Page 17 of We Are the Match
I should care more.
But I am watching Paris, watching her stone face. She is framed by the storm and shadow of the sea beyond as she cradles that grenade in her hand and stares back at me with unmistakable violence in her eyes.
Violence, and something else.
I have let her in, and premonition tells me everything will change because of it.
And then Milos tilts my chin toward him, and we kiss there in front of the watching world, the gathering sea.
The crowd lets out a breath.
We are beautiful, defiant but not enough to give anyone else ideas that they, too, could defy their circumstances.
I close my eyes, an illusion of pleasure for the crowd and an escape for me so I can imagine how it would feel to step off the edge of this mansion and choose freedom.
I close my eyes, and I feel nothing at all.
Chapter 5
Paris
It is Helen herself who gives me the idea for her own destruction. I watch her intently as she mends the party back together in front of me until her guard guides her away. I saved her. Somewhere in that split second when I knew it was a bomb, I decided to save her.
It was not any sense of goodness left in me, no: Helen of the gods ismykill.
The Families—whoever is playing a game at this party, Zarek included—are going to topple.
And Helen is going to help me do it.
I may have lost my window of opportunity tonight, but if I am Helen’s fixer, working this case, finding this bomb-maker, I will have another. And when I have her, and an audience to boot, I will carry her home to Troy.
Helen’s path takes her past me, her eyes on me as if she is riveted.
She stops her guards with a hand, and then pulls off the flower that was pinned to her gown. Despite the bomb, despite the hard landing on the marble beneath my body, it is perfectly unruffled.
A poppy, the flower of remembrance.
Kore had said she would grow them for the lost girls of Troy. It was the last thing she told me as I dragged her out of the rubble, the last thing she told me as the last breath left her body, soot still in her hairand ash dusting her skin. It was the closest thing to goodbye I ever had from Troy.
En morte libertas,Kore had whispered in my ear before the end. It was the words engraved above the door to the group home, a building that had once been a church. In death, liberty. We had joked about it, when we had all lived there together. When we had alllived.
Now, Helen leans close, presses the flower into my calloused palm, her thumb brushing my hand.
And then she is gone, and I am left with a poppy in my fist, glass embedded in my skin and hair, and Thea’s warning thundering in the back of my head.
Helen is dangerous.
Oh, and she is. Whiskey and vanilla. Poppies and blood and rain.
But it is already too late for me.
“Fixer,” Zarek calls me over to him now.
I step forward as the guards guide other party guests away for questioning.
Once we are out of the ballroom—up the stairs, down a long corridor—he pauses in front of his office. “What use are you to me?” he asks.
“You want me to find you a queen,” I answer.
