Page 37 of We Are the Match
“Where do we begin, Paris of Troy?” Helen says quietly, the wind almost stealing her words from me.
I have to lean close to catch them, so close I can see one tiny, perfect freckle on her flawless skin.
“Three queens to choose from,” I tell her. “One of them is testing your father, maybe even telling him a war is coming. It’s a threat, or a promise. It’s either a bold queen showing her hand too early, or a calculating one trying to unsettle him at just the right time.”
Whichever queen is moving now, will it draw Lena out of the shadows sooner than she had planned? The one thing I remember of Lena during her rule was that like Zarek, she was infamous for her brutal response to any threat to Helen.
My plan had felt perfect: revealing Lena before she was ready for the world to see her, breaking Zarek with the depth of the betrayal. Sowhile I do not need Helen to survive this in the end, I do need her to survive long enough for me to destroy this Family.
“Last time,” Helen tells me quietly. “My father ignored the warnings until it was too late. This time we can’t let that happen.”
“And then your father obliterated an entire Family,” I say. “Yes, we all know what happened.”
I was there.
I was there when he dropped his bombs on my island. I was there when the doors melted shut, sealing my sisters inside. I was there, holding Kore’s hand while she choked on ash and soot.
Helen swallows and looks away from me. “I know my father was involved in the violence against Troy,” she says. “I remember—well, I remember his face when he found my mother. She was so unrecognizable they had to identify her with herteeth.”
Again, we skirt toward Helen’s grief, this loss that sits at the center of her, and if I gave myself time to think about that look in her too long, I might almost feel for her.
But still: plenty of the girls from the Troy group home were never identified at all, because no one cared enough.
I clench my jaw shut.
“Anyway,” Helen continues. “My father will take this threat seriously, but he also knows better than to move on the wrong queen. If you imply they are suspects, you will offend them. And you will destroy trade relationships that have taken years to solidify.”
“He’ll get less money,” I translate for her. “And if he gets less money, people die.”
Helen’s face is pale. “I have heard no one speak of my father as you do,” she says.
“Then you have been lied to all your life,” I tell her.
They could kill me for this.
And they will, when they learn I am not here to stop a war. I am here to push them over the edge of it.
“How will you do it?” she asks. “You know that discretion is paramount to the success of this investigation. How do you plan to find out more about each of the queens?”
“We start with Hana,” I tell her.
“Hana the horrible,” Helen says, and then claps a hand over her mouth in horror. She glances around, as if making sure she was not overheard.
The wind sweeps over us in a gust, tossing her curls off her shoulders. Her fingers ghost over the bracelet on her wrist, a thin band of metal devoid of decoration.
“You were wearing that last night.” I gesture to the bracelet.
She jumps, her hand covering the bracelet involuntarily. “Yes,” she says. “It was a gift. A message from my mother.”
“What does it say?” I set down my croissant, twisting one of my own rings around my middle finger. What kind of messages do gods leave their daughters? And will it be one more thing forcing me to confront the ways in which Helen and I are the same?
Helen hesitates. Then she tilts the bracelet so I can see the writing engraved on the inside.
Méchri thanátou.
Unto death.
“That’s not your Family’s slogan,” I say. “Not any of the Families that I’ve heard of.”
