Page 79 of We Are the Match
“No,” she says. “No, listen to me. You were reckless and stupid, and you wanted revenge above everything else.”
“No,” I stop her. “No. Not just that.”
The silence between us is heavy and final. Helen is in all the spaces between us, dark eyes and deadly power. Her pinkie brushing mine and changing everything.
“You cannot be serious,” Thea says. “Paris? After all this time?”
I have wanted revenge.
I have carried my rage like a banner. I have kept anyone from loving me. Kept myself from loving in return. Until—
“Helen,” Thea breathes. “Does she—do you—”
“I wanted revenge,” I tell her finally. “I always have. You know that. I wanted them all to die. I wanted them all to lose everything. And then—then I met her, and then Istillwanted them to die, all of them but ... her.”
“So you kept going,” Thea says. “Because—”
“Because I didn’t care if it was the most reckless plan,” I whisper finally. “If it kept me at her side.”
“That’s not the only option you have. There’s the option where you run,” Thea tells me firmly. She opens a drawer at her bedside table. Inside are two passports and a small box. “I know you have a fail-safe. I’ve been working on one for Perce and me for years. So take Helen and run. Let her burn a thousand ships in your wake if they come for you. But get out of here, Troy, and have a shot at living. To do that you have to let go of that group home.”
I stiffen. “They died,” I snap at her. “Every last one.”
“Not every last one,” Thea says. “Not yet. But they will. And you and Helen will be used and used, and the Families will keep solidifying their power, and nothing you do will change that. So run while you can.”
“But how?” I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees as I look at her. “Thea, I—I don’t know if I can.”
But I know, now, that Ishould.
“Do you think you can convince her?” Thea asks, her expression shifting, the hard look in her face fading as she looks at me. “To go, and leave power behind?”
I am balancing on a knife’s edge. Revenge on one side. Life on the other. And Thea, the only real family I have left, is telling me go, go, go.Live.
“But Lena,” I say, meeting Thea’s dark eyes with mine. “She is building her empire there on ourgrave.”
Thea’s gaze flickers, and then she sighs deeply, as if she knows she has lost. “Not just Lena,” she says.
Again, my body is rooted in place. “You mean—”
Thea hesitates, and then nods. “Yes,” she says. “All of them. All three queens. They have been loyal to her all this time. Paris, I—”
But I am already pulling on jeans and my socks, I am already halfway gone, because if the queens are all using my home together—if they areallinvolved in building a war room on Kore’s grave—
Thea calls my name, and Perce, too, as he passes me, carrying tea in his gentle hands.
The knife tilts. I fall, again, toward vengeance.
The dead girls at Altea’s should have been protected—but I made choices, and they died.
And I know, even now, even with guilt clinging to me like a fine layer of ash, that I will make more choices like it before the end.
From the queen.
The girls of Troy are burning and burning and burning.
And this time it’s me who lit the match.
Chapter 28
