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It pained Juliette to think about. On her first day back, she had paused outside the Public Garden, spotted a sign that read NO CHINESE ALLOWED, and burst out laughing. Who in their right mind would forbid the Chinese from entering a space in their own country? Only later did she realize it hadn’t been a joke. The foreigners truly thought themselves mighty enough to enforce spaces that were reserved for the Foreign Community, reasoning that the foreign funds they poured into their newly constructed parks and newly opened speakeasies justified their takeover.
For temporary riches, the Chinese were letting the foreigners make permanent marks
upon their land, and the foreigners were growing cozy. Juliette feared the tables would turn suddenly one day, leaving the Scarlet Gang to realize they had found themselves standing on the outside.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Juliette jerked to attention, using the vanity mirror to peer at Rosalind. “What?”
“You looked like you were plotting murder.”
A knock came on Juliette’s bedroom door before she could respond, forcing her to turn around properly. Ali, one of the maids, opened the door and shuffled through, but remained hovering over the threshold, unwilling to step too far in. None of the household staff knew how to deal with Juliette. She was too bold, too brazen, too Western, while they were too new, too uncertain, never comfortable. The household staff rotated every month as a matter of practicality. It prevented the Cais from learning their stories, their lives, their histories. In no time, their month was up and they were being shoved out the door for their own safety, cutting the ties that would bind Lord and Lady Cai to more and more people.
“Xiaojie, there’s a visitor downstairs,” Ali said softly.
It hadn’t always been like this. Once, they had had a set of household staff that lasted through Juliette’s first fifteen years of life. Once, Juliette had Nurse, and Nurse would tuck Juliette in and tell her the most heart-aching tales of desert lands and lush forests.
Juliette reached out, plucked a red rose from the vase. The moment she closed her hands around the stem, the thorns pricked her palm, but she hardly felt the sting past the calluses protecting her skin, past the years she had spent chasing away every part of her that qualified for delicate.
Juliette hadn’t understood at first. Four years ago, while she knelt in the gardens, trimming their rosebushes with thick gloves on, she hadn’t realized why the temperature around her had risen so intently, why it sounded almost as if the entire grounds of the Cai mansion were shuddering with… an explosion.
Her ears were screeching—first with the remnants of that awful, loud sound, then with the shouting, the panic, the cries wafting over from the back, where the servants’ house was. When she hurried over, she saw rubble. She saw a leg. A pool of blood. Someone had been standing right at the threshold of the front door when the ceiling caved in. Someone in a dress that looked like the sort Nurse wore, with the same fabric that Juliette had always tugged on as a child, because it was all she could reach to get Nurse’s attention.
There had been a single white flower lying on the path into the servants’ house. When Juliette shook off her gloves and picked it up, her ears ringing and her whole mind dazed, her fingers came upon a pinned note, one written in Russian, in cursive, bleeding with ink when she unfolded it.
My son sends his regards.
They had wheeled so many bodies into the hospital that day. Corpses upon corpses. The Cais had been playing nice, had decided to ease up on an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time—and look where it had gotten them: death delivered directly to their doorstep. From that incident onward, the Scarlet Gang and White Flowers shot at each other on sight, guarding and defending territory lines as if their honor and reputation depended on it.
“Xiaojie?”
Juliette squeezed her eyes shut, dropping the rose and smoothing a cold hand over her face until she could swallow back every memory that threatened to erupt. When she opened her eyes again, her gaze was dull, uninterested as she inspected her fingernails.
“So?” she said. “I don’t deal with the visitors. Get my parents.”
Ali cleared her throat, then twisted her hands through the rough hem of her button shirt. “Your parents are out. I could fetch Cai Tailei—”
“No,” Juliette snapped. She regretted her tone immediately when the maid’s expression turned stricken. Out of all their household staff, Ali was the one who treated Juliette with the least amount of caution. She didn’t deserve to be barked at.
Juliette tried for a smile. “Let Tyler be. It’s probably just Walter Dexter downstairs. I’ll go.”
Ali inclined her chin respectfully, then hurried away before Juliette’s temper came back. Juliette supposed she gave the household staff the wrong impression. She would do anything for the Scarlet Gang. She cared for their welfare and their politics, their coalitions and alliances with the merchant firms and investors.
But she did not care about little men like Walter Dexter, who thought themselves mightily important without the capacity to back such a claim. She had no desire to be running the errands that her father didn’t want to do. This was far from the cutthroat business she had expected to be welcomed into when she was finally summoned back. If she had known that Lord Cai would leave her out of the blood feud, out of the same paralleled sniping occurring on the political stage, maybe she wouldn’t have rushed to pack her bags and pour out the entire contents of her alcohol stash when she left New York behind.
After the attack that killed Nurse, Juliette had been shipped back to New York for her own safety, had had to simmer on her resentment for four long years. It wasn’t who she was. She would have rather stayed and braced herself on her own two feet, fight with her chin held up. Juliette Cai had been taught not to run, but her parents—as parents tended to be—were hypocrites, and they had forced her to run, forced her out of the thick of the blood feud, forced her to become someone far removed from the danger.
And now she was back.
Rosalind made a throaty noise as Juliette shrugged a jacket over her beaded dress. “There it is again.”
“What?”
“The murder face,” Kathleen supplied without looking up from her magazine.
Juliette rolled her eyes. “I think this is simply my resting expression.”
“No, your resting expression is this.” Rosalind imitated the most scatterbrained expression she could manage, eyes wide and mouth open, swaying in circles on the bed. In response, Juliette threw a slipper at her, drawing giggles from Kathleen.
