Page 47 of We Are the Match
I take one smooth wrist and bind it to my bedpost, and then the other.
Helen is trembling, perfect legs spread.
I splay my hand out over one ample leg, slide my fingers up her thigh until I am just a breath away from her clit.
She moans, catching her breath with a sharp little sound that nearly derails me. She is slick with moisture already, waiting for me.
“Helen.”
“Paris?”
“I’ll see you when I get back.”
“What?” Helen’s face shifts from eager and embarrassed to confused to furious. “You’re—oh, no the fuck you arenot.”
It is the first curse that I have heard slip past her lips, but I grin, shrugging on my jacket. “Happy to stay and play another time,” I tell her, tugging open my window.
“I will have you killed,” she snarls, tugging at the restraints. “Paris. Paris, listen to me. I will—”
“You didn’t say ‘red,’” I tell her, and then I vault through the open window, leaving the little goddess herself writhing in my bed, frustrated as much with the absence of my fingers inside her as she is with my trickery.
The car I hired is waiting in the alley, out of sight of Tommy, who presumably is still outside my apartment door.
The walls are thin; it will not take him too long to realize the thumping and screaming coming from my bed are not as pleasant as Helen had anticipated. If he does not—well.
Then she can lie there, wishing I was on top of her, doing as I pleased, and learn towaitfor once. If I have read her correctly, it willmake her come harder later, waiting at the edge of pleasure and pain for so long only increasing her enjoyment.
We pull up outside of Hana’s mansion about twenty minutes later.
Hana’s largest mansion is on her own private island due west of this one, but she spends most of her time here since the escalation between Zarek and Troy. It cannot be a carefree existence here, away from the home she built herself, near the man she cannot fully trust.
She walks a knife’s edge in her position in Zarek’s world, and if she has in fact positioned herself in my way, I intend to topple her off it.
Two of Hana’s guards join me at the gate where my hired car has parked, flanking me as if I am being led to an execution.
Hana’s manor is sugar-white, modernist simplicity contrasting dramatically with the pen of peacocks north of the house. It is her signature—the peacocks, the white cliffside manor, the cascading turquoise pools on the west side. Peacocks and pools and bloodied fragments of bodies mailed to family members.
I press my own injured hand to my chest. It aches. It aches. It aches.
We walk through an entryway guarded by two more men. Hana waits for us, a woman on each side of her. She is known for this, too—the two women who remain by her side, guards, confidantes, lovers.
“Fixer,” she greets me coolly. “Helen told meshewould be visiting, not sending her investigator to interrogate me.”
“Hana,” I say. “Helen sends her regards.”
Of course Hana is suspicious. I was not a fixer until the engagement-party bomb, and it was only Thea’s word and Helen’s choice that made me one at all. But there is another story I can sell: one that begins and ends with Helen.
Hana arches one perfectly threaded eyebrow. “What do you want?”
“To hire you,” I say.
When Hana smiles, it is a deadly thing.
“Do you, then?” she asks. “Come in, Paris of the island.”
I follow her and her attendants down a long hallway to the back terrace, which overlooks the three cascading pools.
“Let us discuss, then,” Hana says gently. She gestures to the lounge chairs beside the pool and sits before I do. She is wearing some loose silk thing that opens to smooth calves and bare feet. She lounges back as if she is used to being this: magnetic, powerful, wanted.
