Roma nodded.
That was that. They didn’t speak while Juliette put everything into the box again, her fingers working nimbly. Roma was somber, his eyes fixed to a random point on the wall. She figured that he couldn’t wait to get out of here, to stretch the distance between their bodies as far as possible and pretend the other didn’t exist—at least until the next corpse of the blood feud got thrown over the territory lines.
Juliette pushed the box back in and found her hands to be trembling. She scrunched them into fists, squeezing as hard as she could manage when she stood and met Roma’s gaze.
“After you,” he said, gesturing to the door.
Four years. It should have been enough. As the seasons blew by and all this time crawled forward, he should have become a stranger. He should have grown to smile differently, as Rosalind had, or walk differently, as Kathleen did. He should have turned more brash, like Tyler, or even adopted a wearier air, like Juliette’s own mother. Only he looked at her now and all he had become was… older. He looked at her and Juliette still saw the exact same eyes wearing the exact same stare—unreadable unless he let her through, unshakable unless he allowed himself to let go.
Roma Montagov had not changed. The Roma who had loved her. The Roma who had betrayed her.
Juliette forced herself to release her fists, her fingers aching from the tension she had squeezed into them. With the briefest nod in Roma’s direction, allowing him to follow her back out, she reached for the door and waved him through, shutting the morgue after herself with a heavy finality and opening her mouth to bid Roma a cold, firm farewell.
Only before she even had the chance to speak, she was interrupted by absolute, world-ending pandemonium within the hospital. At the far end of the corridor, doctors and nurses were wheeling gurneys, screaming at one another for an update on a situation or the location of a free room. Roma and Juliette ran forward immediately, returning to the lobby of the hospital. They were already expecting tragedy, but somehow, what they found was even worse.
The floor was slick with crimson. The air was heavy.
Everywhere they looked: dying Scarlet Gang members, gushing blood from their throats and screeching in agony. There had to be twenty, thirty, forty, either dying or already dead, either motionless or presently still trying to dig their fingers into their own veins.
“Oh God,” Roma whispered. “It’s started.”
Nine
When I peeked into his room, he was sleeping so soundly that I was a little afraid he had died in the night,” Marshall said, nudging the dead man with his foot. “I think he was faking it.”
Benedikt rolled his eyes, then swatted Marshall’s foot away from the corpse. “Could you give Roma some credit?”
“I think Roma is a pathological liar,” Marshall replied, shrugging. “He merely did not want to come out with us
to look at dead bodies.”
Daylight had broken only an hour ago, but the streets were already roaring with activity. The sound of waves crashing onto the nearby boardwalk was barely audible from this alleyway, not with the chatter streaming in from the inner city. The early-morning glow encased the cold streets like an aura. Steam at the ports and the smoke from the factories pumped steadily upward, thick, sooty, and heavy.
“Oh, hush,” Benedikt said. “You’re distracting me from said task of inspecting dead bodies.” Frowning deeply, he was kneeling over the corpse that Marshall had nudged into the wall. Again, Benedikt and Marshall had been assigned cleanup duty, which not only encompassed the cleanup of the bloody corpses, but also the cleanup of the municipal officers involved, paying off any and every legal force that tried to install themselves upon these dead gangsters.
“Distracting you?” Marshall dropped to a squat so that he was level with Benedikt. “If that is so, you should thank me for relieving the morbidity.”
“I would thank you if you helped me out,” Benedikt muttered. “We need these men identified before noon. At this rate, the only thing we will have identified is the number of bodies here—” He rolled his eyes when Marshall looked around and started counting. “Six, Mars.”
“Six,” Marshall repeated. “Six dead bodies. Six-digit contracts. Six moons circling the world.” Marshall adored the sound of his own voice. In any circumstance where there was silence, he took it upon himself as a favor to the world to fill it.
“Don’t start—”
Benedikt’s protest went unheard.
“Shall I compare him to a winter’s night?” Marshall proclaimed. “More breathtaking and more rugged: tempest breezes do tremble with less might—”
“You saw a stranger for two seconds on the street,” Benedikt interrupted dully. “Please calm down.”
“With eyes like deadly nightshade, lips like fresh fruit. A freckle atop his left cheek like”—Marshall paused, then suddenly shot to his feet—“like this strangely shaped spot on the ground.”
Benedikt stopped short, frowning. He stood too, squinting at the culpable object on the ground. It was much more than just a strangely shaped spot.
“It’s another insect.”
Marshall lifted a leg onto a jutting brick in the wall. “Oh, please no.”
Between the cracks in the pavement, a black speck dotted the cement, ordinary upon a mere, cursory glance. But just as an artist could pick out one accidental jerk of the paintbrush amid a smorgasbord of intentional slashes, the moment Benedikt’s eye landed on the speck, a shudder swept down his spine and told him that the canvas of the world had made a mistake. This creature wasn’t supposed to be here.