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In a flash, Tyler’s own double-action revolver was in his hand and pointed at Benedikt. Juliette was on her feet in an instant, moving so fast that her chair fell over, only Tyler was faster and he was already pressing down on the trigger.
“I hate that word like I hate all you Montagovs.”
He pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot echoed into the warehouse, provoked gasps from every direction.
But Benedikt only blinked, unharmed.
Juliette halted in her steps, breathing hard, her eyes wide as she turned around and searched for Kathleen.
Kathleen winked at Juliette upon making eye contact. She opened her palm to show her the six little bullets that rested there.
There had been no damage, but the damage was done. Chairs were scraping back and gangsters were jumping to their feet; pistols were pointed and safeties were pulled; barrels were aimed—steady, even as the shouting began.
“If this is the way it is going to be,” Lord Montagov announced above the noise and the accusations and the heated swearing, “then the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers shall never cooperate—”
He didn’t finish his declaration.
A choking noise was coming from the corner of the warehouse—a quiet gasping, over and over again. In confusion, the gangsters searched for the source, wary for any sense of a trick.
They didn’t expect the noise to be coming from Alisa Montagova, who wheezed one last time before dropping to her knees, her fingers launching at her own throat.
Seventeen
Roma lunged for his sister, tearing her hands away from her throat in the flash of a second. Before she could shake him off with the frenzy of the madness, he already had her pinned to the ground, her hands twisted behind her back and her head pressed to the hard, concrete ground.
“Alisa, it’s me. It’s me,” Roma gasped. Alisa tried to jerk forward. Roma hissed, craning his head back. “Stop that!”
He should have known better than to waste breath trying to talk her out of it. The madness was far from the whims of an unruly child. This was no longer only his sister—something had consumed her from the inside out.
“Help!” Roma called over his shoulder. “Get help!”
The White Flowers around him—each and every single one of them—hesitated. On the far side of the warehouse, the Scarlet Gang were ushering themselves out, leaving as fast as they could. This was not their problem to deal with, after all. When Juliette gave the appearance of lingering, her mother immediately pulled her away by the elbow and snapped something brief, as if speed was of the essence when outrunning a contagion.
At least they had a right to flee. What were the White Flowers doing flinching back?
“Don’t just stand there!”
Benedikt finally snapped out of his daze and rushed over, rolling his sleeves up. He knelt and pinned one of Alisa’s kicking legs to the floor. Face paling, Marshall was forced to join them too by mere principle, pinning down the other leg and snapping his fingers to prompt the messengers nearby.
“Roma,” Benedikt said. “We have to take her to Lourens.”
“Absolutely not.” With his fervent exclamation, Roma almost lost his grip on Alisa’s violent writhing. He quickly pinned her wrists down again. “We’re not bringing Alisa in to be Lourens’s experiment.”
“How do you know that it won’t do good?” Benedikt argued. His words were short and abrupt, a result of his exertion. “Those things are probably eating away at her brain as we speak. If we haven’t tried removing them, how do we know we cannot?”
“Ben,” Marshall chided. For once, on an occasion such as this, his strained voice was the quietest of the three. “We tried removing a dead thing from a dead man and we pulled out ten tons of brain matter. How can we risk it?”
“What choice is there?” Benedikt demanded.
Marshall let go of Alisa’s leg, throwing the task between Roma and Benedikt to manage, then hurried to crouch near her head. “There is always a choice.”
Marshall put his hands around Alisa’s throat and squeezed. It took every working cell of Roma’s rational mind not to attack his friend, not to push him away as Marshall counted beneath his breath. He knew exactly what Marshall was doing, knew that it was the necessary thing to do, but he burned with the need to protect.
Alisa stopped struggling. Marshall let go quickly, removing his hands like he had been scalded, then reaching back over again to check for her pulse.
He nodded. “She’s okay. Only unconscious.”
Heart thudding, Roma looped an arm around Alisa’s neck, picking his little sister up like she weighed nothing—a paper doll of a girl. When
