Page 57 of We Are the Match
I would know if they did.
I would smell it; I would be able totasteit, ash coating my tongue again. Perhaps it is part of what helped me survive the flames of Troy. Perhaps it is why I ran for the window when everyone was running for the doors, clambering over each other when it was already too late.
“How the fuck do you know that?” Tommy demands, guiding Helen behind him.
If it all burns, he will stand in the way of those flames. He would die, if it meant she would live.
It cuts me somewhere deeper, some soft bit of me that I did not know I still had, to think of having someone like that. Something we never once had on Troy.
“Trust me,” I tell him, and then I kick through the door, just above the handle, before reaching through the gap in the splintered wood and turning the handle from within.
The door swings open with a creak, and I step through, flicking a switch. The building lights up, dim light bulbs swinging gently from their chains in a row all down the room.
I comb the warehouse from front to back and then over again, Helen joining me at the far end of the room where barrels line the wall. At the bottom of one—the one tipped on its side—is a handful of dark-gray grounds, the scent of them overwhelming.
“Solidox,” Helen says, the most confident she has ever sounded.
I turn on her with a snarl. “How do you know?”
She looks taken aback at my ferocity. “We all learned what we needed to, Paris,” she answers finally. “I was not as good as my mother or her assistants. But I know what I am looking at.”
“Did you—” I cannot quite get the sentence out. Herassistants. Was it Cass, assisting Lena here? Or was it one of the queens—Hana with her long-held love of a woman whose supposed death she seems to grieve? Frona with her empire of secrets, seeking more power than the secrets can provide? Or is it Altea, branching from trading guns into something more incendiary, beginning with a move against Zarek himself? “Did you help her?”
“I did what I had to,” Helen says, drawing back a little.
I might throttle her right here, right in this warehouse, the rest of my plan be damned. No grand ending to the Families, just Helen dead in a bomb-maker’s warehouse.
“Did you ever make explosives for your father’s Family?”
Helen takes a step back from me, her eyes darkening. “No,” she says. “No, I never did.”
It does not ring true. Not that much she says does.
“Would you?” I close the space between us, my hand drifting toward her throat but landing on her collarbone instead. I slide my thumb along her collarbone slowly. Let it drift to the hollow of her throat, where her pulse is beating wildly. “Would you if he asked you to?”
She does not break eye contact. She does not back away. Instead, she leans in, deepening the pressure against her throat willingly. “No,”she murmurs, her breath warm against my jaw. “No, Paris, I would not make bombs for him.”
I let my hand fall to my side. “You are lucky I believe you.”
It snarls in me all the same. Shecouldhave. She is a bomb-maker like her mother, a player in the wars I am supposed to die in.
Whowashis bomb-maker when he cleared Troy off the map? Was it Lena’s explosives, left behind when she faked her death that were used against her own people?
Helen huffs. “There is nothing here,” she says. “Just a bit of solidox and sugar, and what can you really do with all that?”
Kill a houseful of girls.
Bomb a party.
Any number of things.
“Would your father?” I ask, “Blow up his own party?”
“Careful.” Tommy’s voice cuts through the silence.
When I look at him, he shakes his head.
“Kid, don’t go saying things that will get you killed,” he says.
