Page 35 of We Are the Match
The corner of his mouth tips up like he’s fighting a grin. “Let’s go,” he says.
“Tommy,” I say. “Do you promise not to drive somewhere remote on this island, kill me, and dump my body off a cliff?”
He grins, though there is a shadow on his face. “You’ll be just fine, kid.”
Kid.
“You promise?” I hold out a pinkie finger. His pinkie is about three times as wide as mine.
I say it sarcastically, but the shadows deepen on his face, some emotion there I cannot read.
I follow Tommy down to the car, shrugging my hoodie up over my face as I go.
It is not a large island—about a twenty-minute drive from the southern edge, where I live, to the northern tip, where the mansion is. The warehouse–turned–apartment buildings are well behind us now, and we are passing mansions like Thea’s, three- and four-story homes set close together on the hills.
And then soon after, we pass mansions that belong to the higher-ups in the Families—sprawling, towering creations that attempt to rival one another but cannot come close to the mansion still ahead of us.
We pass a few layers of security—a lift bridge over the river that can be retracted to prevent any crossings, two gates, and a guard tower. Tommy shows ID at each one, until finally we’re parked in an underground garage. There are over a dozen vehicles, some nondescript limousines like the one we’re in, a few sports cars, a few black Suburbans.
I follow Tommy to an elevator, where he swipes his key to enter and then again when he chooses floor seven. A family of two, and it has seven fucking floors.
How many of us could the resources spent on this home have cared for? How many of us would have never gone hungry?
When the elevator stops, Tommy scans his key card again and we step out onto an open-air rooftop garden. Helen is dressed in some soft, flowing rose-gold thing that flows over curving hips, thighs. I see a flash of calf beneath the folds of the dress. She wears a soft white wrap, hung loosely over bare shoulders. Her dark hair is pinned at the nape of her neck, a few stray curls spilling over her shoulders.
The wind whispers, ruffling Helen’s hair and exposing one bare shoulder.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
She holds out a smooth, immaculate hand to me. “Paris,” she says, as if she wasn’t practically begging on the floor of my messy apartment, just last night, breathless and bright-eyed and desperate. “I hoped you would come.”
Beyond her, there is nothing but sea and wind and sky, and I cannot breathe.
“I—” I stare at her and clear my throat. “Who can refuse a summons from a god? Especially one that can tattle to her daddy on you.”
A shadow falls across her perfect face. A brief second where I pulled a thread of power back into my hands.
“Tommy, leave us,” she says gently, and her voice is music, the gentle lilt, the notes hitting just right. The desperate woman in my apartment last night is gone, replaced with the tightly controlled, regal woman before me.
“Helen,” he says firmly. “There must be no threat. No matter who it is from.”
She rolls her eyes. “Then I won’t invite Marcus again, or Milos. This woman won’t hurt me. And I need to talk to her alone.”
This woman.
Even girls from Troy can be something, I want to tell Helen. Even girls from group homes can bring gods to their knees.
And something that even guards like Tommy don’t know is that women like me?
We always have another knife.
It is hidden lower in my boot, a small thing, barely the length of my little finger.
Tommy steps back into the elevator, and then it is just Helen and me, windswept. Breathless.
Alone.
“I am sorry about that,” she says.
