Page 18 of We Are the Match
Zarek tilts his head, surveying me intently. Behind me, his guards step closer. “So find her.”
“Hana, Altea, Frona.” I pause, Thea’s name next on my lips—she is the fourth queen, after all, rising through the ranks like a meteor, and just as destructive. Loyalty stops me, as much as I have tried to cull personal loyalty and feelings over the years.
“Those three,” Zarek says. He is standing close to me, so close I can smell expensive cologne and the faint scent of woodsmoke. “And only those three.”
“Yes,” I say. Not because Thea is loyal to him—I am not even sure she is loyal tome, not even after all these years—but because she loves Perce.
“Tell me why those three.” He moves again, his steps quickening as he enters his office. “And why not Thea.”
Hana controls elected officials, swings local elections, and influences national ones. She has been gathering more connections, more power.
It was only a matter of time before she moved on Zarek.
Altea ran weapons for one of Zarek’s rivals before he decimated them in the last round of brutality. She runs weapons forhimnow, but it has always been an uneasy alliance.
Frona isthefixer, the one with a whole team of people like me.
They were all complicit in the war that killed us, even if only tangentially—though none of them matter as much as Zarek and Lena and Helen.
“Because Thea loves who she loves,” I tell Zarek. “Because she doesn’t want to find his head in a bakery box.”
“Then why those three? Are they not my loyal allies?” Sarcasm is thick in his voice.
“The three queens were never your first choice—not for connections, not for weapons, not for information and fixers,” I answer bluntly. “And you were never theirs.”
“Wasn’t I?” Zarek stops, turning to me so sharply he nearly elbows me in the face.
“No,” I say. “They saw you take Troy and knew they could be next or they could be yours. The question is—which of them has decided to move on you now?”
Red blooms in his face, but then he shakes his head. “I appreciate honesty,” he says finally. “But you would do well to remember yourplace.”
“Of course, sir,” I say, dipping my head in his direction.
The guards part for someone. Zarek raises an eyebrow at the commotion.
Helen’s new fiancé, Milos, stands behind me in the doorway, and behind him, his brother Marcus. Zarek nods to them but looks back at me.
“So,fixer, why would she sign the explosive, whoever she is?” Zarek asks me. “Why would she blow up my party and risk being caught or killed by her own bomb?”
I snort and then pretend to cough into my arm to cover it. It is unwise to let the gods know you are laughing at them, especially when you are in the belly of one’s mansion. “Of course she wants you to know who she is,” I say. “She wanted a spectacle, and she got one. Hel—your daughter salvaged it, so whoever sent the bomb will want a second chance. They want something you cannot walk away from.”
A decade of hating him, a decade of imagining revenge, and I am an expert at how someone would go about it. I am well versed in ripping power out of the hands of a man too used to having all of it. And I know exactly what someone who hates Zarek would want when formulating a plan to destroy him.
It is a question, now, of who thinks they can throw a grenade intomyplan for revenge, if they are working together, if we share the same hatred—and if I can use them to speed my own plan on its way.
Milos’s gaze lands on me squarely now.
“I have never heard of you,” Milos says coldly. “Until tonight. What are you to Helen?”
What am I to Helen? Is thatjealousyI hear in his voice?
I push the poppy deeper into my jacket pocket. “I am nothing to Helen. Just a body that stopped her from dying.”
They saw her rip the flower from her dress, press it into my palm, sweep away across the ballroom, away from all of us as if we were nothing. As iftheywere nothing, but not me. With me, she left the flower.
Marcus laughs. “We are all nothing to Helen,” he says. “Even you,fiancé.”
“Marcus.” Zarek’s voice is a whip.
