Page 25 of We Are the Match
When she moved into her place, a three-story, she rented with roommates, other girls who had aged out of the group home on Troy. Then she bought the house. Then she no longer needed roommates. Then those girls she grew up with became her partners or employees or faded away when her life intertwined more and more with the Families.
She has always been willing to leave the rest of us behind.
I am here often enough to have a key—courtesy of Perce, not Thea—so I let myself in the unguarded side door, and then slip down the hallway.
I shake rain from my coat onto the rug in her entryway. It’s pristine, new, like some of that handwoven shit you can buy from charities to support women’s small businesses. It’s a very Thea move. Beneath, the recently finished hardwood floor gleams.
She has money, and she wants everyone to know it as soon as they enter her house. Butnewmoney, too. She wants them to know that part. That she can be Family and not. That she can play at their level without belonging to them.
A click, and my breath catches at the sound of a safety sliding back.
Not a rifle, then. Just Thea and her handgun.
“Come out,” I call. “You aren’t happy to see me?”
She steps out from the doorway, gun leveled between my eyes. There is something akin to humor in her dark eyes, but the gun does not waver. “Why are you in my house, Troy?” she asks, as if we had not been tangled up in her king bed more evenings than not.
“Thought I still had an open invitation to spend the night.” I shake more water off my jacket, this time above the newly finished wood floor. It pools at my feet. I do not break eye contact with Thea. “Why are you awake in the middle of the night, Thea?”
Perce appears in the entryway behind her as she opens her mouth to speak. There are dark circles under his eyes and his curls are tangled, as if he has just gotten out of bed. “My love,” he says wearily. “Why are you threatening Paris?”
“She’s not,” I say.
“I’m not,” Thea says at the same time.
“What is the gun for then, my dear?” Perce asks patiently. “Is this some new foreplay I’m not familiar with?”
“Thea,” I say. “Let’s take a walk.”
“No,” she says. “Give me a reason not to throw you out of this house right now.”
Perce makes a noise in his throat. “Thea—”
“Enough,” she snaps. The gun has not moved.
I am close enough to smell Thea’s perfume, something like bergamot. That’s Thea, bergamot and bullets.
Not the perfume that I smelled at the mansion tonight, the one mingling with TNT. But I had to know. I had to be sure.
I stare down the barrel of her gun.
“Why are you here?” she demands again. “You’ve refused to work with me foryears. And one night at the big house, and you’re a fixer now?”
I bite my tongue. How do I snap back at someone who has saved my life, not once but twice now? She vouched for me tonight.
And worse, she has cared for me since I crawled out of the rubble of Troy.
“The explosive was not from you tonight,” I say.
Because if it had been—if she was vying for a new place within the Families, I am not sure what I would have done.
“A useless fact we all knew,” Thea says. “Not one you needed to break into my house to tell me. It was your terms when we all started fucking, wasn’t it, Troy? That we were nothing but what we are in bed? Not friends, not allies. So if you’re not here to fuck, why the hell are you in my house?”
“Zarek asked if you were one of the queens I should investigate,” I tell her.
The gun falters in her hands, just briefly. Just for a second. Just long enough.
She was not the bomb-maker, no.
