Page 31 of We Are the Match
I touch my fingertips against my wrist and then my throat, ever so lightly. Having Paris as my fixer—and my eventual liberator—is like trying to hold a flame in the palm of my hand.
Every inch of me is singed by her fingerprints.
Every inch of me demands more. But instead—
“Now.” Paris sets down her beer and leans forward, elbows on her knees as she looks at me. “Get the fuck out of my home, Princess.”
Chapter 9
Paris
The sight of Helen staring up at me from the floor of my apartment, lips parted, tugs at something relentless and wild in the pit of my chest. It leaves me breathless, long after she is gone from my room.
She will be mine.
Regardless of how much or how little Helen really told me, what I learned at the tip of my knife was enough.
After she leaves, I sit in the same spot on the floor of my apartment, staring after her, imagining the way the hollow of her throat felt against my palm. Her hair, wild around her shoulders, just brushing my arm. The curve of her body beneath clothes that are wet with rain, clinging to her and leaving nothing to the imagination.
I take the poppy and kneel near my bed, where I retrieve the box beneath it. This box represented an ending, once. Of Troy, of us.
And it is a beginning, now, of the plan that will end the people who hurt us.
Inside the box are keepsakes, of a sort. A shard of metal from the group home doors, part of it melted again to make the three rings I wear, part of it saved here in remembrance.
And then—
A handful of photographs—a woman with dark hair and a regal bearing leaving a bombed-out husk of a building on Troy. The same woman, over and over again throughout the years since the bombing, making a hideout out of my sisters’ tomb.
Because there is one more player in this fucking game, one that—as far as I can tell—none of them but me know about.
Lena, like me, did not die when she was meant to.
And if it was her supposed death that started the war that killed us, then Lena, like Zarek, is to blame for what happened to us that day.
Beside the warped metal and the stack of photographs I place one more token:
The poppy, a gift from the woman I am going to kill.
Act Two: And Burnt the Towers
Chapter 10
Helen
I wake early the next morning, head aching. Last night—grenade and storm and girl—feel like a hazy dream, but when I sit up, Erin is there, also looking the worse for wear.
“Are you all right?” I ask her.
She raises an eyebrow as if the question is unexpected. “I’m just fine,” she answers. “And yourself?”
I push myself up on the silk sheets and lean against a few of the pillows scattered around the bed. I must have tossed and turned last night, kicked wildly by the look of the tangled sheets and pillows. I must have dreamed, violently, but I can remember none of it. “Did I—how long have you been here?”
“A few hours, ma’am,” she says quietly. “I waited in the sitting room to avoid disturbing you. I called for fresh fruit when I heard you stirring.”
I am overwhelmed by curiosity, as always, to know what I had dreamed. I wake like this often, sheets and blankets and pillows tossed as if I have been fighting all night. And I can never, ever remember what I dreamed of.
“Did you ...?” I let my voice trail off. I have asked her that question before, if I have said anything in my dreams. “Did you hear me?”
