Page 8 of We Are the Match
“Do you usually refuse to answer questions?” she asks me. “You are not one of us, but you answer questions just as vaguely as we do.”
The question is so unexpectedly blunt that I laugh.
“Do you usually demand answers?” I return. Helen laughs, too, and then leans back, surveying me carefully. “It’s my party,” she says after a beat. “Did you know that?”
“Everyone knows that, Princess,” I tell her.
Her eyes snap to mine, finally, a bolt of electricity straight to my spine.
Her eyes are dark brown, deep as the storm. There is something uncontained there, something almost feral. Perhaps this is the one thing she cannot disguise, cannot bury despite the years she must have spent learning to rule with poise and grace.
“Tonight, at the most opportune moment,” Helen says. Her fingers stray farther down the bar, closer to mine. “When the guests are full but not quite sated, and happy but not quite ecstatic.” She pauses, her eyes boring into mine. “We will give them an engagement they could never have anticipated.”
“Yours.” I stare at her soft lavender dress, at the curves of her filling it, at the smooth line of her legs beneath it. There will be pictures of her in this dress, looking perfect, smiling as she receives a ring that could buy whole islands or set a whole group home free from the poverty that dogged them.
“Don’t you want to know who the lucky man is?” she asks. Her head tilts, but again her eyes have left me. “Before anyone else?”
It is maddening to look at her and not be seen by her. I saw that look in her eyes when she met my gaze earlier, a mesmerizing violence, and I crave another glimpse of it. Andthatis the danger of Helen, after all, not the charm and poise and power. But the raw, vicious look in her eyes that makes me want to look again and again and again.
“No,” I tell her, just to see if I can bring the flash of her eyes down upon me again like vengeance. “He’s not important, is he? Whatever alliance you make, you are doing it to shift more power into your own hands.”
“You speak as ifIwas making the choices.” Her laugh is soft, a careful, practiced thing.
I want to rip a real reaction from her throat. I want somethingrealfrom her. She owes me that much, after so many of us died because of her family and the power she upholds. “The power in this room? It’s your father’s. And it’s yours.”
How can she not know this, swathed in silk and here to make someone else’s party her own? How can she not, when both her parents are tangled up in the war that destroyed my sisters? I shove my glass away from me, letting it tip over the edge of the bar top and shatter on the marble floor.
Behind me, Tommy surges forward.
He can see my violence.
They will kill me for it, too. Too soon, if I’m not careful.
But Helen waves him away. “You must be new to the game,” she tells me.
As if I have not been surviving her family’s games my whole life.
“And you are a fool if you think you have no power,” I tell her. “Youarethe power here. They bend to you. If you asked, this room would kneel for you.”
“You would not kneel,” Helen says. Her throat bobs, as if the breath is caught there.
My blade—her throat—I can hardly breathe. I am so, so close to her now.
I could do it here, instead of dragging her all the way to Troy. Set my knife just—there.
“Would you?” Helen’s chest heaves just slightly, the shallow rise and fall the only sign that she is as caught in this moment as I am.
“I kneel for no one,” I tell her.
Not since Troy.
Her cheeks are a soft pink, maybe from the whiskey, or maybe the opiate intoxicating her is something more—something strange and tenuous and unexpected.
I lean close to her. Take the drink from her hand, tip it back, and down it, grinning at her as I do. I can imagine, instead, Helen of the gods on her knees forme. Throat tipped up, eyes trained on me.Begging.
This time, Tommy ignores her hand wave and steps forward.
His hand is on his sidearm, the warning clear.
