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Juliette’s wandering attention dropped to follow the stream of faces coming in and out of the doors to Great World. She searched carefully—scanning the masses in the rapidly falling night as they followed loud advertisements into every vice readily available—until her gaze came to the front of a dress shop. Leaning upon a signpost, Roma stood with his hands buried deep in his pockets, shadows under his eyes.
Juliette strolled over, her shoes silent against the gravel for once. She prepared to chide him for standing so far from the building and making it hard to find him. Only when she came near, something about his expression cut her off before she had even started.
“What’s wrong—”
“Don’t look back,” Roma began, “but you were followed.”
“I was not.”
Her denial came fast and unwavering, though it was more an act of rebellion on her part than true certainty. As she spoke, her first instinct was to swivel around and prove Roma wrong, but logic instructed her to refrain. She held herself still, all the tendons in her neck pulled taut. She had indeed been deep in thought while making her way over, concentrating on keeping her face hidden from those in her view rather than watching for the lurkers in her peripheral. Could she have picked up a tail?
“A white man stopped right when you did,” Roma said. “He pulled a newspaper from his pocket and started reading it in the middle of the street. I don’t know what your thoughts are, but that is highly suspicious to me.”
Juliette started rummaging through her pocket, cursing under her breath.
“He might not be a threat,” she insisted. “Perhaps he is one of yours—doing surveillance on your activities.”
“He is not Russian,” Roma countered immediately. “His clothing and hairstyle say British, and we have none of those within our ranks.”
Juliette finally found what she was looking for and pulled out her facial powder. She opened the box and angled the mirror folded within, scanning the darkening streets behind her without turning around.
“Found him,” Juliette reported. “Yellow handkerchief in the front pocket?”
“That’s the one,” Roma replied.
She didn’t know how Roma had distinguished the tail as British. He looked like any other foreigner on the street.
Juliette peered closer at her mirror. She changed the angle slightly, slightly…
“Roma,” she said, her voice rising. “He’s got a gun.”
“Every foreigner in this city has a gun—”
“He’s pointing it at us,” Juliette cut in. “He just drew it from behind his newspaper.”
Tense silence fell between the two as they desperately thought through their options. Around them, Shanghai continued moving, alive and vibrant and unbothered. But Roma and Juliette couldn’t merge back into this crowd without being followed to wherever they were going next. There was no cover to hide behind and disappear from, nowhere to draw their own weapons before the Brit could see and shoot first.
“Untie your coat and embrace me,” Roma said.
Juliette choked on her sudden laugh. She waited for the pin to drop, but Roma was being serious.
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“No, I’m not,” Roma countered evenly. “Do it, so I can shoot him.”
Their British tail was more than a hundred paces away. There were dozens of civilians walking back and forth in the space between. How did Roma expect to shoot him amid all those conditions, while embracing Juliette?
Juliette gave the ribbon around her waist a tug, loosening her coat and lifting her arm in the same movement. In her other hand, she snapped her mirror closed, cutting off all her sights on the tail.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she whispered. Her lungs were tight. Her pulse was a raging war drum.
She wrapped her arms around Roma’s neck.
Juliette heard his breath catch. A quick inhale, hardly perceptible had she not been so near. Perhaps he had not considered the fact that asking Juliette to act his cover would mean coming close to her. He certainly hadn’t expected her chin to automatically find its place in the crook where his shoulder met his neck, just as it always used to.
They had both grown tall and grown thorns. Yet Juliette had slotted back so easily—far too easily for her own liking.
“Lean closer,” Roma instructed. She felt his arm moving, retrieving his pistol behind the cover of her coat as it billowed on either side of them in the breeze.
