and they lean forward, eager, desperate.
The bodies are already being carried away, and the people in this room are already looking past them. They are looking beyond the smears of blood on the floor. They are looking tome.
I brush my thumb along the bracelet again.
Méchri thanátou.
I am their safety. I am everything they think they need. I almost went over the edge of this cliff tonight to buy my freedom. “I cannot imagine your terror. No, perhaps that isn’t true.”
I do not have to force my words to falter, my voice to tremble.
Mama holds her guts inside her body, hands weak and then slackening entirely. Blood spatters the edge of my soft silk slippers.
She has fury in her eyes. She is afraid.
And then Mama’s body burns.
There are ashes all around me.
The crowd, the real, the now, all blur before me. I want Paris to take my arm so that my body does not forget to hold on to me. I want the force of her colliding with me, the pain of her knee jamming into my thigh, the fury of her eyes staring into mine. I want her fingers to dig into my arm, closing over my skin hard enough to bruise.
I waver on my feet.
Milos steadies me, and I do not feel his touch.
“I can imagine it,” I breathe, but the room is so quiet that I know it carries to every person in this room.
Even the guards, the ones who must detach from it all, the ones who must pay attention to threats and not to me, have their heads tilted toward me, listening even as their eyes scan the crowds.
“I was here, in this room, the last time someone hated my family enough to attack us.” I stand taller, but I allow Milos to continue to support my arm. “The last time this happened, it did not go unpunished.”
I look to my father, whose face is a hard mask. He will spill more blood tonight, a thought that should give me pause.
It ismywords, power cloaked in civility, that enable and embolden him in that brutality tonight, makes him almost sympathetic to those watching.
You are the power,Paris said so viciously.You.
I catch Thea’s eyes, stone cold, boring into mine.
Well, sympathetic tomostof them, that is.
“And I am here to tell you that hatred will not stop us.” I lift my chin. “Milos and I have something to tell you.”
That girl, with the bright eyes and the rage, holding the pin to the grenade. She may have been hired for a job or played like a pawn. But she hated us. That hatred was all her own.
I look back at Milos.
At least I will allow him to tell them. I can grant him that.
“Helen and I are engaged to be married.”
The crowd sucks in its collective breath. I should smile up at Milos, the picture of love and devotion, but this was always for our audience, and not for him, so it is our audience I turn to. Most faces hold surprise, excitement, joy.
Among them, I find the three queens, their expressions pleasantly neutral, because even now, they mask. I imagine they are calculating what this means for their alliance with my father. Do they wonder, now, if those alliances are coming untethered, their place in Zarek’s family made unimportant by the arrival of Milos and Marcus?
