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“Juliette, come on!” Kathleen grabbed her wrist and hauled her back, hauled her to the side of the building once again, right before the doors burst open and those who were yet uninfected ran for safety. Her cousin must have intended for them to keep moving, but Juliette couldn’t do it. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that the White Flowers were looking at her, were watching to see how she would react, and still she could not hold her strength. Her knees grew weak. She gave in to the fatigue without resistance and sank to the soft grass, digging her fingers into the dirt and scrunching, until the cool soil was squirming into her nails.
“Hey!”
Police whistles. Someone must have signaled them upon hearing gunshots. Or a worker inside, having made the call to the nearest station, begging for help. When the uniformed men came into view, however, it was no surprise that they would instead focus on the five gangsters lurking by the building and begin heading over.
On a day like this, as revolution stirred all around the city, the police were itching to make arrests.
“Go,” Roma muttered under his breath to Benedikt and Marshall. “Merge into the alleys until they lose you. We will reconvene on the rooftop of Jade Dragon.”
Jade Dragon was the restaurant not two blocks away from here, easily the tallest building on its street and constantly packed with customers and patrons. The sheer chaos of large restaurants meant that gangsters could often slip in and out of its tall staircases whenever they pleased, climbing to the rooftops and using them for lookouts. Benedikt and Marshall shot off to the west; Kathleen said, “Juliette, come on,” but Juliette refused.
“You go too, Kathleen,” Juliette intoned. “Follow the same plan.”
“What about you—”
“They can arrest you, but they cannot arrest me. They would not dare.”
Kathleen sucked in her cheeks, eyeing Juliette warily, and then Roma, who yet remained, his arms folded. “Be careful,” she whispered, before the three policemen approached and she darted away, gone in a blink.
“Under the jurisdiction of—”
“Scram,” Roma interrupted in Russian. The policemen did not understand him. They did not need to. They only needed to hear the Russian and eye his clothing before realizing that this was the heir of the White Flowers. Then their jaws grew clenched, exchanging terse looks. Then they were forced to back away without another word, hurrying off in the direction Benedikt and Marshall had run in the hopes that an arrest was not entirely lost.
“Juliette,” Roma said when the policemen disappeared. “You have to get up.”
She could not. She would not. She had surpassed anger and rage, moved into numbness instead. She had been stoking the fire in her chest for so long that she had not noticed how intently she had been burning, but now the blaze was extinguished, and she found that nothing remained there except a charred space, hollow where her heart was supposed to be.
“Why should I?” she asked. “The Larkspur tricked us. He tricked us into doing his dirty work.”
With a sigh, Roma dropped to a crouch. He leveled himself with her fallen state. “Juliette…”
“Zhang Gutai was never guilty, yet I executed him,” Juliette went on, hardly listening to Roma. “What did we even achieve? Only more bloodshed—”
“Don’t you dare,” Roma said. “Don’t you dare fall apart now, dorogaya.”
Juliette’s head jerked up. Her breath snagged in her throat, twisting her whole esophagus sour. What did he think he was doing? She was already down. He may as well kick her a few times just to make sure she was dead.
“I shot him,” Juliette told Roma, as if he had not noticed, “in cold blood. He was not hurting me. He begged for his life.”
“We took a calculated risk to save millions. You fired for Alisa. For the smallest chance of saving an innocent life. Get it together. Now.”
Juliette breathed in. She breathed in and in and in. How many more times could she do this? How many more faux monsters would be torn down with unbidden violence in their path toward finding the real one? How was she any different from the killers that lurked in this city—the ones that she was trying to stop?
She didn’t realize she was crying until her tears hit her hand. She didn’t realize that teardrops had started running down her face faster than the pace of her rapid heartbeat until Roma’s stiff posture softened and his hard eyes grew worried.
He reached for her.
“Don’t,” Juliette managed, her breath hitching, her hand rising to knock his fingers back. “I don’t… need your pity.”
Slowly, Roma lowered himself onto the ground until he, too, was kneeling. “It is not my pity you have,” he said. “You made the right choice, Juliette.”
“We hunt the monster to stop it from bringing devastation to this city.” Juliette held her bloody hands out. “But this—this is monstrosity.”
Roma reached for her again. This time Juliette did not stop him. This time he smoothed his thumbs across her cheeks to dry her tears and she leaned into him, her head resting on his chest and his arms wrapping around her—familiar, foreign, fitting.
“A monster,” he said against her hair, “does not mourn.”
“Did you mourn?” Juliette asked, barely audible. She did not need to clarify what she meant. They both saw it in their minds: the explosion, the damage, the blood and the lives and the burning, burning red.
