Page 60 of We Are the Match
So I open my mouth and tell Zarek:
“The name I have for you is Marcus.”
Chapter 20
Helen
I wake to the house aflame with light and bustle and noise, heavy footsteps running and Erin’s hand, shaking me urgently awake.
They are both dressed, Erin in the gray trousers and blouse that most house staff wear, a poppy embroidered on one sleeve to signify her as my attendant, and Tommy in tactical.
“Get up, kid,” Tommy says roughly.
“What’s this?” I ask groggily. I am here and then not. I am in my body and then away, everything muted. “What happened? Is it Paris?”
What does it say about me that Paris has become the first name upon my lips when I wake?
“Your father received some information about Marcus,” Tommy tells me. “We’re getting you down into the bunker.Now.”
They don’t wait for me to dress—though Erin does toss a few things for me into a bag—before they pull me to the trapdoor in my closet.
My father had this escape route built during the reconstruction after my mother died, when he first gave me the suite of rooms that once belonged to my mother. Beneath my room, a long, narrow staircase winds down, the walls on either side still unfinished, solid rock. It is lit only by a few hanging lights along the way, which flicker wearily as we descend.
At the bottom is—a bunker, it could be called, or a cave. It is a room hewn out of rough rock, complete with supplies and weapons and a hidden bay, big enough for not more than two boats, which rock idly in the night-dark water.
From the outside, it looks like unbroken rock—but the wall of the cliff opens inward with the push of a button. The only way to trigger it is my bracelet, an escape built just for me.
“What did Marcus do?” I ask again when we have settled in our little bunker, Tommy rummaging for more weapons from the case on the wall.
“Tommy? Tell me. Please tell me.”
I grabbed my phone, at least, the one thing I managed to remember.
I text Paris:They have me in a bunker. I don’t know what’s going on. Stay safe.
Stay safe?
What a meaningless thing to say when my father is on the rampage—it does not matter who was responsible, because once my father has decided someone will die, they will die.
The idea I had when Paris and I blew that bomb-maker’s warehouse to hell crystallizes further. My father should not be allowed to continue reigning like this, unquestionable and all-powerful and utterly bloodthirsty.
If Mama were here—if I was not trapped in my father’s house all this time—
I could be queen.
“Marcus had some materials,” Tommy tells me tersely, once he had strapped yet another handgun to his thigh. “In the car that brought him to your party.”
The text sends for what seems like ages.
And thendelivered, and immediately Paris’s three dots, indicating her typing.
Congratulations to you, Princess. Got another secret admirer leaving you bombs?
Ah, at least Paris is safe enough to be ridiculing me. Strangely, it returns me to my body, the stone beneath me becoming real again. It is not ten years ago. It is now, here, as real as the smirk on Paris’s face when she typed that message to me.
Tommy snatches the phone from my hand. “Are you telling someone where you are?” he demands. “You don’t know what Marcus is doing, or what he is capable of. Kid, you cannot be serious.”
“Paris doesn’t work with him.”
