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.