Twenty-Six
The next night, Juliette was buried deep inside her head.
All those times when she had brushed Walter Dexter o, she could have been gathering information instead. Now it would appear suspicious if she tried sidling back into his good graces. Perhaps this was why people were warned not to burn their bridges, even if it was a bridge leading to a no-good merchant.
Juliette stabbed her chopsticks down angrily. Suspicious or not, she needed to get back in contact with Walter Dexter without arousing distrust. And in brainstorming how to do so, no matter which path she went down, all roads seemed to lead back to his son, Paul Dexter.
She wanted to strangle herself at the thought.
Perhaps I do not have to hunt him down, Juliette thought weakly. Perhaps I am only chasing ghosts. Who is to say he will even know anything?
But she had to try. Everything in this whole bizarre aair was circumstantial.
Just because Walter Dexter was supplying the Larkspur didn’t mean he knew anything more about the Larkspur’s identity and location than they did. Just because the Larkspur was making a vaccine didn’t mean he could lead them to a cure for this wretched madness.
Equally, it also meant that the Larkspur could know, and so might Walter
Dexter.
Dang it.
“Where are you tonight?”
At Rosalind’s sharp summons, Juliette looked up from her food, stopping herself just a moment before her chopsticks mindlessly closed on air.
“Right here,” she said, frowning when Rosalind pulled a face that said she didn’t believe her.
“Really?” Rosalind gestured across the table with her chin. “Why’d you ignore Mr. Ping when he asked for your opinion on the worker strikes, then?”
Juliette’s attention shot to Mr. Ping, a member of her father’s inner circle who used to like asking about her studies whenever he saw her. If she recalled correctly, a favorite topic of his was astrology; he always had something to suggest about the alignment of the Western zodiacs, and Juliette—even at fteen —always had a quip to re back about fate working through science and statistics instead. Right now he was pouting on the other side of the circular table, looking especially wounded. Juliette winced.
“It’s been a long day.”
“Indeed,” Kathleen muttered in agreement from Rosalind’s other side, massaging the bridge of her nose.
The racket of their private room was loud enough to compete with the rest of the restaurant outside. Lord Cai was in the seat beside her, but these dinners were not opportunities for father-daughter discussions. Her father was always too occupied with other conversation to utter a single word to her, and her mother was taking charge of the second table in the room, leading the conversation there. This wasn’t the setting for personal conversations. This was prime time for members of the Scarlet Gang’s inner circle to jostle and brag and drink to the edge of death against one another to win favors.
Tyler was usually one of the loudest people at these tables. Today, however, he was o chasing rent money instead, as he had been for the past few days.
While Juliette was put in charge of the madness, Tyler was running her heiress roles in her place, and he reveled in them. Juliette stiened each time she heard him yelling through the house, gathering his entourage so they could set out— and it was happening often. It seemed like every minute had a new dodger, a new account going into the red. Tyler would wave his gun and threaten store owners and house tenants until they coughed up the necessary amount, until the Scarlets had made back what they were owed. It was hypocritical for Juliette to be looking down on Tyler for simply doing what was technically her job, she knew, but performing such a job in this climate made her uneasy. People were
not refusing to pay now because they wished to rebel; they were simply not making enough income because all their customers were dying.
Juliette sighed, twiddling her chopsticks. The food spun before them on the glass turntable, presenting roasted ducks and rice cakes and fried noodles without pause. Meanwhile, Juliette was mechanically picking up servings from the center and bringing them to her plate, putting food in her mouth without really tasting it. It was a shame, really. One glance at the decadent greens of the vegetables, at the gleam of the scaled sh, at the glistening oils dripping o the meat was enough to water the mouths of anyone.
Except Juliette had zoned out yet again. Realizing that she was raising the ashtray to her mouth instead of her ceramic teacup, she shook herself back to reality and caught the very last syllable coming out of Rosalind’s mouth—not nearly enough to determine any of what her cousin had said, but just enough to know that it had been a question and something needing a worthwhile answer out of Juliette instead of a smile and a generic, inquisitive noise.
“I’m sorry, what?” Juliette said. “You were talking, weren’t you? I’m sorry, I’m terrible—”
And she was about to be even more terrible because she would never know what Rosalind had asked. At that moment, her father was clearing his throat, and the two tables in the private room fell silent immediately. Lord Cai rose, his hands clasped behind his rigid back.
“I hope everyone is well,” her father said. “There is something I must address tonight.”
Some gut feeling in Juliette tightened. She braced.
“Undeniable proof has come to my attention today that there is a spy in the Scarlet Gang.”
Utter quiet sank into the room—not an absence of sound, but a presence in itself, like an invisible, heavy blanket had been settled over all their shoulders.
Even the servers stopped—one boy who had been pouring tea froze midmovement.
Juliette only blinked. She exchanged a glance with Rosalind. It was almost common knowledge that there were spies in the Scarlet Gang. How could there not be? The Scarlets certainly had people among the common ranks of the
White Flowers. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to consider the White Flowers had invaded their messengers, especially given how often their people got the
jump on the Scarlet Gang.
Lord Cai continued.
“There is a spy in the Scarlet Gang who has been invited into this room.”
For a short, horric second, Juliette felt a pang of fear that her father was referring to her. Could he have found out about her association with the White Flowers—with Roma Montagov—and taken it the wrong way?
Impossible, she thought, clenching her sts beneath the table. She hadn’t given away any information. Surely something had to have happened to damage their business to elicit a declaration like this from her father.
She was right.
“Today three important potential clients pulled out of their planned partnerships with us.” Juliette’s father was holding himself with the air of exhaustion, as if he was sick and tired of battling nervous clientele, but Juliette saw through the guise. Her eyes skipped over him and traced the tense lines of her mother’s sti shoulders across the room. They were furious. They had been betrayed.
“They knew of our pricing before it had even been proposed,” Lord Cai continued. “They went to the White Flowers instead.”
Doubtlessly after the White Flowers had approached them with lower prices.
And how could a spy know of such protected information unless they were in the inner circle? This wasn’t the work of a messenger who had vague ideas regarding drop-o locations. This was the very core of Scarlet business, and it had sprung a leak.
“I know all your backgrounds,” Lord Cai went on. “I know you are all born and bred of Shanghai. Your blood runs thousands of years back to ancestors who link us together. If there is a traitor here, you have not been turned by true loyalty or anything of that caliber, but rather by the promise of money, or glory, or false love, or merely by the thrill of playing spy. But I assure you…” He settled back into his seat and reached for the teapot. He relled his ceramic cup, his hand completely steady as the leaves overowed to the very, very brim, spilling onto the red tablecloth and staining it until the darkness looked like a bloom of
blood. If he poured any longer, Juliette feared the hot tea would spill down the tablecloth and burn her legs. “When I uncover who you are, the consequences by my hand will be far greater than what the White Flowers may do upon the notication that you will no longer act the traitor.”
To Juliette’s relief, Lord Cai nally set the pot down just before the overspill reached the edge of the table. Her father was smiling, but his eyes, despite the aged crinkle of crow’s feet, stayed as blank as an executioner’s. In this moment, Lord Cai didn’t choose verbal words to deliver his message. He let his expression speak for him.
There was no doubt which parent Juliette had received her monstrous smile from.
“Please,” Lord Cai said, when nobody moved after the close of his threat.
“Let us continue eating.”
Slowly the powerful men and the wives who whispered into their ears picked up their chopsticks again. Juliette couldn’t quite sit still anymore. She leaned toward her father and whispered that she had to run to the washroom. When Lord Cai nodded, Juliette rose, making for the door.
Outside the Scarlet Gang’s private room, Juliette leaned against the cold wall, taking a second to catch her breath. She saw the other patrons of the restaurant to her left, where the volume was at a roar—a collective eort of dierent small tables each ghting to be heard over the others. To her right, there were separate doorways leading to the kitchen and the washrooms. With a sigh, Juliette marched into the washroom.
“Calm yourself,” she told herself, leaning her head against the large metal sink. She drooped her neck, breathing deeply.
What would her father say if he knew that she was working with Roma Montagov? Would he see it the way she did, that giving up this one point of pride could help all their people if they managed to stop the madness? Or would he get stuck on the very core of Juliette’s betrayal: that she had had unlimited chances to shoot Roma in revenge for all the blood his hands had spilled, and hadn’t?
Juliette pulled her chin up, facing the distorted bronze mirror before her. All she saw was a stranger.
Perhaps she was in over her head. Perhaps the correct course of action was to break o any alliance with Roma Montagov and go to her own people instead, to gure out a way to corner Walter Dexter with brute manpower and make him talk— A scream pierced her ear. Juliette startled, registered it as coming from the main restaurant.
She barged out of the washroom. In seconds, she had hurried to the source of the scream, panting for breath as she searched for victims. She found only one man collapsed on the ground. Her eyes landed on him in the same second that his hands launched around his neck.
But nobody went forward to help him. Even as he tore into his throat, littering chunks of skin outward along a small radius and eventually stilling into death, the people of the restaurant continued on. Only one elderly lady at the back waved down a waiter to clean the scene. Some others had hardly inched, acting as if they had not noticed, as if not acknowledging death would oend it enough to have it go away.
Civilians were ripping out their own throats and the people of this city had become so desensitized that they were content to continue their dinner like it was a regular Tuesday. Juliette supposed it was. If this continued, it would be the norm until the whole city collapsed. It was only a matter of time until every small establishment in Shanghai emptied out, either because their customers had succumbed to the madness or because others wished not to attend places where infection was likely. A matter of time until Scarlet-assisted businesses ate through their savings and could no longer make rent even despite Tyler’s threats, until large restaurants of this size crumbled too. There were red roses sprouting forward on every second door along Scarlet territory. Warnings upon warnings, but what good were warnings in the face of madness?
“Hey,” Juliette snapped when the waiter crouched near the dead man.
“Don’t touch him.” Her tone scared the waiter enough to send him scrambling back. “Put a tablecloth over the body and call a doctor.”
Nothing was a guarantee. She needed Roma’s help to x this city. But she also needed to stop sitting around and making excuses.
She needed to weasel her way beside Paul Dexter.
At this hour it was hard to nd the line in the horizon where the waters ended and land began, where the Huangpu River bled into the bank on the other side.
When Benedikt was sitting by the water’s edge, looking out into the night, it was easy to forget the swirling concoction of red and gold and smoke and laughter that existed in the city behind him. It was easy to believe that this was all there was: an unshaped land, blotted with the faintest dots of glitter from the other
bank.
“I thought I would nd you here.”
Benedikt turned at the voice, letting his leg swing over the boardwalk. The light that framed Marshall stung at Benedikt’s unadjusted eyes when he looked
upon him.
“It is not like I go anywhere else.”
Marshall shoved his hands into his pockets. He was dressed nicely in a Western suit tonight, which was rare but not unusual, not if Lord Montagov had just sent him somewhere on an errand.
“Do you know how long the Huangpu River is? You’re picky, Ben. I don’t think I’ve ever found you in the same spot twice.”
Beneath them, the river seemed to rock in response. It knew that it was being
gossiped about.
“Did something happen?” Benedikt asked.
“Were you expecting something to happen?” Marshall replied, coming to sit
beside him.
“Something is always happening.”
Marshall pursed his lips. He thought for a second. “No, nothing happened,” he nally said. “When I left him, Roma was drafting a reply to a message from Juliette. He’s been at it for three hours. I think he’s going to pull a muscle.”
Roma did nothing half-heartedly. Whenever he visited Alisa’s bedside, he would stay for almost half the day, his other tasks be damned. The only reason Lord Montagov allowed such inactivity from him was because he knew Roma would enact his other tasks with his full attention eventually, as soon as he left the hospital.
“Better to pull a muscle than to pull out his own throat,” Benedikt muttered.
He stopped. “I don’t trust her.”
“Juliette?”
Benedikt nodded.
“Of course you don’t,” Marshall said. “You shouldn’t. It doesn’t mean she’s not useful. It doesn’t mean you have to dislike her.” He gestured toward the alleyway. “Can we go home now?”
Benedikt sighed, but he was already getting up, dusting o his hands. “You could have gone home on your own, Mars.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Benedikt would never understand how often Marshall needed to be surrounded by people. Marshall was allergic to lonesomeness—he had once genuinely developed a rash because he sat down in his room and forbade himself from leaving until he balanced an account book. Benedikt was the opposite.
People made him sticky. People made him think about his words twice as hard and sweat when he didn’t pick them right.
“I don’t suppose you’re in the mood to stop by a casino rst?” Marshall asked when they started to walk, grinning. “I heard there’s—”
Midspeech, Marshall suddenly halted in his steps, throwing an arm out to snag Benedikt back. Benedikt needed a few seconds to see why they had stopped.
He needed a few more to truly comprehend what he was seeing.
A shadow—stretching on the pavement in front of them. They were still midway inside this alleyway, too deep inside to look past the tall buildings on either side and determine what was making the looming shadow. The streetlamp was not far; the outline shining down was stark and well dened, leaving no mistake for the sight of horns, for limbs that moved with a pained stagger, for a size that was incomprehensible for anything natural.
Chudovishche. Monster. The same one that all of Shanghai had been seeing,
lurking in the city’s corners.
“Good God,” Benedikt muttered.
The shadow was moving toward them, toward their very alleyway.
“Hide!”
“Hide?” Marshall hissed in echo. “You want me to magically shrink myself?”
Indeed, the alleyway was too thin to oer a viable hiding spot. But there was a wide blue tarp lying atop the discarded wooden boxes. With no time to give instruction, Benedikt grabbed the tarp and pushed Marshall down roughly, shushing him when Marshall winced, and folded himself down too, until they were curled up alongside the boxes and hidden under the thin sheet.
Something heavy passed through the alley. It sounded eortful, like feet that did not quite come down right, like nostrils that were too thin to pass breath, so only a wheeze could come out.
Then a rough splash of water rang into the night. Droplets came down onto the river surface as if it had started raining only in one section of the sky.
“What was that?” Marshall hissed. “Did it jump into the water?”
Benedikt grabbed a corner of the tarp, slowly inching his head out into the open. Marshall gripped his shoulder and tried to do the same, until both of them were peering out from their hiding place, squinting into the dark, trying to get a look at the river beating on at the other end of the alleyway.
A shape was oating in the water. Under the moonlight, it was hard to catch much except the glint of what could have been the spine, rows of protrusions that were distorting and changing and… Benedikt swore, pushing Marshall down. “Hide, hide, hide!”
A burst of movement erupted from the water—from the monster. Miniature dots—spitting into the air, barely visible until they landed on the boardwalk, barely visible until they skittered forward under the moonlight, looking like a moving carpet spreading into the alleyway.
Marshall yanked the tarp up and Benedikt slammed his foot down on the edge of it, pressing the tarp hard into the ground lest the insects crawl through.
There was the sound of skittering. The sound of a thousand little legs brushing up against rough gravel, dispersing into the city.
Silence. A long minute passed. The silence only continued.
“I think they’re gone,” Benedikt whispered. “Mars?”
Marshall made a choking noise.
“Marshall!”
Benedikt moved fast enough to disrupt the air around him. He placed his hands on both sides of Marshall’s face, squeezing hard to demand Marshall’s
attention and sanity, squeezing hard in case he needed to stop him from clawing himself to death.
But instead of falling to madness, Marshall snorted. A beat later an amused
laugh escaped. “Ben, I’m only kidding.”
Benedikt stared at Marshall.
“Mudak,” he hissed angrily. When he took his hands back, he had to resist the urge to hit Marshall. “What’s wrong with you? Why would you joke about such a matter?”
Marshall appeared confused now, like he didn’t understand the fury being thrown in his direction. “They hadn’t crawled upon us,” he said slowly. “Why would you take me seriously?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Benedikt snapped. “You don’t joke about that, Marshall.
I will not lose you!”
Marshall blinked. He tilted his head curiously, in the same way he usually did when he was trying to predict Benedikt’s next move during a sparring match. In a true match, Benedikt had always been better at predicting Marshall’s lazy feigns, tracking Marshall’s guesswork and acting the opposite.
But here, while they sat nose to nose, he would never have expected Marshall to reach out and touch his cheek—the brush of a nger feather-soft, as though to test whether Benedikt was really there.
Benedikt jerked away. He tore the tarp o them, getting to his feet in a whirlwind of motion.
“I need to tell Roma what we just saw,” he snapped. “I’ll see you at home.”
He hurried o before Marshall could follow.
Roma nally sent his letter of reply ve hours after he started writing it. Once he had proofread it a tenth time, he wasn’t entirely sure anymore whether he had spelled his own name correctly.
“Should I have included my patronymic?” he muttered to himself now, ipping to the next page of his book without taking in any of the words. “Is that strange?”
The whole thing was too strange. Four years ago, he had sent Juliette so many love letters that when he sat down to write this letter—to agree that they should gather as much information as possible from their separate sources on Walter Dexter, before meeting in Great World tomorrow—his immediate reaction upon scribing “Dear Juliette” was to make a comparison of her hair to a raven.
Roma sighed, then put the book down on his chest, closing his eyes. He was already lying on his bed. He gured he may as well take a nap until it was time for him to go sticking his nose into the White Flower factories. Someone there had to have information on Walter Dexter’s ongoings.
But the moment he started dozing, there was a heavy thudding on his
bedroom door.
Roma groaned. “What is it?”
His door opened. Benedikt came barreling in. “Do you have a moment?”
“You’re interrupting my quality time with Eugene Onegin, but that’s quite all right.” Roma removed his book from his chest and set it down on his blanket.
“He’s unnecessarily pretentious anyway.”
“The monster. The insects. They’re one and the same.”
Roma bolted up. He demanded, “Say again?”
Benedikt took a seat at his cousin’s desk, his anxiety releasing through the rapid tapping of his ngers. Roma, on the other hand, had scrambled up and started to pace the entirety of his bedroom. There was too much tension building up between his bones.
“The insects come from the monster,” Benedikt said in a rush. “We saw it. We saw it leap in the water and then…” He mimed an explosion outward. “The nonsense all makes sense now. Those who say that sightings of the monster create the madness are correct, just not in the way they think. The monster makes the insects. The insects make the madness.”
Roma was suddenly very short of breath. Not in panic, but in understanding.
As if he had been presented with a gift box of information, disassembled in little pieces, and if he didn’t put it together quickly enough, the gift would be taken away.
“This is colossal,” Roma said, forcing himself to go slowly. “If we trust Lourens when he says these insects operate identically to one another, if we
assume they are all being controlled by one entity, and that one entity is in fact the monster…” Roma stopped pacing. He almost dropped to his knees. The monster was real. Real. And it wasn’t that he hadn’t believed the sightings prior to this moment, but he’d accepted them the way he accepted the foreigners in the concessions—as something of an inconvenience but not his biggest threat.
The sightings were outside his eld of concern, secondary to the madness. But now… “If we kill the monster, we kill each and every one of these peculiar insects in Shanghai. If we kill the monster, we stop the madness.”
Then the insects embedded in Alisa would die. Then she would no longer be under the clutches of the madness. Then she could wake up again. It was as good as a cure.
Benedikt thinned his lips. “You say that as if it will be easy. You didn’t see it.”
Roma paused in his pacing. “Well—what did you see?”
A loaded quiet set into the room. Benedikt seemed to consider his answer. He tapped his knuckles against the desk a few times, then did it again for good measure. Finally, he gave his head a minuscule shake.
“You’ve heard the stories,” Benedikt replied tightly. “They’re not so far o from the truth. I wouldn’t worry about its appearance yet. Before we can even consider killing it, how do we nd it again?”
Roma resumed his pacing. “Marshall said the Communists saw it coming from Zhang Gutai’s apartment.”
If Roma had been paying close enough attention, he would have seen his cousin’s expression suddenly crumple—not in a grimace or a sneer but rather a ash of pain. It was fortunate that all Montagovs knew how to switch to a blank stare in the blink of an eye. By the time Roma glanced over, Benedikt had resumed a neutral expression, waiting for his cousin to continue.
“I need you and Marshall to stake out Zhang Gutai’s apartment,” Roma decided. The plan was coming together while he talked, each piece slotting in mere moments after the one before had clicked. “Watch for any appearance of chudovishche. Conrm for me that Zhang Gutai is guilty. If you see the monster appear with your own two eyes, then we know he is controlling it to spread
madness across Shanghai. Then we know how to nd the monster to kill it: by nding Zhang Gutai.”
This time Benedikt did grimace plainly. “You wish for me simply to watch?
That sounds… tedious.”
“I would worry for your safety if it were exciting work. The more boring, the better o you are.”
Benedikt shook his head. “You bored us enough searching for a live victim of the madness, and look where that got us,” he said. “Why can’t you and Juliette do it? You’re already on the investigation. I have my own life to tend to too, you know.”
Roma narrowed his eyes. Benedikt crossed his arms. Is there something about this assignment that is too much of an ask? Roma wondered. What is his resistance to it? It is merely another chance to goof off with Marshall, which he does on a daily basis anyway.
“I won’t waste our collaboration with Juliette on stalking Zhang Gutai,”
Roma answered, sounding oended at the notion.
“I thought this monster was our concern, not the Larkspur.”
“I know that,” Roma shot back. He was bristling, unable to hold the sharpness from his tone. Alisa’s life was a stake—he did not have the energy to debate such petty matters. “But we cannot be certain Zhang Gutai is truly linked to the monster until we see something. Until then we need an alternate plan for answers on the monster and its madness. Until then we need to get to the bottom of this Larkspur gure so we can gather why he knows what he knows and use it to get back to the monster.”
But Benedikt was still insistent on digging his foot in. “You cannot stalk Zhang Gutai after you nd the Larkspur? Obviously he is linked with him in some fashion if you found correspondences between them.”
“Benedikt,” Roma said rmly. “It was only one correspondence from the Larkspur’s end.” He shook his head. His cousin was sidetracking him. “Look— you and Marshall have to do it because we don’t know how long it could take for the monster to make an appearance.”
“Can’t you just tell a lower-ranked gangster to keep an eye on him?”
“Benedikt.”
“And truly, you only need one person on this task—”
“Are you,” Roma interrupted, his tone suddenly cold, “a White Flower or not?”
That shut him up. Benedikt clamped his lips together, then said, “Of course.”
“So stop arguing against my command.” Roma placed his hands behind his back. “Is that all?”
Benedikt stood. He made a mock bow, his mouth twisted sourly. “Yes, Cousin,” he said. “I’ll leave you to your heir duties now. Make sure not to overly exert yourself.” A gust of wind followed his fast escape. The slam of the door echoed loudly enough to shake the house.
Heir duties. What a jokester. Benedikt knew full and well that Roma could either be the heir or be a ghost. Benedikt might have been one of the only people who actually understood that Roma did not ght so hard to remain heir because he enjoyed the power but because it was the only place he could control his personal safety. If the heavens opened and oered Roma a little villa in the outskirts of the country, where he could move himself and his loved ones out to live a life in obscurity, he would choose it immediately.
Benedikt’s dig rolled right o Roma’s shoulders. His cousin could complain all he liked and take his anger out on Roma, but he was too logical to dismiss the task outright. He would do it and complain like hell about it, then shut up when it mattered. Besides, Benedikt could not grumble for long. Whatever had knotted his intestines in such a state was bound to loosen soon, and then he would forget why he threw such a t.
Roma sighed and opped back onto his bed.
He had always known that sitting at the top came with its prickles and thorns.
But in this city, void of any alternative path, at least this was better than not being heir at all.
Later that night, a knock came down on Kathleen’s door, startling her from her reading. She was snuggled into her blankets already, half considering feigning
sleep so she would not need to get up, put her pendant on, and answer the door, when the door simply opened on its own.
“Thank you for waiting on my response,” she droned, eyeing Rosalind as she came in.
“You weren’t going to open it,” her sister replied knowingly.
Kathleen grimaced, closing the magazine she was reading. She supposed this season’s latest shoe designs could wait. “I might have been asleep.”
Rosalind looked up. She pointed at the small chandelier, then at the three golden lamps scattered around the room. “You sleep with the lights on?”
“Pft. Maybe.”
With a roll of her eyes, Rosalind sat down at the foot of the bed. She seemed to gaze at nothing for a long while, before drawing her legs up to her chest and resting her face delicately on the at surface of her knees.
Kathleen frowned. “Ça va?”
“Ça va.” Rosalind sighed. “Lord Cai scared me tonight.”
“Me too.” It was a mighty big claim to insist a spy had made its way into the Scarlet inner circle. The circle was only so big. “We have enough trouble with people dying. This is going to divide even further.”
Rosalind made a noise—it could have been one of agreement; it could have been nothing but a need to clear her throat. Another few seconds passed by.
Then she asked: “You don’t think it’s Juliette, do you?”
Kathleen’s eyes widened. “No!” she exclaimed. “Why would you even think that?”
Rosalind thinned her lips. “I’m just thinking out loud. You’ve heard the same
rumors as I have.”
“Juliette would never.”
The air was getting a little thick. Kathleen hadn’t expected this, hadn’t expected a wary silence to follow when she wanted agreement instead.
“You can’t be too trusting all the time.”
“I’m not too trusting,” Kathleen snapped, prickled now.
“Oh, really?” Rosalind shot back. The volume of their voices was growing.
“What is this quick need for defense, then? I was just throwing the possibility
out there and you’re acting like I’m biting your head o—”
“Talk is dangerous,” Kathleen cut in. “You know this. You know what a few thoughtless words can do—”
“Who cares what talk can do! She’s Juliette!”
Kathleen jerked against her nest of blankets, shocked. Her ears were ringing, like her sister’s outburst had been an explosion rather than an exclamation.
Though they were both close to Juliette, Rosalind’s relationship to their cousin was dierent from hers. Rosalind and Juliette were too similar. They both coveted the leading role, the right to have the ultimate decision. When they clashed, only one could be right.
But… this wasn’t a clash. This was just… “God, I’m sorry,” Rosalind said suddenly, her voice softening. “I don’t—I’m sorry. I love Juliette. You know I do. I’m just… I’m scared, okay? And we don’t have the same safety she does. Lord Cai is going to stop at nothing to nd out who’s acting the traitor, and you know he’ll suspect outsiders like us rst.”
Kathleen stiened. “We are hardly outsiders.”
“But we are not Cais, at the end of the day.”
Much as Kathleen hated it, her sister was right. It mattered little that they were more closely related to the beating core of the Cais than the other second, third, fourth cousins. So long as their last name was dierent, there would always be that doubt in the family over whether Rosalind and Kathleen truly belonged here. They came from Lady Cai’s side—the side that had been brought into this house rather than the side that had been raised in it for generations.
“I guess we need to be careful, then,” Kathleen mumbled. “Make sure we have no reason to be accused.”
People like Tyler would not have to worry. Even if they were all just as related, he bore the Cai name. Anything he did, anything he achieved was something wonderful reecting back on the family, on the generations of ancestors who had built them from the ground up. Anything Kathleen and Rosalind were a part of reected back to the Langs instead, and Kathleen knew absolutely nothing about that side of her family history, short of the grandmother she visited once a year.
“Yeah,” Rosalind whispered. She sighed, scrubbing her forehead. “Okay, I should go. I’m sorry for yelling.” She hopped o the bed. “Get some sleep.
Bonne nuit.”
“Good night,” Kathleen echoed. The door had already closed. When she lay back down and picked up her magazine again, she could no longer return her
attention to the shoes.
You’ve heard the same rumors as I have.
“Wait,” Kathleen whispered aloud. “What rumors?”
