by Chloe Gong
“I have never feared you.”
Juliette reversed their bodies in one deft push. Bitter and resentful and aggrieved, she hooked her legs around his and twisted her hips until Roma was the one flat on his back and she loomed over him, kneeling on the sheets. Though she attempted to pin his shoulders down as he had done to her, it was a half-hearted, head-spinning attempt. Roma merely looked upon the ire in her manner and responded in kind.
He sat up fast, shaking her grip loose. But he did not act further. They remained as they were—too close, too entwined. She was straddling his lap; he was hovering merely inches away.
One of his hands landed on her ankle. Her hand came down on his neck.
“Perhaps,” Roma said, his words barely audible, “you do not fear me. But”—his hand was moving higher and higher, brushing her calf, her knee, her thigh. Juliette’s palm sank lower, until it was gripping the space underneath the smooth collar of his white shirt—“you have always feared weakness.”
Juliette snapped her gaze up. Their eyes met, murky and drunk and alert and challenging all at once, the loosest they had ever been and sharper than ever, somehow—somehow.
“And is this weakness?” she asked.
She didn’t know who was breathing harder—her or Roma. They hovered a gasp away, daring the other to make the first move, daring the other to give in to what neither wanted to admit they wanted, what neither wanted to admit was something that was happening, what neither wanted to admit was a mere replay of history.
They both gave in at once.
Roma’s kiss was just as she remembered. It filled her with so much adrenaline and exuberance that she could burst. It made her feel too ethereal for her own body, as if she could tear out of her own skin.
The alcohol had tasted terrible in its glass, but its remnants were wholly sweet on Roma’s tongue. His teeth grazed her lower lip, and Juliette arched against him, her hands running across his shoulders, down the hard muscles along his sides, up his shirt, and against the burning warmth of his bare skin.
Her blood was roaring in her ears. She felt his lips move from her mouth to her jaw to her collarbone, burning everywhere he touched. Juliette couldn’t think, couldn’t speak—her head was spinning and her world was spinning and she wanted nothing else in this moment than to continue spinning, spinning, spinning. She wanted to veer off course. She wanted to be out of control forever.
Four years ago, they had been innocent and young and good. Their love had been sweet, something to protect, simpler than life itself. Now they were monstrous; now they were pressed against each other and giving off the same heady perfume of the brothel they hid inside, drunk off more than just cheap tequila. Hunger and desire fueled their every move. Juliette tore at the buttons down Roma’s front and she was pushing his shirt off, gripping at the scars and the old wounds that ran down his back.
“Call a truce,” Juliette murmured against his lips. They needed to stop. She couldn’t stop. “You are torturing me.”
“We are not at war,” Roma replied softly. “Why call a truce?”
Juliette shook her head. She closed her eyes, let the sensation of his lips brushing against her jaw roll through her. “Aren’t we?”
We are.
The realization hit Juliette like a bucket of ice, sinking into her bones with a sort of cold found six feet underground. She burrowed her face into the crook of Roma’s neck, forcing herself not to break, not to cry. Roma sensed the change before Juliette had even realized it herself, his arms coming around to hold her.
“What are you doing, Roma Montagov?” Juliette whispered, her voice only a rasp. “What are you doing to me?”
Wasn’t playing with her heart once enough? Hadn’t he already torn her in two and left her to the wolves once before?
Roma did not say anything. Juliette could read nothing from him, not even when she lifted her head and looked at him with wide, blinking eyes.
Juliette lurched away suddenly, scrambling to stand. Only then did Roma react. Only then did he reach out and grab her wrist, whispering, “Juliette.”
“What?” she hissed back. “What, Roma? Do you wish to explain what this is between us, when you made it achingly clear four years ago where your heart stands? Shall I hold you at gunpoint until you have no choice but to admit you are once again playing me—”
“I am not.”
Juliette reached into her dress, tore out the gun she had hidden in its folds. With the hand she had free, she pulled the safety and pressed the barrel to the underside of his jaw—to the soft part where her mouth had been merely minutes before—and all Roma did was lift his chin so the gun would sink in further, until the muzzle was only another press of a kiss against his skin.
“I cannot fathom it,” she breathed. “You destroy me and then you kiss me. You give me reason to hate you and then you give me reason to love you. Is this a lie or the truth? Is this a ploy or your heart reaching for me?”
His pulse was beating hard enough that Juliette could sense it, could feel it thundering away even as she stood over him with her hand so close to his neck. An arc of moonlight had shifted in through the small window, and now it ran along Roma’s body: his bare shoulders and his bare arms, braced to either side of him but making no move to stop Juliette from threatening his life.
She could pull the trigger. She could save herself the agony of hope.
“It is never as simple as one truth,” Roma replied hoarsely. “Nothing ever is.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is all I can give you.” Roma reached up, closed his fingers around the barrel slowly. “And it is all that you could bear to hear. You speak to me as if I am still the same person you left behind, who betrayed you four years ago, but I am not. And you are not the same Juliette I loved, either.”
Juliette was the one holding the gun, but suddenly she felt like she had been shot. Mantua was silent now, the raid finished and the municipal police packed up. Below, all that moved was the reflected glow of the building’s neon sign, rippling in the shallow rain puddles.
“Why?” she rasped. The question she should have asked four years ago. The question that had been bearing on her all those years, a weight chained to her heart. “Why did you launch that attack on my people?”
Roma’s eyes fluttered shut. It was like he was waiting for the bullet to come.
“Because,” he whispered, “I had no choice.”
Juliette withdrew her gun. Before Roma could say anything more, she ran out.
Thirty
Juliette buried her hands deep in the rich soil. She pressed and melded, closing her fingers around the bits of mulch that lined her gardens.
She had been working on the flower beds at the front of her house since dawn, easing her pounding headache with sunshine and the sounds of nature. If the frown on her face was any indication, however, it wasn’t working. When she had gardened as a child, cleaning the soil beds with fistfuls of dead petals clutched in her fists, it had meant that she was in a bad mood and that she was trying to work off her aggression without shooting her pistol. It was practically Scarlet urban legend: speak to Juliette when she had a plant in her hand and risk the consequences.
Nobody had tended to these gardens since Ali bled to death in them.
Juliette breathed out deeply. She unwrapped a small purple hyacinth, settling it neatly into the hole she had dug. Before the bulbous flower could misalign and tip over, Juliette pushed the soil back into the hole.
She wished she could fill herself up like this. She wished she could press mounds of rich soil into the gaps of her heart, occupying the space until flowers could take root and grow roses. Maybe then she wouldn’t be hearing Roma’s voice in her head over and over again, taking up every inch of her thoughts.
Juliette’s knees were covered in little, scarred-over scratches. She had fallen a quarter of a mile away from Mantua, and stayed there with her palms grazing the gravel, her dress soaking up mud and rainwater. I
t had stung badly during the rest of her trek home, but the pain now was good. The coolness of the earth underneath her, the morning sun cutting a golden line down her face, the crisp sharpness of the little rocks and twigs digging into her skin—it reminded her that she wasn’t untethering from space itself and floating up into the clouds.
It is all I can give you.
None of this made any sense. If Roma Montagov had not hated her all these years, then why pretend he did? If he had hated her all these years, then why say such things now—why pretend, with such agony in his words, that his betrayal had hurt him just as much as it had hurt her?
I had no choice.
Juliette gave a sudden scream, smashing her fist into the soil. Two maids working nearby jumped and skittered away, but Juliette paid them no heed. For crying out loud, she had already done this four years ago. She had long ago drawn up two columns in her head: Roma’s actions and Roma’s words, utterly unable to pit them up against each other, unable to comprehend why—why—he would betray her when he said he loved her. Now she could not fathom him yet again, could not align the way he reached for her with the hate that he claimed to possess, could not understand the sadness in his eyes when he spoke of her being a new, cold Juliette he could not bear to see.
It is never as simple as one truth. Nothing ever is.
Juliette grabbed the shovel beside her, the anger in her veins raging to a crescendo. Planting flowers was child’s play. She staggered to her feet and raised the shovel instead, smashing the lip of the metal hard into the plots she had just spent hours making beautiful. Again and again, her shovel sank into the flower beds until the flowers were all shredded to pieces, sharp petals littering the black soil. Someone called her name from afar and that mere summoning incensed her even more, to the point where she turned around and made a new target out of the first thing her eyes landed on: a thin tree that was twice as tall as she.
Juliette stormed toward the trunk. She raised the shovel, and thwacked, and thwacked, and thwacked—
“Juliette!”
The shovel snagged midmotion. When Juliette whirled around, she found Rosalind’s delicate hand and her manicured nails gripping the shovel hard, holding it back from another gouge upon the tree.
“What is wrong with you?” Rosalind hissed. “Why have you become unhinged?”
“Leave me be,” Juliette replied sharply. She tugged the shovel from her cousin’s hands and hurried inside the house, leaving a track of soil and the gardening materials in the foyer, hardly caring about the mess she made as she trekked up to her bedroom. There she found her most drab oversize coat and tugged it on, hiding her dress and hiding her face, covering every element that gave away her stature. Almost out of habit, she pulled the hood on too to cover her hair, but that was unnecessary; she hadn’t styled her signature finger waves. Loose black locks of hair brushed her neck instead. Juliette touched a strand that sat above her ear and gave it a tug, as if to check if it was real.
She marched out of her house, walking with her eyes in front of her, checking her surroundings only once. Was she still being followed? She hardly cared. Not when her heart was pounding a war cry in her ears. Not when she could not stop clenching her fists, a desperate effort to distract her trembling fingers.
Juliette had always prided herself on her priorities. She knew how to sight what was important, like explorers knew how to sight the north star. Her city, her gang, her family. Her family, her gang, her city.
But could an explorer still find the north star if the whole world turned upside down?
One ragged boot in front of the other, Juliette walked. At some point, she was passing through the Bund, weaving through the motor vehicles that pulled in and out of their parking spaces hazardously and merged onto the neatly pressed roads like a zip.
Dimly, Juliette wondered what it would be like to cease walking forward and err sideways instead, right down the wharves into the river. She could just keep going and drop straight into the water, becoming nothing more than another box of lost stock, another stray mark in the catalogs, another statistic of lost revenue.
Juliette moved on from the Bund, out of the International Settlement, and onto White Flower territory at last.
She pulled her hood higher. The action wasn’t warranted—it was far easier for her to blend into the streets here where the Montagovs reigned than it was for Roma to sidle into her territory. Without Scarlet colors twined around her wrist or clipped into her hair, without any of her usual identifiers, as far as any of the patrolling White Flowers knew, she was just another Chinese girl who happened to live nearby.
“Oi!”
Juliette winced, angling her head down before the person she had accidentally shouldered could get a good look at her face.
“Sorry!” she called back. Just before she hurried around the corner, she thought she caught a glimpse of blond atop a pair of eyes staring curiously after her.
* * *
“The strangest thing happened,” Benedikt announced.
He dropped into the open seat, unwinding the scarf around his neck and setting it down on their small corner table. Marshall nodded in a gesture for Benedikt to go on, but Roma acted as if he hadn’t even heard his cousin. He was staring blankly at the other side of the restaurant, and—much to Benedikt’s concern—was looking like he hadn’t slept for days. Ever since Alisa became infected with the madness, the exhaustion on Roma’s face had been wearing deeper and deeper, but something about his expression now was… different. It seemed that not only had his body reached its breaking point, but his mind had too, teetering past the point of bouncing back and now merely sitting idle, in wait for something to shift it back into cognition.
Benedikt wondered if Roma had even gone home last night, given his cousin was wearing the same wrinkled white shirt as the previous day. He wondered if he should ask what was wrong, or if it was better to pretend that all was well and treat his cousin no differently.
Afraid of the answers to the former, he chose the latter.
“I think I just saw Juliette Cai.”
Roma’s knee jerked up, colliding with the bottom of the table so roughly that the plate in front of Marshall almost slid off.
“Hey, watch it,” Marshall chided. He put his hands protectively around his slice of honey cake. “Just because your food hasn’t come yet doesn’t mean you should ruin someone else’s.”
Roma ignored Marshall.
“What do you mean?” he demanded at Benedikt. “Are you certain it was her?”
“Calm down,” Benedikt replied. “She was minding her own business—”
Roma was already leaping out of his chair. By the time Benedikt had even registered what was happening in that sudden flurry of motion, Roma was long gone, the doors of the restaurant swinging and swinging.
“What… was that?” Benedikt asked, stunned.
Marshall shrugged. He shoved a big spoonful of cake into his mouth. “You want cake?”
* * *
Meanwhile, Juliette had wandered deep into White Flower territory using only the basis of her memory, backtracking and doubling up on routes that she thought she remembered. Eventually, the streets started to bear some resemblance to the images she had in her head. Eventually, she found one very familiar alleyway and ducked in, lowering her head to pass through the collection of low-hanging laundry lines, wrinkling her nose against the damp smell in the air.
“Disgusting,” Juliette muttered, wiping away the drops of dirty laundry water that landed upon the back of her neck. Just as she paused, intending to fling away the water, she caught sight of a tall and imposing figure entering the other end of the alleyway.
All the muscles along her shoulders froze stiff. Quickly, Juliette forced herself to scrunch her hand small, to continue strolling forward at an unsuspicious pace. Backing away now and running from the alleyway would immediately mark her as guilty, as a trespasser on enemy ground.
Fortunately, Dimitri Voronin didn’t seem
to recognize her as he passed. He was busy muttering to himself, straightening the fabric of his sleeve cuffs.
He disappeared from the alley. Juliette emerged out the other side too, breathing a sigh of relief. She scanned the apartment complexes laid out before her, matching her memory to the changed sights. She had been here before, but so much time had passed that the colors of the walls were different and the tiles had faded.…
“Are you out of your mind?”
Juliette gasped, barely registering Roma’s voice before he had looped an arm around her waist to drag her aside, hauling her into the alleyway by the apartment building. When Juliette struggled back onto her own feet, she barely stopped herself from stomping on Roma’s toes.
“I can walk, thank you,” she hissed.
“You seemed to be taking your sweet time lingering in full view of every single window in my house!” Roma hissed back. “They will kill you, Juliette. Do you consider us a joke?”
“What do you think?” Juliette shot back. “All my dead relatives would say otherwise!”
They both fell silent.
“What are you doing here?” Roma asked quietly. His gaze was focused on a point just above her shoulder, refusing to make direct eye contact. But Juliette was looking right at him. She couldn’t stop looking. She looked at him and she wanted to burst with all that she wanted to say, all that she wanted to hear, all that she wanted to be rid of. Everything—everything—was tight: her lungs, her skin, her teeth. She was too big for her body, bound to erupt into pieces and become a segment of the natural world growing in the cement cracks.
“I’m here,” Juliette managed, “because I am sick to death of running away and remaining in ignorance. I want the truth.”
“I told you—”
“You cannot do this.” Juliette had started yelling. She had not intended to yell, but she was—four years of silence escaping all at once. “Don’t I deserve to know? Don’t I deserve at least a modicum of what the hell was going through your brain when you decided to tell your father exactly how to set an ambush on my—”