Page 71 of We Are the Match
What if it isn’t just the world I want?
Chapter 25
Paris
Helen will be the death of you.Thea told me that ages ago—or maybe only days ago.
Then Helen spoke to me of Troy tonight, as if she had any right.
And still, andstill, I cannot let her go.
I must have paced the shoreline for almost an hour, long after Tommy took Helen home, before I call him.
“Tommy,” I say. “I need to speak to Helen.”
Tommy’s sigh is a blend of annoyance and resignation. “You two,” he mutters. “Did you not cause enough trouble together tonight?”
“We did,” I say. “But will you send a car for me anyway?”
He does, of course he does, and brings me to Helen’s rooftop garden without a word.
It is a different place at night: though I know it cannot be true, the plants look more tangled, the wind wilder, and—Helen.
Her hair curls, unbound, past her shoulders. “I am sorry,” she says, stopping still before me.
The silence is as long and dark and empty as all those nights after I survived the bombing, after Kore and Cass and Milena were gone and it was just me, sleeping on concrete beneath the stars. And because I cannot bear a silence that lasts that long, I do, finally, speak.
“I am sorry, too.” I have not said those words in years—not since before I lost my sisters. It was a part of me I cut away, because if I was sorry, I could not do what I needed to do to survive. Helen stretches out one smooth hand and takes mine.
My aching, bandaged hand.
And she is so gentle with it, so purposefully tender that tears bite at the backs of my eyes. Oh, Helen. Plaything and power.Mine.
“Helen,” I say, and then she is kissing me there in defiance of gods and families and every power that has ever bound the both of us.
It is brief, and it is wild, and the only taste I know is her lips.
And my plans for revenge be damned, there are no gods I would not defy to get another taste of Helen.
Perhaps her vengeance and mine are the same after all. Perhaps we do not have to be one another’s pawns or playthings.
Perhaps—perhaps.
My lips taste of Helen long after our kiss is past, and I am thinking about her concern for the innocents, about her dismay over the coming wars as I pace the worn floorboards in my apartment later that night.
Zarek will destroy Altea for this.
The weapon is in her house. Fired above his very head.
It will be over by morning, but I call her, all the same.
“What have you done, Troy?” Altea answers my call, her voice sharp as a blade.
“He knows what you long for,” I tell her. “What all of you long for.”
Home.
They have all built houses here, mansions close to Zarek’s. But their islands—Altea’s homeland, Hana’s old place on Troy, Frona’s home before she lived full-time on the floating pleasure city—are far from this island, out past the bright-blue waters of the Mediterranean, far from Zarek. And perhaps they all want their homes back.
