“I don’t know,” the Brit said quickly. His eyes swiveled from the door to her gun’s barrel and back to the door again. He was twenty paces away from the exit.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Roma demanded.
“Other merchants spread the word that there was money from the Larkspur for whoever killed Juliette Cai or Roma Montagov,” the man stammered. “We tried our hand at it. Please—come on, just let me go. It seemed too good to pass up, you know? We thought we would have enough trouble finding you separately, but then you showed up together. It’s not like we actually would have succeeded.…”
The man trailed off. By the widening of his eyes, it seemed that he was realizing what he held in his inventory. He knew. He knew that Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai were working together. He had seen their embrace. That gave him information to take to the Larkspur; that gave him power.
The man lunged for the door. Roma yelled out in warning—it was incomprehensible whether he was directing his shout at the Brit or at Juliette—and darted after the Brit furiously, one hand outstretched in a bid to grasp his collar and haul him back into the room like a stray dog.
By then Juliette had already pulled the trigger. The man dropped to the floor, slipping out of Roma’s grasp with a heavy finality.
Roma stared down at the dead man. For the briefest moment Juliette caught shock marred in his wide eyes, before he blinked once and shuttered it away.
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
Juliette stepped forward. There was a splotch of blood on Roma’s pale cheek, running an arch so that his cheekbone was stark in the dim bulb’s light.
“He would have killed us.”
“You know”—Roma dragged his eyes up from the body—“that he got pulled into this. He didn’t choose it like we did.”
Once upon a time, Roma and Juliette had come up with a list of rules that, if followed, would have made the city something tolerable. It wouldn’t make Shanghai kind, only salvageable, because that was the best they could do. Gangsters should only kill other gangsters. The only fair targets were those who chose the life they led, which, Juliette later realized, included the common workers—the maids, the chauffeurs, Nurse.
Fight dirty but fight bravely. Do not fight those who cannot understand what it means to fight.
Nurse had known exactly what working for the Scarlet Gang
entailed. This man had pulled at a hint of glitter in the ground expecting a nugget of gold and disturbed a hornet’s nest instead. They would leave him here, in a puddle of his own blood, and soon someone would come in and find him. The poor worker to make the discovery would call the police and the municipal forces would arrive with a weary sigh, looking upon the man with no more emotion than someone observing a dead wheat field—displeased with the general loss upon the world but overall void of any personal attachment.
By all their old rules, these men chasing after them should have been spared. But Juliette had lost those old rules the second she lost the old Roma. When conflict erupted, she thought about herself, her own safety—not that of the man waving a gun in her face.
But an agreement was still an agreement.
“Fine,” Juliette said shortly.
“Fine?” Roma echoed.
Without quite looking at him, Juliette pulled a silk handkerchief from her coat and passed it forward. “Fine,” she said again, as if he hadn’t heard her the first time. “You said to spare them, and though I agreed, I still went against it. That is my wrongdoing. While we keep working together, we listen to each other.”
Roma brought the handkerchief to his face slowly. He dabbed an inch away from where the splatter actually was, wiping at nothing except the brutal line of his jaw. Juliette thought he would be content with her poor attempt at an apology, would at least nod in satisfaction. Instead, his eyes only grew more distant.
“We used to be pretty good at that.”
A pit formed in Juliette’s stomach. “What?”
“Working together. Listening.” He had stopped wiping at his face. His hand merely hovered in the air, its task undetermined. “We used to be a team, Juliette.”
Juliette strode forward and yanked the silk from Roma’s hands. She was almost insulted that he was so aggressively bad at wiping up a simple blood splatter; in one furious swipe, she had stained the white of her silk with a deep red and his face was beautiful once more.
“None of it,” Juliette hissed, “was real.”
There was something awful about the shrinking distance between them—like the coiling of a spring, winding tighter and tighter. Any sudden movements were bound to end in disaster.
“Of course,” Roma said. His tone was dull. His eyes were electric, like he, too, was only remembering just now. “Forgive me for that particular oversight.”
A tense moment passed in stillness: the slow release of the spring back into its usual position. Juliette looked away first, moved her foot so it wouldn’t touch the puddle of blood growing upon the rotting wood floors. This was a city shrouded in blood. It was foolish to try changing it.
“It would appear that while we search for the Larkspur, the Larkspur looms closer to us,” she remarked, gesturing to the dead man.