Page 5 of We Are the Match
Her head snaps up. “Happy?” she repeats.
“Yes.” I am shivering in the gown, goose bumps crawling up my skin. But Erin cannot answer me. I should already know that; Idoalready know that.
I hold the power in the room. Iamthe power, wrapped in silk and glittering. Smooth skin, soft hair, clothes no one else on this island could ever afford. Even now, when I am no longer a bomber, no longer laying charges beside my mother or recklessly sneaking out at night to blow something up just for fun—even now I am too dangerous to be honest with.
“Of course I am happy, Helen,” she tells me, in that same changeless, smooth tone, and then it is time.
Erin opens the door, and I step through, take Tommy’s waiting arm to keep from falling.
I am no longer here nor there. I am in my body, just muted, feeling the solid weight of his arm, even smelling the subtle scent of cologne, but the pressure, the smell, it is as if neither sensation belongs to me.
And Helen—I, me, Helen, gone—I drift.
Perhaps I am just a collection of the spirits who died here.
My mother, the rest of the guards I had grown up with, the maids, the cooking staff, the doorman. They died here, and my father rebuilt when he should have left the ashes to rest.
My mother would have called this notion a foolish dream, but—but my mother is dead.
Tommy releases me before we reach the double doors to the staircase, releases me because the guests assembled below cannot seeme leaning heavily on the arm of a guard. My father runs guns and topples elected leaders and still deals in the explosives my mother and I were so viciously good at. Their daughter cannot look as if she is about to collapse. Not in any version of this world.
“You gonna be okay on those stairs, k—ma’am?”
Tommy had almost saidkid, as he always used to call me, but there is another, newer guard flanking us, and the guards here would report each other—or kill each other—just for the chance at rising in my father’s ranks.
And Father has never liked the familiarity or the gentleness of Tommy’s words, never liked that Tommy could calm my fear as a child, that I would seek out Tommy and not him. That it was Tommy who had seen me as I was—small, seething, cruel—and tried to teach me gentleness when no one else could.
“Of course I’m all right,” I tell Tommy. My gaze skims past the other guard, who stares straight ahead, face impassive.
When I walk through the double doors onto the balcony above the ballroom, every head below turns.
It is to be expected, of course.
I am half god, half woman to them. Enough woman, always, to expect the gazes that rake down me, the hungry hands that graze me without permission on the rare occasions I pass through a crowd. Always, always enough woman.
Enough god, though, for men and women to worship whenever they see me.
Enough god. Enough woman.
And in all of it, I am always utterly alone.
My heels tap the pattern on marble floors.
Father looks up at me from the dais below, where he is elevated above the other guests—only two steps, a subtle but significant sign of the power he exerts here. I inherited his fair skin, but not his narrow green eyes, not his broad, tailored build. He is an impossible man to read, but he nods imperceptibly at me.
I have passed the test. I tilt my chin just high enough to be regal, but not high enough to be defiant. I have performed my part.
At least so far.
I am a shade of a daughter to him, just a piece on the chessboard.
So well trained now that I move without being commanded.
I take a step toward the staircase, and another. In the sea of color, of gowns and gold, one person stands out from all the others. A lean slip of a woman, dressed in black jeans, her shoulders square, her brown eyes fierce. She meets my eyes, and my heart catches. I descend.
There is silence, and beside the glittering, living souls who are here to celebrate stand the dead.
There is glass shattered across the floor, strewn in bloody fragments. My mother is there at the center, empty-eyed and bleeding. The soft clink of champagne glasses is the gentlest kind of violence.
