Page 77 of We Are the Match
That I have become apartof it, that I chose this and walked into it with my eyes wide open.
Still, I warned her so they wouldlive. So that innocent maids and doormen would not be slaughtered.
Perhaps that has always been the difference between me and these gods: if someone had given me warning on Troy, I would have spent my last breath getting every single one of us out of there.
I walk toward the house, empty now.
The hit team is long gone—Helen’s text said Zarek sent Marcus with two dozen men. I know enough of Marcus to know he wouldwantto be a part of something like this.
He wants what belongs to you.
I circle the house, stopping when I reach the terrace on the north side of the house. There are dead servant girls, bloodstained uniforms visible in the swirling red of the fountain. I stagger, my legs scarcely willing to hold me up in the face of such loss.
“I told you she was dangerous.”
I spin around. Thea stands at the north entrance to Altea’s ravaged house, her eyes narrow and furious and full of a wild grief that I feel like a blade between my ribs.
“She didn’t—” My voice catches strangely.
Because it wasn’t Helen who did this.
It was me.
“All because you wanted to fuck power.” Thea’s mouth twists. “You know, for all your talk about the Family not owning you, you ended up with them all the same.”
“Likeyoudidn’t,” I snap.
“Do you think I had achoice?” She throws the words at me across the bloodied ground between us. “Do you think any of the girls at Troy had a choice when the Families told us tocome?”
I stare at her. “You wanted—”
“Iwantednothing,” she snarls. “None of us did. It was no honor, like they told us it was to be chosen. They took the strong, they took the girls with an affinity for weapons and explosives.” She hesitates. “They took the beautiful.”
It was true.
“And now.Thesegirls,” she says softly, extending her hand toward the fountain. “Altea and I stood side by side and those girls—they shotthem, right there. We watched them die from the safety of her hidden office.” Thea’s eyes are haunted as she says it. “They were Troy girls.”
Girls who grew up with bars on the windows.
Girls who died in someone else’s war.
“They weremine,” Thea says fiercely.
Tears are hot on my cheeks before I realize they are there. “They wereours,” I say.
There are tears cutting lines down the sharp angles of her face, too, and she takes a step closer to me. “And do you know what else I saw from that office window?” she continues. “A girl on a motorcycle, trying to stop it. A woman in a black leather jacket, facing down a hit team. And I thought it was you at first, trying to save them. But it wasn’t, was it?”
My body stills.
Helen.
And then it is too much for me to bear. Too much. Wars and gods and a woman who will change everything.
“Why did you warn Altea?” Thea asks. “And why did you warn her toolate?”
Helen on that boat, accusing me of being just like her father.
My hand around her throat, because the only thing unforgivable wasthat.
