“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 first 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 flush 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 fill 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 floating 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 flower 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 fulfill 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 fingertips now could be attributed to nothing save the weakness of her own heart.
The taste of metal flooded 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 flaring 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 finally happened. He said he could launch a hit on you—”