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“I’ll give you the same answer we gave your father,” Juliette said. She drew her legs up onto the armrest, the layers of her dress falling back. Paul’s eyes followed the motion. She watched his eyebrow twitch with the scandal of her long, pale thigh on show. “We’re not taking on any new endeavors. We’re busy enough with our current clients.”
Paul feigned disappointment. He leaned forward, like he could persuade her with mere eye contact. All it did was show Juliette that he hadn’t quite brushed out a clump of pomade in his sweep of dark-blond hair. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “I hear there’s a rival business who might be more enthusiastic about the offer.…”
“So perhaps you should try them,” Juliette suggested. She straightened up suddenly. He was trying to entice her into listening by suggesting he would take his business to the White Flowers, but it mattered little. Walter Dexter was a client they wanted to lose. “I’m glad we could resolve this matter so promptly.”
“Wait, no—”
“Goodbye now…” Juliette pretended to think. “Peter? Paris?”
“Paul,” he supplied, frowning.
Juliette summoned a smile, not unlike the scatterbrained one Rosalind had been mimicking earlier. “Right. Bye!”
She hopped to her feet and pranced across the living room, toward the front entrance. In a blink, her fingers were on the heavy handle and she was pulling the door open, eager to get rid of the British visitor.
Paul, to his credit, was fast to recover. He came up to the door and bowed. Finally, some manners.
“Very well.”
He stepped out, onto the front stoop, then pivoted again to face Juliette. “May I make a request, Miss Cai?”
“I already told you—”
Paul smiled. “Can I see you again?”
Juliette slammed the door shut. “Absolutely not.”
Six
Roma wasn’t having a pleasant day.
Within his first hour awake, he had tripped going up the stairs, smashed his favorite mug with his favorite herbal tea, and checked his hip against the kitchen table so roughly that there was a giant purple splotch forming on his torso. Then he had been forced to inspect a crime scene. Then he had had to face the possibility that this was a crime scene of supernatural proportions.
As Roma trudged back into the city’s central hub under the early-afternoon sun, he could feel his patience wearing incredibly thin. Every blow of whistling steam sounded like the noise his father made from his mouth when he got angry, and every crack of a butcher bringing his cleaver down reminded Roma of gunfire.
Usually, Roma adored the busyness that surrounded his home. He would deliberately take the long routes to skirt in and out of the stalls, peering at the bundles of farm-grown vegetables piled higher than their seller. He would make faces at the fish, inspecting the conditions of their small, dirty tanks. If he had time to kill, he would pick up sweets from every vendor selling them, popping them into his mouth as he went along and emerging from the markets with aching teeth and empty pockets.
The open market was one of his greatest loves. But today it was nothing but an irritant atop an already viral rash.
Roma ducked under the laundry lines pulled along the narrow alleyway leading into the Montagovs’ central housing block. Both clean and dirty water dripped furious puddles onto the pavement: transparent if it was under a sopping-wet dress, black and sludgy if it was under a half-installed pipe.
That was a feature that became more prominent as one ventured deeper in Shanghai. It was as if a lazy artist had been in charge of building everything—rooftops and window ledges would curve and stretch with the most glorious angles and archways, only to abruptly end or cut into the neighboring block. There was never enough space in the poorest parts of this city. Resources were always running out just before the builders were ready. Pipes were always a smidgen too short, drains only had half a covering, sidewalks seemed to slope into themselves. If Roma wanted to, he could stretch his arms out from his bedroom window on the fourth floor and easily reach the outward-folding window shades of a bedroom in the building next to his. If he stretched with his legs instead, he could hop over without struggle to scare the old man who lived there.
It wasn’t like they were short on space. There was an abundance of land outside the city for expansion—land untouched by the influence of the International Settlement and the French Concession. But the White Flowers’ lodgings were nestled right beside the French Concession, and there they were resolute to stay. The Montagovs had been located here since Roma’s grandfather emigrated. The foreigners had only claimed the nearby land in these recent years as they became more brash with their legal power. Every once in a while it gave the White Flowers great trouble whenever the French tried to control the gang’s ongoings, but the state of affairs always blew in favor of the Russians. The French needed them; they did not need the French. The White Flowers would let the foreigners continue practicing their laws over a space that didn’t seem to belong to either of them, and the pompous merchants with their floral coats and polished shoes stepped aside when the gangsters ran amok on the streets.
It was a compromise, but it was one that would become more tense as more time drew out. Places like these were already suffocating. It did naught to add more weight upon the pillow pressed to their faces.
Roma shrugged Benedikt’s bag higher up his shoulder. Benedikt hadn’t been very pleased that Roma was taking his art supplies away from him, but then Roma had pretended to offer it back, and his cousin had only needed one look—at all the dead bugs Lourens didn’t want to keep and the dead man’s shoe that Roma had shoved in there—before promptly pushing it back, asking Roma to return it after he gave it a good wash.
Roma unlocked his front door and slipped in. Just as he dragged himself into the living room, a door slammed to his right, and Dimitri Voronin was strolling in too.
Roma’s already unpleasant day turned even worse.
“Roma!” Dimitri shouted. “Where have you been all morning?”
Despite being only a few years older, Dimitri acted as if he were legions superior to Roma. As Roma passed him, Dimitr
i grinned and reached out to ruffle Roma’s hair.
