Page 3 of We Are the Match
“Be careful.” She leans close to me, her breath hot against my neck. “She can take everything from you without lifting a finger.”
There are stories about Helen. She does not date often, but every girlfriend and boyfriend she has had—dead. She does not travel often, but everywhere she does—death trails in her wake. It has made people only more ferocious in their pursuit of Helen, the most beautiful of all these untouchable gods. As if they could be the one who survives her.
I have no interest in any of that.
I turn, my mouth inches from Thea’s. “No one takes anything from me,” I hiss back. “Not even this Family.”
No.
Not ever again. No, I will be the one that takes something fromthem. I will take and take the way they once took from me. I am no god, but I have their viciousness, and if I had let Thea listen when she gave me opportunities to talk, I would have told her what it was like to be kept alive by a tenacity I did not want. To be the one who lived, even if I had not deserved it.
Thea draws back and laughs, the sound sharp as a slap. “Do you think you can do it?” She leans even closer, her lips almost brushing my jaw. “Do you thinkyoucan kill him?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. We pretend we do not hate him, even here, in a room that belongs just to us, because in this world, people listen. Words can be recorded and twisted. Words can kill. “I don’t want Zarek dead.”
And it’s true. I don’t want him dead. Not yet.
He has to suffer first. Has to lose what he loves, what he keeps locked in the tower like a precious jewel, before I take his life, too.
I have a plan, and once I have enacted it, I am going to kill Helen of the gods.
Unless Thea is right.
Unless Helen is the end of me first.
Chapter 2
Helen
My father does not make mistakes. He makes acts of strategy, and he makes acts of war.
It is strategic, then, that tonight’s party comes ten years to the day since the bomb that ignited my father’s last great act of brutality.
As my attendants style my hair, as I sit perfectly, perfectly still, I wonder which one tonight will be, the strategy or the outright violence. Both have a place here—in our home, on this island.
“Helen?”
Erin’s hand is gentle on my shoulder. My personal attendant is sometimes myonlycompanion, a carefully curated isolation to protect me from rival crime families, or to protect my father’s alliances from me. From the bombs I once built, from the reckless way I once used them, and from the knowledge I still have—because everyone would try to use it.
Bomb-maker, they call me.
Death follows her.
Most beautiful, most deadly.
But most of all: alone.
Erin’s hands are always gentle when she helps me.
Sometimes I wish they were not.
Perhaps then I could feel them.
I have to fight to feel her touch or anything else. I can see her hand on my bare shoulder, the silky lavender evening gown swishing to my feet, the thin strap of my heeled sandal, gold, ornate. And yet Erin could just as well be dressing a mannequin for as much as I can feel it.
I run my finger along the ridge of my phone, a new, sleek thing, because I am never allowed to keep the same phone for too long. Someone could find the number. Someone could use it to findme. God knows how many have tried, over the years.
There is a veil separating the world, and I am on the wrong side of it.
