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“Let her be,” Juliette replied. “Too many kind hearts turn cold every day.”
A hush started to sweep through the warehouse. The meeting was starting. From the corner of her eye, Juliette caught sight of Roma’s gaze once again. She wished Roma would stop looking at her. This whole thing felt strange for both obvious reasons and reasons she couldn’t precisely decipher. In bringing the Scarlet Gang and White Flowers together, it felt like cooperation, but it also felt like defeat.
But they had no choice.
“Well, I hope everyone’s having a nice evening.”
Silence followed Lord Montagov’s words immediately. He spoke in the Beijing dialect, the most common Chinese tongue that the merchants and foreign businessmen learned first, but it was accented. The older generation was not as fluent as their children.
“I will proceed right to the point,” he said. “There is madness in this city, and it is killing Scarlets and White Flowers alike.”
Lord Montagov seemed pleasant enough. If Juliette didn’t know better, she would think him patient and unbothered.
“I’m sure that all will agree with me, then,” he continued, “that this must stop. Man-made disease or natural occurrence, we need answers. We need to figure out why it is affecting our people so heavily, and then we need to put a stop to it.”
Only silence followed.
“Really?” a sardonic voice said. It was not directed at Lord Montagov, but at the silent Scarlet Gang. Marshall Seo stood up. “While the whole city dies, you still refuse to speak??
?
“It is simply in my belief,” Lord Cai said coldly, “that when one announces a plan to put a stop to the madness, they should offer some of their own ideas first.”
“Was it not your daughter who suggested this meeting?”
This came from Dimitri Voronin, who shrugged in a blasé, God-could-care sort of way.
“Our daughter,” Lady Cai cut in, her tone thunderous, “sought to begin a dialogue. It was not a promise nor the guarantee of an exchange.”
“Typical,” Dimitri scoffed.
That remark didn’t sit well with the Scarlet Gang. The errand runners who surrounded Lord Cai twitched in their seats, their hands inching closer and closer to the guns hidden at their hips. Lord Cai made an impatient gesture, telling everyone to calm down.
“This is the situation at present,” Lord Cai said. He placed his hands upon the table, palms flat on the cold surface. “Under the current circumstances, we have leads and sources to work with should we wish to investigate this madness.”
Lord Montagov opened his mouth, but Juliette’s father was not done.
“That means,” Lord Cai pressed on, “we do not need your help. Understand? We are here in hopes of furthering our knowledge and quickening our investigation. That is the position of the Scarlet Gang. Now, do the White Flowers wish to share their knowledge, their ideas, and indeed begin a cooperation, or did they attend this meeting simply to leech, as they have been doing for decades?”
While the back-and-forth occurred, eyes were shifting left and right; gazes met in all directions. Everybody was having an unspoken conversation, one person asking the ubiquitous question and another giving the most minuscule shake of the head.
It occurred to Juliette then that perhaps the White Flowers offered no further avenues of investigation because they had none to give. But to the White Flowers, admitting that they were clueless was just as bad as offering up all their trade secrets. It gave away power. They would rather have the Scarlet Gang think them hostile.
And some members of the Scarlet Gang bought it.
As Marshall Seo scoffed at the insult, muttering some inaudible retort beneath his breath, Tyler leaped to his feet, unable to hold himself back any longer. In two, three strides, he had crossed the divide.
Then Benedikt raised his gun, and Tyler froze in place.
The room collectively stopped breathing, uncertain what to do next, if now was a good time to react violently, if the simple act of raising a gun prompted retaliation. Juliette touched her own weapon, but she was more bothered with analyzing this turn of events, trying to connect them logically.
Marshall with the calloused hands was the one who had been threatened, but Benedikt with the paint-smudged fingers was the one reacting instead.
Juliette’s hands moved away from the holster at her thigh. She understood. Benedikt had raised his gun to prevent Marshall from doing so first. Marshall would shoot, but Benedikt wouldn’t.
“We thought this meeting was supposed to be peaceful,” Benedikt said quietly, an attempt to unknot the tension before him. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. Tyler wasn’t one for reason; he lashed out and thought through how to weasel himself out of the consequences later.
“Oh, that’s rich,” Tyler sneered. “Whip out your gun and then claim you’re talking of peace. Peace.”
