Page 21 of We Are the Match
There is a small smile on his face.
The gods like when their playthings fight back. It amuses them.
“You have boldness, Troy,” he says. “You remind me of a woman I once knew.”
The doctor patches up my injuries, and then leaves me. I have memorized the floor plan, so now I walk the halls. I can feign confusion when a guard finds me. I can pretend I am lost.
I have enough favor, for saving Helen, to talk my way around a guard.
I am going to die tonight.
En morte libertas.
I still have her poppy in my pocket, the memory of us tangled up on marble, limbs crashing together, glass shattering. We were a damn cacophony. And what was it Helen knew, moments before a bomb went off? Does she know the queen? Is she making a move to become one in her own right?
She was famous, once, for the explosives she and Lena made together, though it was said Helen stopped making them altogether after the Trojan bomb destroyed her home.
The mansion, the party, the grenade, Helen—all of it runs through my mind on a loop. It would take a dozen of my tiny studios to fill one room in Helen’s mansion. I imagine whatherbedroom must look like for the briefest of minutes before I stop myself.
I find my way to the floor below her wing of the house, a long, mostly empty room with an easel and paints that are covered in dust, a lounge chair, a long mirror. Someone’s studio, once.
I am not directly below; her balcony is several rooms over, partially visible from where I stand.
I push back the curtain so that I can see her balcony, the length of it extending out from the house, over the white cliffs and the raging blue waters below.
Helen stands there, curves barely concealed by a black silk dressing gown. She is barefoot, lips slightly parted, gazing out at the sky.
I can imagine her room, even if I cannot see more than the balcony and the window into the room.
Silk that smells of whiskey and vanilla. Glass skylights and rain. Poppies at the bedside.
Bare skin, tangled sheets.
Hot breath against my neck.
I crumple the poppy in my fist.
Damn all the gods.
Especially the beautiful ones. Especially the one that’smine.
Chapter 6
Helen
The sea is a siren below me, calling for me as I stand on the balcony far above the raging water. The doctor has left, Erin has left, and I am finally, blissfully alone.
Could I jump from here? Make them think I had fallen, make them wonder why?
My father would tie up loose ends with Paris, of course, and that bothers me more than it should.
I can still go, after her investigation concludes. And she is not connected to the Families, has no loyalty to any one of them in particular, so maybe—with the right money, the right leverage—I can even convince her to help me disappear.
I close my eyes and Ifeelit. I feel the way the water thunders against the cliff, feel it thundering in my chest. I can feel the cold of the guardrail against my bare arms, the firm, smooth marble beneath my feet. What spell did Paris cast on me that sensation has rushed in like a wave and demands my presence here? It is disorienting, deeply, but so is everything about Paris.
I can feel the silk robe against my legs, smooth and recently shaved. I can feel the bruises, too, on my back, my arms, where Paris knockedme to the floor to shield me from the glass, the bomb. I can feel the raised welt that her knee left in my thigh, and I wantmore.
And more than anything, I can feel the warped, round metal in my hand that saysfrom the queen.
