Page 74 of We Are the Match
Erin moves with more urgency than I have ever seen. She pauses at the door, something wild in her dark, ever-serene eyes. “You will do what you have to, Helen,” she says, but I can hear the question in her voice. “You will try.”
“To stop this?” I say. I could not stop my father’s carnage on Troy, child that I was—but perhaps I have a chance at stopping this one. “Yes. I will try.”
And so she goes to do as I have asked of her and—perhaps for the first time in years—I choose my own clothes, and I dress myself.
White jeans, torn at the knees, buried at the bottom of a drawer at the very back of one of my closets. A soft red top that hugs the rolls and curves of my soft, pale stomach beneath, with a bird taking flight across the front. Combat boots from the very back of my shoe closet. A black leather jacket to cover it all.
It feels like something Paris would wear to a party where cocktail gowns were expected, and the thought of her gives me strength.
I have always been dressing for war, but this time I am slipping into a different uniform.
I go to my father’s study. He is pacing at the windows, staring out over the sea.
“Helen.”
“Father.”
“Was it your fixer?”
I steady myself on his desk chair, my hands closing over it tightly. No.No.
He cannot possibly know—because if he does, Paris is already dead, andthatI cannot live with, no matter how many times I have tried to convince myself that I could. “No,” I tell him, with as much certainty in my tone as I can muster. “Why didn’t you send me along on the project this morning? I have asked you for a greater role. This would have been a chance to prove myself, and you wasted it on a man like Marcus.”
There was a time when I would have chosen the violence. Laid explosives myself. But pretending to care about my father’s business seems to be one of the only things currently keeping Paris alive—so I will do what I must.
He turns at last, raising an eyebrow when he sees what I am wearing. “You are dressing like her now?”
“I am dressing comfortably. And you didn’t answer my question,” I say, but what I mean isAm I already too late?and what does it say about me that I am more worried it is Paris he killed this morning, and not Altea’s entire household?
“I sent Tommy,” he says. He watches me carefully, searching for some reaction. “Helen, this kind of upheaval is a threat toourpower. Not theirs. When you rule, any war is a reason for the people who follow you to leave, or betray you, or questionwhyyou rule. You have always been impulsive—you have been kept out of the Family business for years because you couldn’t stop yourself from blowing up marinas when the whim took you, Helen. Is that what you’ve been doing this time? When your fixer was poking around, did she offend Altea enough for that bitch tofire upon me?”
I hang on to the back of his chair and let out my breath slowly. So not Paris.
Not yet.
“I’m not sure what Paris has to do with it,” I say. “Altea had the weapon, not my fixer.”
My father’s eyes are cold when they meet mine. “Maybe so. And maybe not. Either way, you have allowed her too close to you,” he says. “You have allowed her to mean too much to you, little girl, and that isalwaysdangerous.”
“I allow nothing,” I tell him coldly. My heartbeat is thundering in my chest, nearly drowning out my ability to hear my own words. “Paris is nothing to me.”
Paris is everything. Paris laughing on the open water. Paris with a blade to my throat. Paris’s hands—
“If that is true,” Zarek says. “Then finish this fling with her and let me take care of things.”
“Let me at least have until the marriage.” I try to make my words sound casual, careless, as if she is just a plaything and killing her too early would be an inconvenience, nothing more.
His eyes narrow. “That does little to convince me she means nothing to you,” he says. “If she does not matter, you can have a new toy before the wedding. Let this one go.”
“Then let it be Tommy,” I say, and I taste ash on my tongue as I say it. “Offer me that much, Father. I have asked for so little. A quick death for Paris.”
He nods, just once. “Very well.”
It is acknowledgment and dismissal, and I turn to go.
I stop at our private armory and gather a handgun and a few magazines, packing them in a holster beneath my jacket.
Erin is waiting for me at the garage.
