“STOP!”
The room stilled. Guns upon guns upon guns. That was how it would always be.
“Do you hear that?” Juliette hissed. She held up a finger near her ear, demanding the men in the room listen. The united roar of noise. The united stomping of feet and chanting of slogans, coming from afar and coming ever closer.
“When they get here,” Juliette seethed, “they will kill us all. White Flower or Scarlet Gang, it does not matter. They have machine guns and machetes and what do we have? Money?”
She turned to her side. The Scarlet gangster that Marshall had shot was dead on the ground. The bullet was in his neck. His eyes were glazed, staring up at the ceiling. She had not even known his name.
Marshall’s torso, too, was dripping red. Tyler would not let the White Flowers leave in time to save Marshall. Tyler was not so kind. He needed to register at least one sacrifice in order to be appeased. One sacrifice had to be made for the White Flowers to escape. For Alisa to live.
Her throat tight, Juliette stuck her hand into her pocket. She wished there existed something up her sleeve that would defuse the situation, but there was nothing. There was only the blood feud.
“We must leave before it is too late.”
“Have you no honor?” Tyler hissed.
“Honor?” Juliette echoed harshly. Her voice was terrible in the reverberant quiet of the hospital room. “Who cares about honor when we will be dead should we remain any longer?”
“I will not be the first to leave this room, Juliette,” Tyler said coldly. “I wish not to be shot in the back—”
“Then they leave first,” Juliette proposed, squaring her shoulders. “Lex talionis, Tyler. An eye for an eye. That’s how this feud works.” She pointed a finger to Marshall. She forced it not to shake. “Let go of your deluded revenge plan. We only kill him, for the Scarlet lost. The others go free.”
“No,” Roma and Benedikt snapped in unison.
Juliette’s stomach was ice-cold when she looked Roma straight in the eye. “You are not exactly in the position to be bargaining right now.”
“It’s not going to work, Juliette,” Roma said firmly. “If Tyler wants a fair fight, let us have a fair fight. Do not lie to have us retreat.”
Did he not realize she was saving him? Did he not realize that an armed uprising was occurring outside, mobs upon mobs seeking to kill all whom they recognized as part of the elite? Did he not realize that cutting off ties between them was the only way they could all walk out alive, that if Tyler even faintly suspected Juliette of being Roma Montagov’s lover, then Roma was already half lowered into his grave?
He does realize, a little v
oice whispered. He stays for you. He will not walk away from you. Not a second time. He would rather die.
Juliette supposed it was her turn to walk away. The lover and the liar, the liar and the lover. They switched those roles between themselves like it was a game.
“I tell the truth,” Juliette said again. Each word was a blade that sliced through her tongue, cutting her twice as deep as the harm she put out into the world. “Wake up. This entire dalliance between us has been an extraction of information.”
“Juliette, don’t say such—”
“Mybergh Road,” Juliette interrupted.
Roma stopped. He simply… stopped. He recognized the address. It was his mother’s safe house. The one that no one knew about.
The blood feud is the blood feud. Don’t think much on it. Don’t dwell. It’s not your fault.
Oh, but it was. It was.
Lady Montagova had died two weeks after Juliette left Shanghai. Two weeks after the attack on the Scarlet house that had killed all their servants.
Because after the attack, Juliette had lost her temper at the two Scarlet men escorting her onto the boat to New York. Her parents were too busy to even send her off. The Scarlets had thought the task beneath them; one had snapped for her to shut up, that she was merely a child who knew nothing about this city, who wasn’t needed here.
Because that day, Juliette had stomped her foot down in a fit of childish anger and, to prove herself, told the two Scarlet men everything she knew about the White Flowers in one long breath, including the safe house location of Lady Montagova. She had gotten the address on an off chance, one lazy afternoon when she had gone into White Flower territory to surprise Roma and overheard him talking to his father.
The Scarlet men hadn’t asked questions about how she knew such information. They had brushed her off. She thought they hadn’t taken her seriously. She had felt sick to her stomach once she boarded the boat, but she told herself that Roma betrayed her first. That the Scarlet Gang could do what they pleased with the information she gave them and it would serve him right.
She never could have thought that they would hunt down his mother.