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Marshall did not have the same control. Marshall Seo was a raging, two-ton explosive.
He had finally stopped with his fishy comparisons, at least, dropping to a sudden crouch by the water. Marshall always moved like this—like the world was on the verge of ending and he needed to jam as many movements in as possible. Ever since Marshall had been embroiled in a scandal involving another boy and a dark storage closet, he had learned to hit first and hit fast, countering the talk that followed him around with a Cheshire-cat grin on his face. If he was tougher, then he could not be beat down. If he was more vicious, then nobody could drop their judgment upon him without fearing a knife pressed to their throat.
“Roma.”
Benedikt waved his hand, and Roma strode over to his cousin, hoping that he had found something. After last night, the bodies had been removed and sent to the local hospital for storage, but the blood-splattered crime scene remained. Roma, Marshall, and Benedikt needed to put together why five of their men, a Scarlet, and a British police officer would tear out their own throats, only the crime scene was so sparse of clues that obtaining answers felt like a lost cause.
“What is it?” Roma asked. “Did you find something?”
Benedikt looked up. “No.”
Roma deflated.
“This is the second time we have searched the scene from corner to corner
,” Benedikt went on. “I think we’ve done all we can—there cannot be anything we have missed.”
But other than examining the crime scene, what else could they do to understand this madness? There was nobody to question, no witnesses to interrogate, no backstories to piece together. When there was no perpetrator to a crime, when the victims did such a terrible thing to themselves, how were answers supposed to be found?
Over by the water, Marshall sighed loudly in exasperation, resting his elbow on his knee, his head on his fist. “Did you hear about an alleged second incident last night?” he asked, switching to Chinese now. “There are whispers, but I received nothing conclusive.”
Roma pretended to find something of particular interest in the cracks along the ground. He couldn’t hold back his grimace when he remarked, “The whispers are true. I happened to be there.”
“Oh, excellent!” Marshall bolted upright, clapped his hands together. “Well, not quite excellent for the dead victim, but excellent! Let us go search the new scene instead and hope it will offer more information than this foul-smelling—”
“We cannot,” Roma cut in. “It occurred within Scarlet territory.”
Marshall stopped pumping his fists, disheartened. Benedikt, on the other hand, was watching his cousin curiously.
“And how did you happen to be on Scarlet territory?” he asked. Without bringing us, no less was the unspoken addition tacked to the end of his question.
“My father sent me to obtain answers from the Scarlets,” Roma replied. That was half a truth. Lord Montagov had indeed waved Roma off with the order to determine what the Scarlets knew. Walking up to the burlesque club had been Roma’s own doing.
Benedikt arched an eyebrow. “And did you obtain answers?”
“No.” Roma’s gaze wandered off. “Juliette knew nothing.”
A sudden bang echoed loudly into the relative calm of the waterfront. Benedikt had accidentally elbowed the crates in disbelief, sending the one at the top of the stack hurtling onto the ground and splintering into dozens of wooden slabs.
“Juliette?” Benedikt exclaimed.
“Juliette is back?” Marshall echoed.
Roma remained silent, his eyes still tracing the edge of the river. An ache was building in his head, a sharp tension that throbbed each time he probed into his memories. It hurt him just to say her name. Juliette.
This was where he had known her. As workers bustled back and forth with dirty rag cloths tucked in their pockets, grabbed at periodically to wipe away the grime that collected on their fingers, two heirs had hidden here in plain sight almost every day, laughing over a common game of marbles.
Roma forced away the images. His two friends didn’t know what had happened, but they knew something had. They knew that one day Roma had been trusted by his father as closely as one should expect from a son, and the next, regarded suspiciously as if Roma were the enemy. Roma remembered the stares, the glances exchanged between observers when Lord Montagov spoke over him, insulted him, smacked him over the head for the littlest infraction. All the White Flowers could sense the change, yet not a soul dared voice it aloud. It became something quietly accepted, something to wonder about but never discuss. Roma never brought it up, either. He was to accept this new strain, or risk shaking it even further upon confrontation. Four years had passed now on a careful tightrope. So long as he did not run any faster than what was asked of him, he would not lose his balance above the rest of the White Flowers.
“Juliette is back,” Roma confirmed quietly. His fists tightened. His throat constricted. He breathed in, barely able to exhale through the shudder that consumed his chest.
All the abominable stories he had heard, all the stories that blanketed Shanghai like a heavy mist of terror, injected directly into the hearts of those outside Scarlet protection—he had hoped them to be lies, hoped them to be nothing but propaganda that sought to poison the willpower of men who were out to harm Juliette Cai. But he had faced her last night for the first time in four years. He had looked into Juliette’s eyes and, in that instant, felt the truth of those stories as if a higher power had opened his head and nestled the thoughts neatly into his mind.
Killer. Violent. Ruthless. All those and more—that was who she was now.
And he mourned for her. He didn’t wish to, but he did—he ached with the knowledge that the softness of their youth was gone forever, that the Juliette he remembered was long dead. He ached even more to think that though he was the one who had dealt the killing blow, he had still dreamed of her in these four years, of the Juliette whose laughter had rung along the riverside. It was a haunting. He had buried Juliette like a corpse beneath the floorboards, content to live with the ghosts that whispered to him in his sleep. Seeing her again was like finding the corpse beneath the floorboards to not only have resurrected, but to be pointing a gun right at his head.
“Hey, what is this?”
