Page 87 of We Are the Match
I walk past my father toward Tommy, move the barrel of the gun from Tommy’s head. Take Tommy’s hand and pull him to his feet.
He stares down at me sadly. “Kid,” he says.
“No,” I say. “No, not anymore.”
“Paris stays there,” my father says.
I meet her eyes.
I am standing, and she is kneeling, but I feel smaller than I have in my entire life.
You are the power,she told me.
And I can feel it, pounding against my rib cage, begging to be released.
I kneel in front of Paris and cup her face in my hands.
“Whatever I must,” I murmur, and press a kiss to her lips.
And then I walk, hand in hand with Milos, to become his wife.
A man I do not know arrives to perform the ceremony, and Milos is quiet and Tommy is quiet and Paris is furious and the room is a tomb and Mama and everyone who died at Altea’s are here bleeding and all of it circles back around me, but still I stand, still I stand unshaking, and I do what I must.
Tommy takes his post beside me. He brushes hair from my face and looks down at me with an ocean of sorrow in his eyes, but he says nothing.
They keep Paris between two armed guards, flanking her but not touching her—if they touch her,if they touch herI will draw the knife from beneath my dress and cut their throats.
After our vows, Milos turns to me. His face is almost blank, almost empty. But not quite. “Helen,” he says. “Helen, I didn’t want to marry you like this. I thought we could besomething.”
I cup his face with one hand. “I am sorry,” I tell him. “I am sorry.”
How can he have been so naive, to think this marriage could become something it was never meant to be?
“This is an alliance,” I tell him. “Our families are now one.”
“But—could we come to care for each other, do you think?” he asks me. “Does it always have to be this way?”
I pull enough of me back into my body to answer. To answer, but not to feel. Because after Paris’s hands, how could I ever want anyone else’s hands on me? How could I ever go back? “How could it have been any other way, darling?”
It is easier to look past him and pretend I am talking to Paris. She is watching me, her body still but her eyes blazing. I can use words likedarling, and I can imagine it is her hands cupping my neck. Her hands, long, lean fingers with those rings that drive me mad, dancing across my skin.
And if after all this, I cannot save her—cannot save Tommy—
I turn to my father.
“Father, may we go?”
“Not yet.” His voice is sharp, dangerous. “Milos, in my family, loyalty must be proved.”
Tommy moves toward me, the gesture automatic. He can hear a threat in the change of tone, and he moves to protect me now, his body between mine and my father’s.
And I want to rewind it all, return to a time when I was a little girl and Tommy could just hold me close and call mekidand tell me to be better, but it is too late, too late for both of us, because—
They force him to his knees beside Paris again.
There is a gun in my father’s hand. He hesitates.
Not one of us moves.
