Page 53 of We Are the Match
Only Tommy knew that Marcus had visited my room. That I hadsentfor him.
“What is it you think you know?” I ask her.
She shrugs one shoulder. “Everyone looks at you like you’re this untouchable god,” she answers. “I saw it at the party. Milos looks at you like you’re a pretty toy he’s excited to have. But Marcus is the unstable one. The dangerous one. And he looks at you like—”
She stops abruptly, shaking her head.
“Marcus doesn’t trust me,” I tell Paris, debating for a moment if I should tell her about the visit I had with him. “He loves his brother. That’s all.”
“Hewantsyou,” Paris repeats with unarguable assurance. “And besides all that, he’s a good target. Milos wouldn’t be reckless with your alliance—but Marcus? He’d be reckless if it meant protecting his brother.”
She sounds so confident, almost as if she can relate to that particular kind of recklessness. That particular kind of violence.
“So you’re trying to frame him?”
“I’m trying to learn about him,” Paris corrects. She pulls a small golden locket from her pocket, holds it out for me to look at. “How well do you know Hana?”
Not well, if I am truthful.
She was my mother’s friend, once, and then she was my father’s.
But she has never been mine. I am held at a polite but immense distance, a smile and a kiss on my cheek when she sees me, but questions directed to my father, to others in the room, and never to me.
“She has been in this world since before the fall of Troy,” I tell Paris carefully.
If Paris really knows this world she is trying to belong to, she will understand what I am seeing: the loyalty of new blood, like Marcus and Milos, is easy to determine. There is only one power, now, to ally oneself with.
But old blood, like Hana? Anyone who worked in the smaller satellite organizations like Hana’s has loyalty that is muddy at best, mostly allied to Troy before its fall, now exclusively allied to my father. If you believe them, that is.
Paris holds the locket out to me. “I took this from her,” she says. “I did my research on her—on all of them. She’s always wearing it; it means something to her.”
“You . . . youtookit?”
“While she was kissing me,” Paris says, so casually I am not sure, at first, if I have heard her correctly.
And why doesthatmake me want to kill her more than tying me up and leaving me did?
I snatch the locket from her hand. “It doesn’t say anything.”
Heat has climbed my face, giving me away.
Paris grins and jumps to her feet, crossing the apartment in a few strides. She grabs a hammer from a drawer, then stalks back over, snatches the locket, and sets it on the floor. She hits it once with the hammer, warping the metal, and then peels the locket open.
“That mean anything to you?”
She slides the warped metal toward me.
Inside it is—not a picture, like I would have assumed.
No, engraved on the inside is a symbol I recognize.
It’s not Hana’s symbol—her house has a peacock on a white backdrop, Altea’s anAin red ink, Frona’s a pomegranate, my father’s an intertwined symbol ofZ & L, still representing his love for my mother.
But no, Hana’s locket has something else entirely, an old symbol that no longer represents any house in the Families.
It is simple, anLwith a snake curling itself around the letter.
When I look back at Paris, there is a darkness to her eyes that I cannot read, but recognition that tells me she knows, too:
