Page 12 of We Are the Match
I sway a little on Tommy’s arm, and he shifts to support me. “Come sit,” he says quietly. “The physician will be here soon.”
“Marcus,” my father snaps at the man beside my almost fiancé.
I suck in a breath, trying to still the raging beat of my heart.
Marcus ducks his head toward my father.
“Gather my fixers.”
Many in the room are already cowering.
My father will do what he does best—rule. And after he lets the party guests sink deeper into their fear, after he reestablishes his own power however he needs to, I will step in and I will pick up the pieces and I will make them feel as if all is well again.
Unless I—unless I jump.
I look out the ravaged windows to the storm raging outside, the sea below calling to me. I could do it. I could make it. I could make it to freedom. Or I could break on the rocks or be lost to the water, tangled in my gown in the perilous sea. It would be freedom regardless.
The fixers surround my father within seconds—half a dozen of his most trusted employees, brutal people who have served him for years.
“Should we evacuate, sir?” Tommy asks. “There might be another explosive.”
My father’s face hardens. “No. No one leaves. Sweep the room and remove my daughter if you deem there to be a security threat. But everyone else remains until I find the person who did this.”
No. The shattered glass, the shattered daughter, all of that can be swept up later. My father must have his blood.
“Look.” Marcus’s voice cuts across the chaos of the room and splits the crowd in two as surely as if he were carrying a blade. He is holding two halves of a round golden object that fits in his cupped palms. “By the window. Someone blew out the windows withthis.” He holds it out to Father, who nods to one of his fixers to take it.
It is a grenade, not the kind of complex explosive I am used to laying. If it were, if I had been the one laying the explosive, this whole room would be in the Mediterranean.
There are too many people between me and the gap in the wall now. I could run for it. I could force them to move if I wanted, cut my path with the brutality befitting my father’s daughter.
They expect it of me, even if I am no longer brutal enough for my father’s liking.
The investigators gather around, but with a look from Tommy, they take a step back.
Except Paris. Still bloody. Still furious.
If I jump—
Paris moves into my path, solid and real.
Everyone else might move from my path if I made for the windows, but not Paris. She watches me with cold, immovable disinterest.
I shiver with the weight of her gaze but turn back toward Marcus and the grenade.
“Careful,” Father snaps at his fixers now. “That could still—”
“It did its damage,” I tell him. I step back toward him, toward this life, toward the fragments of the grenade. The sea behind me mourns my choice. “Let me.”
When my mother was alive, she taught me what she knew, let me pore over the materials in her workshop. Let me set them off on the small, uninhabited islands around us. The shards of the grenade are hot to the touch, the twisted metal singeing the pads of my fingers. It is beautiful: even warped, I can see it was made in the shape of a golden apple, lettering engraved on one side that somehow survived the flames. I lean closer, awe and horror at war inside me. This is a grenade even my mother would have been proud of.
“Careful.” This time it is Milos, back with the doctor, lecturing me as if he has any right to tell me what to do. As if he is anything but a man my father is selling me off to. He hovers at my elbow. “Don’t hold it so close to your face.”
Anger uncurls beneath my ribs so quickly I nearly strike him with the remnants of the bomb. This man, this man from the world offinance and ships andbusiness, knows nothing of explosives like this. This was my world,mine, long before it was ever his.
I bring the grenade closer, turn it over to see a message engraved on the other side.
From the queen.
