Page 32 of We Are the Match
“I did,” she says. Her gaze finds the smooth, cold mahogany floors.
“And?” I lean closer, my hand pausing midair as I reach for the glass of water.
“Forgive me, ma’am,” she says. “It seems ... inappropriate.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Inappropriate?”
She hesitates. “You were moaning,” she answers finally.
My face warms, and I draw the tangled covers farther up my body. “Moaning?”
“Yes,” Erin says, twisting her fingers together. There is a trace of a smile hiding on her face.
“Oh.”
I do not remember the dream, but a flash of it hits me—sheets of rain and the smell of a leather jacket and the cold steel of a knife and ringed fingers sliding across my throat, smooth as silk and—
My door slams open. Tommy is in my doorway, eyes flashing. “What thehelldid you do?” he snaps.
Erin jumps, startled at his tone.
“Erin, out,” he orders.
She looks at me, and I nod.
As soon as she is gone, he whirls on me. “You wentout,” he says. “Helen, what the fuck? Someone tried to set off a grenade next to you and you sneak out hours later? Do you have a death wish? Your guard certainly must have—”
“He ... he wasn’t supposed to tell you,” I say weakly. “It’s not his fault, Tommy. It isn’t. He did what I commanded.”
“Helen.” Tommy isn’t looking at me, and his voice is lower, careful.
“Tommy?” I don’t want to hear this. I want to beg Tommy not to say what I’ve realized too late was always going to come next.
“I tried to send the guard away quietly,” he says, and then he clears his throat. His eyes are haunted. “I did, kid.”
I press my hands down hard on my thighs, fingernails digging in. No.
No.
Did my father gut this guard like he gutted the other boy with the gun at the party last night? Did he make him suffer first?
“I’m sorry,” Tommy says, his voice almost crumbling. “I am.”
“Did you do it?” I ask him, but I am looking past him, because I cannot lookathim, cannot bear to see him, to see our shared brutality.
But it isn’t shared, is it?
It wasmychoices that killed the sandy-haired boy who guarded my suite last night. It was my choices, and I don’t even know the boy’s name.
Tommy nods once. “I made it quick,” he says.
He swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. Despite the long years he has been in this work, protecting me, killing has never sat well with him—unless he is doing it to protect me.
“Tommy,” I say finally. “It isn’t an excuse. But I didn’t think—”
“He was dead the minute you pulled him into your game with Marcus,” Tommy says. “There is nothing you could have done after that.”
“Fuck,” I whisper, guilt settling heavy in my chest.
