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The echo of the safety being pulled on a handgun sounded into the alley. Surprised, Juliette looked to her left, where the gun she had disarmed was still lying, untouched. She turned her gaze back to Roma and found him smiling, his beautiful, wicked lips quirked in mockery.
“What?” Roma asked. He sounded almost teasing. “You thought I only had one?”
The cold press of metal touched her waist. Its chill seeped through the fabric of her dress, printed its shape into her skin. Begrudgingly, slowly, Juliette removed her knife from Roma’s throat and raised her hands high. She released her deathly grip on him, each step as prolonged as possible until she was standing up, striding backward to put herself two paces away from the pistol.
In unison, with no other way to avoid a deadlock, they put their weapons away.
“The man who died at your club last night,” Roma began. “Do you remember his mismatched shoes?”
Juliette bit down on the insides of her cheeks, then nodded.
“I found the other half of one of the pairs in the Huangpu River, right where the rest of the men died the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival,” Roma went on. “I think he escaped the first bloodshed. But he took the madness with him, took it to your club a day later and then succumbed to it.”
“Impossible,” Juliette snapped immediately. “What sort of science—”
“We are past science, Juliette.”
Her indignation hot in her throat, Juliette brought her shoulders up to her ears and clutched her hands into fists. She entertained the idea of calling Roma paranoid, irrational, but unfortunately she knew how diligent he was when he found something to focus on. If he thought this a possibility, it was very likely a possibility.
“What are you saying?”
Roma folded his arms. “I’m saying that I need to know for certain if it was indeed the same man. I need to see the other shoe on his corpse. And if the shoes match up, then this madness—it could be contagious.”
Juliette felt denial lay thick and heavy in her bones. The victim had died in her club, spraying blood onto a room full of her Scarlets, coughing spittle into a gathering full of her people. If this was indeed a disease of the mind—a contagious disease of the mind—the Scarlet Gang was in big trouble.
“It could have been a suicide pact,” she suggested without much conviction. “Perhaps the man backed out, only to act later.” But Juliette had looked into the dying man’s eyes. In there, terror had been the only emotion that existed.
God. She had looked into the dying man’s eyes. If this was contagious, what was her risk of catching it?
“You sense it just as I do,” Roma said. “Something is not right here. By the time this goes through official channels to be investigated, more innocent people will have died from this peculiar madness. I need to know if it is spreading.”
Roma was looking right at Juliette when he fell silent. Juliette stared back, a deep coldness unfurling in her stomach.
“As if you care,” she said softly, refusing to blink in case her eyes started watering, “about innocent people dying.”
Every muscle along Roma’s jaw tightened.
“Fine,” he said sharply. “My people.”
Juliette looked away. Two long seconds passed. Then she pivoted on her heel and started to walk.
“Hurry up,” she called back. Just this once she would help him, and never again. Only because she, too, needed to know the answers he sought. “The morgue will be closing soon.”
Eight
They walked in tense, palpable silence.
It was not that it was awkward—in honesty, that would have been preferable. It was rather that their proximity to each other, with Juliette walking ahead and Roma trailing three paces behind so they weren’t seen together, was horrifyingly familiar and, quite frankly, the last thing Juliette wanted to feel for Roma Montagov was nostalgia.
Juliette dared a glance back as they worked through the long, winding streets of the French Concession. Because there were so many foreigners here clambering for a piece of the city, the roads of the French Concession reflected their greed, their scramble. Houses within each sector turned inward in a manner that—if viewed from the skies—almost appeared circular, huddling in on themselves to protect their underbelly.
The streets here were just as busy as the Chinese parts of the city, but everything was somewhat more orderly. Barbers performed their duties on the pavement like usual, only every few seconds they would reach down with their feet and neatly brush the discarded tufts of hair closer to the gutters. Vendors sold their wares at moderate volumes, rather than the usual screaming Juliette would hear in the western parts of Shanghai. It was not only the adaptations of the people that made the French Concession peculiar—the buildings seem to sit a little straighter, the water seemed to run a little clearer, the birds seemed to chirp a little louder.
Perhaps they all sensed Roma Montagov’s presence and were bristling in warning.
And Roma was bristling right back, inspecting the houses with his eyes narrowed into the twilight.
