Page 29 of We Are the Match
I open my mouth and close it again. “You are leading this investigation,” I say. “My father is keeping me out of it. And I want in.”
She arches an eyebrow, leaning closer to me. “And why is that, Princess?”
“My father has his reasons.” Reasons that have something to do with the volatile, violent girl that I was, or with the timid woman I became—or perhaps reasons that have more to do with his own fear, sowed deep in him after we lost Mama. “If my upcoming marriage is being targeted, I want to know. Besides, you need me. I have connections. I can get you inside their homes—Altea and Frona and Hana. If you work for me, I can—”
“I can get all of those things by working for your father.” Paris’s smile is mocking. “And I have no interest in working for someone who cannot be honest about what she wants.”
I open my mouth and then shut it again with a click. It is not honesty I lack, but courage. And besides, who in this world is honestabout what they want? Who among us does not have secrets that could kill?
“Now get the hell out of my house.” The smile is still on Paris’s face, fixed in place as if welded there, but that danger Tommy mentioned—that danger is sharp edged and obvious in her dark eyes. “Unless there was something else, Helen?”
“You will not speak to me this way,” I tell her, summoning every piece of decorum and control I can. “I am—”
“We both knowexactlywho you are, Princess,” Paris says. She shrugs off her button-up and slings it over the stool along the little countertop island next to her kitchenette. Beneath is—not much. Smooth, toned skin. Faint scars on one wrist. A tangle of tattoos circling her ribs. Her bra is lacy, black, and shows most of her beneath. “Anything else?”
It is difficult, suddenly, to focus on the conversation, with Paris so bare before me.
“If you had spoken to my father this way, you would already be dead,” I tell her coldly. “Do not think for a second that I can be pushed around just because I did not show the same level of brutality tonight.”
Paris leans back against the high-top, folding her arms and raising an eyebrow at me. “No,” she says. “You just enabled it.”
“You can choose not to work with me,” I tell her. “But then you’ll have to explain to my father how you knew the bomb was going to go off a second before it did.”
Paris’s expression does not slip. “You think he has not already asked me that?”
“But would that matter?” I ask softly. I can be dangerous, too, and wrap it in silk. “If I confide in him that I think you are dangerous? Would it matter to the bullet with your name on it?”
Something settles in Paris’s expression, half a smile flickering across her face, and then she shrugs one shoulder. “So I update you as I have leads,” she says easily. “What is the endgame here, Helen of the gods?”
“You destroyed my plans tonight, Paris. And I want your help finishing what I intended.”
She surges forward, her knife flicking open, and then I am being propelled backward until I am pinned against the wall, rough wood digging into my shoulder blades.
The tip of her blade edges against my throat, and I feel every beat of my heart thundering within me.
“Was it your bomb?”
“No,” I breathe.
I am so close to Paris, I can almost taste her. She smells of TNT and woodsmoke, and I am as intoxicated as I am afraid.
She eases back, but her knife remains where it is, the tip digging into my skin.
“Talk.”
It is not the knife that loosens my words, but the fact that I really do need her. So I offer a piece of honesty, if not the whole of it.
“At the right moment,” I tell her. “The perfect one, when the party was at its height. I was going to step off the cliffs and be free of this world.”
Confusion flickers in her dark eyes. “You were going to kill yourself,” she says. “Why?”
“No,” I tell her. “I would have survived the fall. I would have been free. If I leave, I will be hunted. But if I am dead—there is no one to hunt.”
Her knife eases away from my throat.
I inhale deeply, grateful for the gasping breaths I can take now that the pressure of the blade is not robbing me of the ability.
“So you want me to what? Help you fake your death at the end of this?” Paris is watching me carefully.
