Page 13 of We Are the Match
“From the queen,” I whisper, and Paris surges forward, a strange, knowing expression in her eyes.
She looks as curious as any fixer now, hungry for answers. “Is that what it says?” she asks. “Fromthe queen?”
Father’s gaze finds Paris. “Who are you?” he asks. I can see it on the tip of his tongue, thethank youhe knows he owes her, but he hesitates. There is suspicion in his eyes, and for good reason. No one ever does the Families favors without expecting something in return. And sometimes—sometimes the circumstances around those favors are staged.
“Paris,” she tells him, with no further explanation. Something strange and unsettling flickers in her eyes, but she does not move closer to him, does not speak further.
The corner of my lip quirks toward a smile. I have never heard someone speak to my father with such minimal deference.
Just briefly, she looks as if she belongs among the gods, despite the black jeans and scarred knuckles. The set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head, the thing in her eyes that tells me she, too, has stood too close to death too many times—
A scream cuts the air before either my father or Paris has the chance to escalate the tension rife in the air between them.
Near the bar, the guards sweeping the room have stopped a young woman in a server’s uniform.
She is tall and lean, her hair dark red, her skin freckled. Her green eyes are snapping with a fury that reminds me of Mama. Fiery, and then gone.
Two of the guards are holding her while a third searches her, and my stomach tightens.
They will kill her. Or my father will.
She will die.
She will die, and she is so young, and she is furious, and someone so young and so furious should not die here.
“She has the pin,” one guard says. “She has the pin to the grenade.”
And then everything—
Everything happens too fast.
My father, raising a hand and shoutingwait, and Tommy moving in front of me, wrapping his body around me to protect me, and then: a gunshot.
Nothing about it feels real—not the screaming, not the surge of the crowd like a frantic wave, not the shots that follow, not silence settling over the crowd again. The fear, though. That pulses in the air.
That is as real as my own heartbeat.
Beside me, my father is trembling with rage.
Beside the bar, the girl’s body is splayed across the floor, blood still leaking from her temple.
Paris’s face is a hard mask, my father’s face a twist of fury, his stare deadly as he looks at the guard who shot the girl.
“Bring. Him.”
His words are quiet, but they are a thunderclap.
I force back a flinch, drop my hands to the bracelet from Mama instead, rub the pad of my thumb along it, over and over. It is a thin black metal band with words engraved on the inside, an oath we took so many wars ago.
Méchri thanátou.
Unto death.
Unto death,Mama would say as we lit a charge together.Unto death,she would say as she taught me to fire a gun.Unto death.
They drag the guard who fired the shot before my father.
I should have chosen the jump, the sea below, the chance of escape, because I do not want to watch the rest, do not want to see, do not want tosee—
