These Violent Delights (These Violent Delights 1)

Juliette made a frustrated noise at the back of her throat. “Don’t say it like that. Don’t be so loud.”

Marshall gestured around, as if to demand, Who is listening? Nobody. Nobody was listening. Nobody would hear this confession of Juliette’s except a dead man walking who could take it nowhere.

“And you love him enough to have him hate you.”

“He should hate me,” Juliette replied tiredly. “I killed his mother.”

“Personally?” Marshall asked, knowing the answer.

“No.” Juliette looked down at her hands. There was a scratch at the side of her wrist. She had no idea how it got there. “But I gave them her location with malice. I may as well have held the knife.”

Marshall stared forward at her, unspeaking for a long while. There was pity in his gaze, but Juliette found that she did not quite mind. Pity from Marshall Seo did not feel prickly. It felt a little warm, a little kind.

“Before you leave me again,” Marshall said after a pause, “in such a rush as you did earlier while I was still bleeding through my bandages, I have one request.”

It might have been her imagination, but she thought his voice grew a little fainter. Juliette frowned.

“Go on.”

Marshall Seo’s gaze flicked away. “Benedikt.”

“You can’t,” Juliette replied immediately, knowing what the request was without need for elaboration. It hadn’t been her imagination after all. “Just one more person in on the secret makes this a hundred times more dangerous.”

Juliette imagined Tyler finding out that Marshall was alive. She imagined him going on a crusade to figure out where Marshall was, hurting everyone who might hold the location. She didn’t think Benedikt liked her very much, but she would not let Tyler hurt him.

“I may have to hide for months,” Marshall said, his arms coming around his middle. “He will have to believe I am dead for months.”

Juliette’s heart clenched. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But as a favor to me, please, let Benedikt Montagov believe it. He must.”

The floorboards groaned. The walls and ceiling blocks creaked, shifting with the howl of the wind outside. A small eternity passed with Juliette’s breath held before Marshall finally nodded, his lips thinned.

“It won’t be long,” Juliette assured him, pushing the basket of food forward. “I promise.”

Marshall nodded again, this one to show his acknowledgment of her promise. When she left him, shutting the door after her with a quiet click, Marshall was staring pensively out the window, squinting through a crack in the weakly boarded up glass.

Juliette returned to the streets, to the hustle and the bustle and the loud, loud anarchy. The sky was dark and the day had been long, but the city central had already returned to business per usual, to vendors selling their wares and merchants screaming their prices, like a monster had not torn a warpath through it hours ago.

And to gangsters. Gangsters, lurking in each corner, their eyes pinned to Juliette as she walked by.

“Miss Cai! Miss Cai!”

With a frown, Juliette paused and turned, fi

nding a messenger running toward her. He appeared vaguely familiar as he approached, but it was not until he handed her a note with Kathleen’s handwriting that she recognized him as one of the men she had sent to the Bund.

“Did you find what I asked for?” Juliette asked.

“There was no giant insect,” the messenger reported. “But Miss Kathleen said to get you this as fast as possible.”

Frowning, Juliette took the note and flipped it open. It was not a note from Kathleen, but rather what appeared to be the copy of a letter, marked as sent by Paul Dexter and addressed somewhere Juliette did not immediately recognize, identified only within the French Concession.

Juliette read the one-lined scrawl, squinting to decipher the spindly, long handwriting perfectly fitting for Paul Dexter.

She almost wished she hadn’t.

In the event of my death, release them all.

The cold sweat that swept through her body was immediate. From her fingertips to her spine, she became possessed by a bone-deep terror, turning her wholly numb.