These Violent Delights (These Violent Delights 1)

Roma looked down into the gardens below. “You don’t have any pebbles.”

Juliette rubbed her eyes again, forcefully this time. Maybe if she rubbed hard enough, she would realize this was all a fever dream and she’d wake up peacefully alone in her room.

She removed her hand from her eyes. Roma was still there.

They really needed to upgrade their security.

“Roma Montagov, this is unacceptable,” Juliette declared tightly. This was all too reminiscent, too wistful, too much. “Leave before you get shot.”

Even with his face shrouded in the shadows, Roma managed to convey a frown that reached Juliette with maximum effect. He looked around, seeing no one in the gardens below him.

“Who will shoot me?”

“I’m going to shoot you,” Juliette snapped.

“No, you’re not. Open the door, dorogaya.”

Juliette jerked back, horrified not by the command, but by his term of endearment. With delay, Roma seemed to realize too what had slipped out, his eyes widening a fraction, but he didn’t fumble or take it back. He merely stared at her in wait, like he hadn’t just pulled out a relic from their past, one that they had smashed to pieces.

“The door stays closed,” Juliette said coldly. “What do you want?”

Roma hopped off the railing, his shoes landing on the balcony tiles with a soft sound. When he came up close against the glass, Juliette noted a deep scratch marring his jaw, and she wondered if he’d stumbled here right after a fight. It was almost enough to have her reach for her gun and really send him running, but then, quietly, Roma whispered, “I want to save my sister.”

Something inside of Juliette came loose. Her hard eyes softened the smallest of fractions.

“How is Alisa?” she asked.

“They’ve tied her up at the hospital like some asylum patient,” Roma replied. His eyes were focused on his hands. He kept flipping them over—palm, back, palm, back—searching for something that wasn’t there. “She tried to go for her throat again when she regained consciousness, so they’re injecting her with something to keep her asleep. They’re keeping her asleep until there’s some way to cure this madness.”

Roma looked up. There was a madness, a desperation, in his own eyes.

“I need your help, Juliette. All the trails from my end have gone cold. There’s nothing else I can chase, nowhere I can go, no one I can call. You, however—I know you know something.”

Juliette didn’t immediately respond. She stood there unmoving, wrestling with the pit in her stomach and realizing she was uncertain if this feeling was still hatred… or fear. Fear that if the madness went on, she too would find herself in Roma’s position, watching someone she loved die. Fear that by mere consideration of Roma in such a sympathetic manner, she had crossed the line.

The problem with hatred was that when the initial emotion weakened, the responses still remained. The clenched fists and hot veins, the blurred vision and quickened pulse. And in such remains, Juliette was not in control of what they might develop into.

Like yearning.

“You ask me for help,” Juliette said quietly, “and yet—how much blood is on your hands, Roma? In the time I was gone, how many of my people asked you for help, for mercy, right before you shot them?”

Roma’s eyes were wholly black under the moonlight. “I have nothing to say to that,” he answered. “The blood feud was the blood feud. This is something utterly new in itself. If we don’t help each other, we may both die out.”

“I am the one with information,” Juliette warned, her skin pricking uncomfortably. “Try to refrain from making sweeping generalizations about us both.”

“You have information, but I have the other half of the city,” Roma countered. “If you a

ct alone, that’s half of Shanghai you cannot work with. If I act alone, I cannot enter any Scarlet territory. Think, Juliette—when the madness is hitting us both, there is no telling in which territory the answers will be found.”

A chill swept through her room, bitter and cold and correct. Juliette tried to ignore it. She forced a laugh, the sound hard.

“As you’re proving right now, I don’t think a lack of permission is stopping you from prancing into my territory.”

“Juliette.” Roma pressed his hands against the glass. His pleading stare was utterly, utterly unguarded. “Please, she’s my sister.”

God—

Juliette had to look away. She couldn’t bear it. The heaviness twisting her heart was undeserved. Any vulnerability that Roma Montagov showed was an act, a carefully constructed facade he would bide his time with until the chance came to strike. She knew this.