Page 43 of We Are the Match
“Is she okay?” I ask.
“The doctor is reattaching her finger,” Tommy tells me. “She tried to refuse medication, gritted her teeth until she passed out. He has her sedated now to finish the job, but your father wanted you to know. Hewanted you tobethere. Why, Helen? What is it your father thinks is so important about this woman?”
“Because she’s close to me,” I whisper finally. My father cannot know I plan to run. I have been careful, more careful than those who did not survive him. And yet—and yet he sees danger in this alliance I am forging with Paris. Tommy shakes his head, his face clouded. “I stood there,” he says.“I just stood there.”
“There was nothing you could do,” I tell him, but he will not believe my empty words. We are all of us complicit here. “You know that.”
“Kid,” Tommy says sternly. “You know that’s not true. There is always something we can do, and I didn’t do it.” He turns away from me, his face toward the wind and the sea.
My knees weaken as I clutch Tommy’s arm for stability. “What can I do?” I ask. “Should I remove her from the investigation? Hire someone else?”
I could let her go now, tell her to leave this island and me behind. Do I owe her that, for saving me? A life for a life?
“She said you wanted to work on this with her,” Tommy says wearily. “Stay away. From her, from this, from your father’s business.”
“Someday I will inherit this,” I say, but even as I say the words I can taste ash. It coats my teeth, and the blood spills over my fingers and Mama is dying in front of me, dying because of the Family, because of the money, because of the blood we have spilled here.
“Stay far, far away,” Tommy repeats. “Do you understand me, kid? You will not be involved in this.”
Briefly, I fight the urge to be obstinate with Tommy just because I can, because he is the closest thing to a father I have had, at least when it comes to telling me no. But then I see the bloodstains along his arm, undoubtedly from Paris, and I swallow my words. “Tommy,” I whisper. “Thank you. For helping her.”
He grunts in reply, and then he looks at my thin wrap and scowls. “You should come in from the cold,” he says.
I should.
My eyes wander to the overturned breakfast. Tommy’s gaze follows mine. He looks back and forth between me and the table and the toppled cushions, and when I blush, the faintest smile touches his face.
It is tinged with sadness, though. “You really like her,” he says, wonder threading his voice.
“She fascinates me,” I admit. Can you like someone who mocks you with a grin and holds a knife to your throat? Can you like someone who has both saved your life and treated you like a plaything? Can you like someone who you will leave in the end?
“Helen,” he says. “You will only get hurt.”
“And getherhurt.”
He exhales. “Yeah, kid,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
The ground is scorched beneath me, the pillars crumbling, the blood swirling at my feet. We are always, always burning in this house. Dying over and over again. Me and Mama, Paris and I.
And never, ever my father.
I allow Tommy to coax me inside, to walk me to my rooms, to tuck a warmer blanket about my shoulders. “Your fiancé will want to see you later,” he says as he approaches the door. “But for now, rest. I’ll call for Erin, and she can bring up a tray of food.”
But when he leaves, I do not rest. I pace my rooms, the balcony, the hall, and I feel the soft carpet beneath my bare feet, feel the places on my skin where Paris touched me with hands that are no longer whole.
I pace and I pace and I pace, and when I close my eyes on the balcony and feel sea spray on my cheeks, I see something for myself beyond the life I have been given.
For the first time in years, I do not even dream of the sharp white cliff and the escape below.
I dream instead of taking my place on his throne.
Tommy would have words with me if he knew what I was about to do, but I wait until he leaves to take Paris home that evening. I asked if I could see her—of course I did—and Tommy told me she was still groggy from anesthesia, which was likely a kinder way to say she would have told me to fuck off if I’d seen her in that condition.
My father is not in his office now, after sunset. He is taking his scotch in his private library, which juts out on the opposite side of the house, his balcony facing away from Troy.
When I enter, he is seated in an easy chair near his fireplace, the double glass doors open to the sea breeze that comes in over white cliffs.
“Helen.” He does not look up.
