Page 40 of We Are the Match
I wish it was just me and Paris, and no one else on the whole godforsaken island.
I wish she belonged to me.
“Is it not enough?” I ask her. “That I have hired you? That I will give you whatever you want in exchange for helping me escape?”
Paris stares at me. “It will never be enough,” she says, so softly I almost miss it.
“Paris,” I whisper.
“Helen,” she repeats. “What do youwant?”
But how can I answer her, when I don’t quite know myself? When I am not sure, at the end of this, what will be left of me? And how can I do this—kiss her and know she will be expendable, if she steps too far into my father’s sights? That no matter what happens to her, I will put my own freedom first?
Paris stands, drawing back. “When you finally have the stones to say it,” she tells me. “You tell me, Princess.”
And then she leaves me there, windswept and breathless, and descends to face god.
Chapter 13
Paris
Zarek is seated in his office when Tommy and I arrive, his hands steepled, his eyes distant as if he is deep in thought.
He raises an eyebrow when I enter. “You’re late,” he says.
I have to hold back the growl in my throat. Something woke in me on the roof as I kissed Helen, something rough and raw and ambitious. She will be mine, wrapped in silk and vengeance. I want towin. I want this whole goddamn house.
He slams a hand down onto the table when I say nothing.
I do not flinch. The crash of his palm against the solid wood is a practiced move, the power, the violence, the noise. I will not let the power slide back into his hands. I will not.
“Do you have a name for me?”
Behind me, Tommy stands squarely between Zarek’s personal guards. None of them move.
“I have a theory,” I answer. “Helen and—”
“You come into my office with no leads to share,” Zarek cuts me off. “Speaking of my daughter by her first name? Who gave you theright?”
“Helen did,” I answer.
There is silence, stark, white, measureless silence, the kind before a storm strikes the rock, the kind of silence you find in the burned-out husk of what was once a home. A violent, living kind of silence.
“She has asked to work with you,” Zarek says, his voice quiet, measured, endlessly cold.
More specifically, she asked me to answer toher, not to her father. But Zarek doesn’t need to know that.
“She did.” Zarek sits back in his chair, eyes never leaving mine. “Give me the information you have gathered, and you will be paid and sent on your way. I have no further use of you.”
“If you have no further use of me, you will throw my body out with your guard from last night,” I say. “And I have already agreed to see this investigation to its completion. I’ll keep any location or lead I might have until I finish my investigation. You will have your results, Zarek. But I will not die for it.”
Zarek’s pupils expand until black nearly fills his eyes. “Everyone else out,” he says softly. “Not you, Tommy. You stay. You, Kaleb—send for my daughter. I want her to see this.”
Tommy makes a noise, low in his throat. “Sir,” he says quietly.
Zarek’s gaze locks on Tommy. “Is there something you want to say to me?”
Tommy clears his throat. “She may be ... upset.”
