Thirty
Juliette buried her hands deep in the rich soil. She pressed and melded, closing her ngers around the bits of mulch that lined her gardens.
She had been working on the ower beds at the front of her house since dawn, easing her pounding headache with sunshine and the sounds of nature. If the frown on her face was any indication, however, it wasn’t working. When she had gardened as a child, cleaning the soil beds with stfuls of dead petals clutched in her sts, it had meant that she was in a bad mood and that she was trying to work o her aggression without shooting her pistol. It was practically Scarlet urban legend: speak to Juliette when she had a plant in her hand and risk the consequences.
Nobody had tended to these gardens since Ali bled to death in them.
Juliette breathed out deeply. She unwrapped a small purple hyacinth, settling it neatly into the hole she had dug. Before the bulbous ower could misalign and tip over, Juliette pushed the soil back into the hole.
She wished she could ll herself up like this. She wished she could press mounds of rich soil into the gaps of her heart, occupying the space until owers could take root and grow roses. Maybe then she wouldn’t be hearing Roma’s voice in her head over and over again, taking up every inch of her thoughts.
Juliette’s knees were covered in little, scarred-over scratches. She had fallen a quarter of a mile away from Mantua, and stayed there with her palms grazing the gravel, her dress soaking up mud and rainwater. It had stung badly during the rest of her trek home, but the pain now was good. The coolness of the earth underneath her, the morning sun cutting a golden line down her face, the crisp
sharpness of the little rocks and twigs digging into her skin—it reminded her that she wasn’t untethering from space itself and oating up into the clouds.
It is all I can give you.
None of this made any sense. If Roma Montagov had not hated her all these years, then why pretend he did? If he had hated her all these years, then why say such things now—why pretend, with such agony in his words, that his betrayal had hurt him just as much as it had hurt her?
I had no choice.
Juliette gave a sudden scream, smashing her st into the soil. Two maids working nearby jumped and skittered away, but Juliette paid them no heed. For crying out loud, she had already done this four years ago. She had long ago drawn up two columns in her head: Roma’s actions and Roma’s words, utterly unable to pit them up against each other, unable to comprehend why—why—he would betray her when he said he loved her. Now she could not fathom him yet again, could not align the way he reached for her with the hate that he claimed to possess, could not understand the sadness in his eyes when he spoke of her being a new, cold Juliette he could not bear to see.
It is never as simple as one truth. Nothing ever is.
Juliette grabbed the shovel beside her, the anger in her veins raging to a crescendo. Planting owers was child’s play. She staggered to her feet and raised the shovel instead, smashing the lip of the metal hard into the plots she had just spent hours making beautiful. Again and again, her shovel sank into the ower beds until the owers were all shredded to pieces, sharp petals littering the black soil. Someone called her name from afar and that mere summoning incensed her even more, to the point where she turned around and made a new target out of the rst thing her eyes landed on: a thin tree that was twice as tall as she.
Juliette stormed toward the trunk. She raised the shovel, and thwacked, and
thwacked, and thwacked— “Juliette!”
The shovel snagged midmotion. When Juliette whirled around, she found Rosalind’s delicate hand and her manicured nails gripping the shovel hard, holding it back from another gouge upon the tree.
“What is wrong with you?” Rosalind hissed. “Why have you become unhinged?”
“Leave me be,” Juliette replied sharply. She tugged the shovel from her cousin’s hands and hurried inside the house, leaving a track of soil and the gardening materials in the foyer, hardly caring about the mess she made as she trekked up to her bedroom. There she found her most drab oversize coat and tugged it on, hiding her dress and hiding her face, covering every element that gave away her stature. Almost out of habit, she pulled the hood on too to cover her hair, but that was unnecessary; she hadn’t styled her signature nger waves.
Loose black locks of hair brushed her neck instead. Juliette touched a strand that sat above her ear and gave it a tug, as if to check if it was real.
She marched out of her house, walking with her eyes in front of her, checking her surroundings only once. Was she still being followed? She hardly cared. Not when her heart was pounding a war cry in her ears. Not when she could not stop clenching her sts, a desperate eort to distract her trembling ngers.
Juliette had always prided herself on her priorities. She knew how to sight what was important, like explorers knew how to sight the north star. Her city, her gang, her family. Her family, her gang, her city.
But could an explorer still nd the north star if the whole world turned upside down?
One ragged boot in front of the other, Juliette walked. At some point, she was passing through the Bund, weaving through the motor vehicles that pulled in and out of their parking spaces hazardously and merged onto the neatly pressed roads like a zip.
Dimly, Juliette wondered what it would be like to cease walking forward and err sideways instead, right down the wharves into the river. She could just keep going and drop straight into the water, becoming nothing more than another box of lost stock, another stray mark in the catalogs, another statistic of lost revenue.
Juliette moved on from the Bund, out of the International Settlement, and onto White Flower territory at last.
She pulled her hood higher. The action wasn’t warranted—it was far easier for her to blend into the streets here where the Montagovs reigned than it was
for Roma to sidle into her territory. Without Scarlet colors twined around her wrist or clipped into her hair, without any of her usual identiers, as far as any of the patrolling White Flowers knew, she was just another Chinese girl who
happened to live nearby.
“Oi!”
Juliette winced, angling her head down before the person she had accidentally shouldered could get a good look at her face.
“Sorry!” she called back. Just before she hurried around the corner, she thought she caught a glimpse of blond atop a pair of eyes staring curiously after her.
“The strangest thing happened,” Benedikt announced.
He dropped into the open seat, unwinding the scarf around his neck and setting it down on their small corner table. Marshall nodded in a gesture for Benedikt to go on, but Roma acted as if he hadn’t even heard his cousin. He was staring blankly at the other side of the restaurant, and—much to Benedikt’s concern—was looking like he hadn’t slept for days. Ever since Alisa became infected with the madness, the exhaustion on Roma’s face had been wearing deeper and deeper, but something about his expression now was… dierent. It seemed that not only had his body reached its breaking point, but his mind had too, teetering past the point of bouncing back and now merely sitting idle, in wait for something to shift it back into cognition.
Benedikt wondered if Roma had even gone home last night, given his cousin was wearing the same wrinkled white shirt as the previous day. He wondered if he should ask what was wrong, or if it was better to pretend that all was well and treat his cousin no dierently.
Afraid of the answers to the former, he chose the latter.
“I think I just saw Juliette Cai.”
Roma’s knee jerked up, colliding with the bottom of the table so roughly that the plate in front of Marshall almost slid o.
“Hey, watch it,” Marshall chided. He put his hands protectively around his slice of honey cake. “Just because your food hasn’t come yet doesn’t mean you
should ruin someone else’s.”
Roma ignored Marshall.
“What do you mean?” he demanded at Benedikt. “Are you certain it was her?”
“Calm down,” Benedikt replied. “She was minding her own business—”
Roma was already leaping out of his chair. By the time Benedikt had even registered what was happening in that sudden urry of motion, Roma was long gone, the doors of the restaurant swinging and swinging.
“What… was that?” Benedikt asked, stunned.
Marshall shrugged. He shoved a big spoonful of cake into his mouth. “You want cake?”
Meanwhile, Juliette had wandered deep into White Flower territory using only the basis of her memory, backtracking and doubling up on routes that she thought she remembered. Eventually, the streets started to bear some resemblance to the images she had in her head. Eventually, she found one very familiar alleyway and ducked in, lowering her head to pass through the collection of low-hanging laundry lines, wrinkling her nose against the damp smell in the air.
“Disgusting,” Juliette muttered, wiping away the drops of dirty laundry water that landed upon the back of her neck. Just as she paused, intending to ing away the water, she caught sight of a tall and imposing gure entering the other end of the alleyway.
All the muscles along her shoulders froze sti. Quickly, Juliette forced herself to scrunch her hand small, to continue strolling forward at an unsuspicious pace. Backing away now and running from the alleyway would immediately mark her as guilty, as a trespasser on enemy ground.
Fortunately, Dimitri Voronin didn’t seem to recognize her as he passed. He was busy muttering to himself, straightening the fabric of his sleeve cus.
He disappeared from the alley. Juliette emerged out the other side too, breathing a sigh of relief. She scanned the apartment complexes laid out before her, matching her memory to the changed sights. She had been here before, but
so much time had passed that the colors of the walls were dierent and the tiles
had faded.… “Are you out of your mind?”
Juliette gasped, barely registering Roma’s voice before he had looped an arm around her waist to drag her aside, hauling her into the alleyway by the apartment building. When Juliette struggled back onto her own feet, she barely stopped herself from stomping on Roma’s toes.
“I can walk, thank you,” she hissed.
“You seemed to be taking your sweet time lingering in full view of every single window in my house!” Roma hissed back. “They will kill you, Juliette. Do you consider us a joke?”
“What do you think?” Juliette shot back. “All my dead relatives would say
otherwise!”
They both fell silent.
“What are you doing here?” Roma asked quietly. His gaze was focused on a point just above her shoulder, refusing to make direct eye contact. But Juliette was looking right at him. She couldn’t stop looking. She looked at him and she wanted to burst with all that she wanted to say, all that she wanted to hear, all that she wanted to be rid of. Everything—everything—was tight: her lungs, her skin, her teeth. She was too big for her body, bound to erupt into pieces and become a segment of the natural world growing in the cement cracks.
“I’m here,” Juliette managed, “because I am sick to death of running away and remaining in ignorance. I want the truth.”
“I told you—”
“You cannot do this.” Juliette had started yelling. She had not intended to yell, but she was—four years of silence escaping all at once. “Don’t I deserve to know? Don’t I deserve at least a modicum of what the hell was going through your brain when you decided to tell your father exactly how to set an ambush on my—”
Juliette stopped midsentence, her eyebrows lifting so high they disappeared into her bangs. There was a blade held to her heart. Roma was holding a blade to her heart, his arm straight and long.
A beat passed. Juliette waited to see what he would do.
But Roma only shook his head. He suddenly felt so much like his old self again. Like the boy who had kissed her for the rst time on the rooftop of a jazz club. Like the boy who didn’t believe in violence, who swore he would rule his half of the city one day with fairness and justice.
“You’re not even afraid,” Roma breathed, his voice hitching, “and do you know why? Because you know I cannot push this knife in—you have always known, and even if you doubted my mercy upon returning, you discovered what the truth was pretty soon, didn’t you?”
The tip of the blade was ice-cold even through her dress, almost soothing against the hot ush emanating from her body.
“If you know that I will not be afraid,” Juliette asked, “then why hold your blade out?”
“Because this—” Roma closed his eyes. Tears. Tears were falling down his face. “This is why my betrayal was so terrible. Because you believed me incapable of hurting you, and yet I did.”
He pulled away then, removing the tip of the blade from her heart and letting the cold air rush to ll the space. Without warning, Roma turned and threw his knife; it sank to the hilt, the whole blade embedded into the opposite wall.
Juliette watched it all numbly, like she was some specter oating high above. She supposed she had expected this. Roma was right. She could not be afraid even when her life was in his hands. After all, she had been the one to walk her life into White Flower territory, to place it upon waiting palms.
“Then why?” Juliette asked. Her words came out a rasp. “Why did you do it?”
“It was a compromise.” Roma scrubbed at his face harshly. His eyes slid to the mouth of the alleyway, checking for threats, checking that they were uninterrupted, unwatched. “My father wanted me to kill you outright, and I refused.”
Juliette remembered the white ower lying on the path of her house, the note written from Lord Montagov. It had been dripping with mockery.
“Why not?”
A hard laugh. Roma shook his head. “Must you ask? I loved you.”
Juliette bit down on her tongue. There was that word again. Love. Loved. He spoke as though all that had happened between them was real up until push came to shove, and Juliette could not comprehend this, could hardly accept this when she had spent so long convincing herself that their whole past was a lie, nothing save a spectacular act on Roma’s part to fulll his ultimate deed.
She had to convince herself. How could she bear to think that he had loved her and yet destroyed her anyway? How could she bear to face the truth that she had loved him too, so deeply that remnants yet remained, and if it hadn’t been some grand master plan to sink his claws into her mind… then the pull in her ngertips now could be attributed to nothing save the weakness of her own heart.
The taste of metal ooded her mouth. With a wince of pain, Juliette eased her jaw loose, but she remained quiet still, the broken skin under her tongue throbbing.
“You can believe what you want to believe,” Roma went on, noting the look on her face. “But you wanted the truth, so here it is. My father found out, Juliette. Some spy reported to him that we were lovers, and to rid the Montagov name of the insult, he gave me a knife”—Roma pointed to the knife in the wall —“to sink into your heart.”
She remembered how deeply Roma had feared his own father, had feared the feats that the White Flowers were capable of. She remembered how Roma used to ponder day in and day out the ways he would change things when the White Flowers came under his hand. And she remembered her own fondness for such ambition, that spark of hope aring in her chest every time Roma said that the future was theirs, that the city would be theirs one day, united as one, as long as they had each other.
Juliette stared at the knife in the wall. She whispered, “But you didn’t.”
“I didn’t,” Roma echoed. “I told him I’d rather take my own life, and he threatened exactly that. My father has been waiting for me to screw up since I was born, and it nally happened. He said he could launch a hit on you—”
“He couldn’t have,” Juliette interrupted. “He doesn’t have the power—”
“You don’t know that!” Roma’s voice cracked, splitting apart into fragments.
He turned away again; he spoke while facing the mouth of the alleyway. “And I
didn’t know that, either. My father… It may not seem like it because he does not act on it often, but he has eyes everywhere. He has always had eyes everywhere. If he made up his mind to kill you as he promised, if he wanted to set the scene to look as if we had both killed each other in the middle of Shanghai and kick o the blood feud to new heights, then he could do it. I had no doubt.”
“We could have fought him.” Juliette did not know why she bothered oering solutions to a situation long passed. It was instinct at this point, a way of protecting herself from the possibility that Roma had—perhaps—made the correct decision. “Lord Montagov is still human. He could have taken a bullet to the head.”
Roma choked out another laugh, utterly, utterly devoid of humor. “I was fifteen, Juliette. I couldn’t even defend myself against Dimitri’s aggressive shoulder slaps. You think I could put a bullet through my father’s head?”
I could have done it, Juliette wanted to say. But she didn’t know if it was wishful thinking, if she would truly have been capable enough before anger turned her skin from re to hardened rock. Back then she had believed just as Roma did, believed that this divided city could be sewn back together. She believed it when they sat under the velvet night and looked out at the haze of lights in the distance, when Roma said he would defy everything, everything, even the stars, to change their fate in this city.
“Astra inclinant,” he would whisper into the wind, so heartachingly sincere even when quoting in Latin, “sed non obligant.”
The stars incline us, they do not bind us.
Juliette breathed in shallowly. She felt something inside her unravel.
“What happened?” she managed. “What happened to change his mind?”
Roma started rolling up his sleeves. He was looking for something to do with his hands, something to occupy his restless energy because he could not stand there as Juliette did—a soldier turned to stone.
“My father wanted you dead because he felt insulted. He wanted me dead because I dared rebel.” A long pause. “So I went to him and gave him a better plan. One that would cause more loss to the Scarlets. One that would put me back on his side.” And Roma nally glanced at Juliette again, nally looked her eye to eye. “It would hurt you more than death, but at least you would be alive.”
“You—” Juliette raised her hand, but she didn’t know what she was trying to do. She ended up pointing a nger at Roma instead, like this was nothing but a small scolding. “You—”
You didn’t have the right to make that choice.
But she couldn’t even articulate herself.
Roma reached out, smoothed a palm over her hand so she was making a st instead. His hands were steady. Juliette’s were shaking. Repenting.
“I can’t be sorry if you’re looking for an apology,” Roma whispered. “And… I suppose I am sorry that I am not more sorry. But given the choice between your life and your Scarlets…” Roma let go of her hand. “I chose you. Are you satised?”
Juliette squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t care anymore that that was dangerous, that she was breaking apart in the middle of White Flower territory.
She pressed her st to her forehead, feeling the sharpness of her rings dig into her skin, and breathed, “Indeed, I never shall be satised.”
He chose me. She had believed him callous, believed him to have performed the greatest possible betrayal when she had oered him love.
Instead, the truth was that he had gone against everything he stood for. He had stained his own hands with the lives of dozens of innocents, placed razor blades in his own heart just to keep Juliette alive and safe, far from the threats of his father. He hadn’t used the information he gleaned from his time with her as a tool of power. He had used it as a tool of weakness.
Juliette almost laughed out loud—in deliriousness, in sheer disbelief. This was what this city did to lovers. It tossed blame around like a slick coat of blood, mixing and merging with everything else until it had left its stain. This was why he hadn’t wanted to tell her. He’d known that she would reach this conclusion —this realization that, in a roundabout way, Nurse’s blood was now on her hands too. If Roma had not truly loved her, her life would have been the one the blood feud took instead—a simple, clean exchange.
She opened her eyes and looked to the skies. Gray, dreary skies of the rst day of October. Down here, in the shadows of the cold alleyway, she could remain a lurker in the dark, could reach out and brush away the teardrop hovering at Roma’s jaw and know that nobody could act a witness. She resisted. Somewhere
above, past those low clouds and brisk winds, the north star was spinning, spinning atop the world with no regard for anything else.
Her city, her gang, her family. Her family, her gang, her city.
“Very well.”
Roma blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
Juliette returned her hands to her sides, smoothing down her dress. She tried for a smile, but she was sure that she merely looked to be in pain.
“Very well,” she repeated. “We hardly have time to be wasting on our personal dramas, do we? Mystery solved.”
She walked over to the knife and pulled it out from the alleyway. It was beautiful. The handle was etched with a lily, the blade shiny, sharp, golden.
This city was on their shoulders. They could not collapse now, no matter how badly Juliette wanted to lie down in the grass and become still for the next millennia. And no matter how much it pained her, she glanced over her shoulder and looked to Roma, looked upon him right as he settled his mask back on, as he turned from mournful to cold once more.
You chose me four years ago. Would you choose me still? Would you choose this version of me—these sharp edges and hands far bloodier than yours?
Her city, her gang, her family. The better thing to do now would be to walk away, walk away from anything that would distract her from what was important. But she couldn’t. She… hoped. And hope was dangerous. Hope was the most vicious evil of them all, the thing that had managed to thrive in Pandora’s box among misery, and disease, and sadness—and what could endure alongside others with such teeth if it didn’t have ghastly claws of its own?
“We still have a monster to catch,” Juliette said rmly, even knowing, knowing better. “Chenghuangmiao is White Flower territory. Let’s go.”
She feared Roma would say no. That he would walk away even if she couldn’t. There were so many people bustling about Chenghuangmiao on the daily—Chinese or otherwise—that it would be impossible to keep the Scarlet Gang out. She did not need Roma’s help to nd the Larkspur at this stage. They did not have to keep cooperating. He knew this.
Roma’s eyes were blank. His posture was easy, spine straight.
“Let’s go,” he said.
