by Chloe Gong
“Before you ask,” Juliette said, “I found her like this. Did you bring a silencer?”
“Right here,” Kathleen said. She passed Juliette one of the pistols in her pocket, her gaze still locked on the dead woman slumped against the wall.
“Where’s Rosalind?” Juliette asked. She rose to the tips of her toes to look over Kathleen’s shoulder, as if Rosalind had merely been walking a little slowly.
“She could not come,” Kathleen replied. She dragged her gaze away from the dead victim. “The burlesque club needs her. It was too suspicious to leave.”
Juliette nodded. She would have preferred to have another trusted pair of eyes and hands here, but there was nothing to do about it.
“Now can you tell me what’s going on?” Kathleen demanded.
“Exactly as my note said,” Juliette replied. “The madness stops today.”
“But—” Kathleen scratched the inside of her elbow, drawing angry lines over her skin. “Juliette, surely you don’t mean for just the two of us to storm what is essentially a Communist stronghold. This may be a workplace, but I’ve no doubt some are carrying weapons.”
Juliette grimaced. “About that…” She spotted three figures approaching along the pavement. She raised her hand, catching Roma’s attention. “Don’t panic. I’ll explain everything later.”
Kathleen whirled around. As always, when somebody said not to panic, the first thing one did was panic. She physically darted back a few steps when Marshall Seo grinned at her and waved. Benedikt Montagov reached over and yanked the other boy’s hand down.
The White Flowers ducked under the vines, and Roma threw something fast in Juliette’s direction: something soft and squarish, balled up into a mass of fabric so that it could volley through the air and into her palm. A large handkerchief. The sudden projectile made it easy for Juliette to pretend her stifled gasp was in surprise over having to catch the fabric and not because Roma had then stepped close, almost brushing her shoulder.
“To cover your face,” he explained. There was another in his hands too, for the same purpose. “Since we are the executioners—oh.”
Benedikt and Marshall went on alert, both stiffening in anticipation of a threat. But there was no threat, at least not here. Roma had merely spotted the dead woman.
“How did she get here?” Benedikt muttered.
“She had to have been an employee,” Marshall replied, jerking his thumb at the bright walls of the office building. “Better be careful. There might be an outbreak coming.”
Roma made a disgusted noise at the back of his throat but did not add anything more.
Perhaps it was a little sadistic of Juliette, leading them all to meet here, three feet away from a corpse. But they needed to see this before they went in. They needed to remember exactly what was at stake.
One guilty life for countless innocent ones. One guilty life to save the city.
Perhaps this was the choice that should have been made four years ago. If only Juliette had had more guilt on her soul back then. It would have made her death worthy.
Stop, she chided herself. Her pulse was thudding a symphony in her ears. She was a little afraid that the others could hear it. She wondered if each time she opened her mouth, the sound would travel from her chest and through her throat, making its way to the outside world.
Juliette pushed past her nerves. She had conquered much fiercer opponents than a loud heartbeat.
Now or never.
Juliette cleared her throat. “This is how we will proceed,” she started. “We need guards at the back. Zhang Gutai’s office has a window he may jump from.”
Roma nodded at Benedikt and Marshall. Wordlessly, they hurried off to the back of the building.
“Kathleen.”
Kathleen snapped to attention.
“I need you to cause some sort of evacuation on the first floor. Enough commotion that no one will stop us from approaching the second level and entering Zhang Gutai’s office.”
Kathleen pulled her pistol, readying it in her two hands. A slow exhale. A nod.
“Listen for my signal,” she said. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Juliette.” Kathleen ducked out from underneath the vines.
Dear God, I hope so too.
“As for us—” Juliette turned to Roma. Tied the handkerchief around the lower half her face. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
A thunderous gunshot echoed out from the office building. Three more pops followed in close succession. Glass shattering. Shouts of confusion.
“Let’s go.”
They hurried for the front doors, merging into the commotion without notice. Kathleen wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but that only meant she had been fast at getting herself out of there. She had left behind a scene of general bewilderment, but no panic—people were too concerned with muttering over what they should do, to notice Roma and Juliette hurrying up the stairs. This was more a simple assassination mission than it was a direct confrontation. The faster they could get in and get out, the better it was.
Unfortunately, there were people on the second floor too: two men standing outside Zhang Gutai’s office door. Perhaps they had been asked to guard it. Perhaps Zhang Gutai knew his assassination was coming.
“No,” Roma hissed before Juliette could start forward. “We cannot kill them.”
“Announce your business!” one of the men by the door called lazily.
“They are in the way,” Juliette hissed back to Roma.
The two men by the door were growing alert now. If the cloths over Roma’s and Juliette’s faces weren’t enough to rouse suspicion, the pistols in their hands certainly were. The men started forward fast.
“Leg,” Roma mediated.
“Stomach.”
“Juliette.”
“Fine!”
Juliette aimed and blew holes in the men’s upper thighs. Merciless. They yelled out, collapsed to the ground, and she charged forward. When she struck her palm against the office door, it flew back hard enough to put a dent in the wall.
“Watch out!”
Roma pulled her aside roughly, muttering a prayer under his breath. A red-hot bullet struck the doorjamb where Juliette’s head would have been.
Zhang Gutai stood behind his desk, aiming his gun again. His grip was unsteady. He had beads of sweat dripping down his face, eyes turned to saucers. Caught at last.
“What have I done to you?” Zhang Gutai demanded. He recognized them. Of course he did. It took more than one flimsy cloth to disguise Juliette Cai. “What is your issue here?”
“I have issue with your madness,” Juliette answered, thunderous.
“I do not know what it is you speak of!” Zhang Gutai yelled. “I have nothing to do with—”
Juliette fired. Zhang Gutai looked down, looked at the blotch of red blooming on his white shirt.
“Don’t,” he whispered. His gun fell from his weak grasp. Instead of trying to pick it back up, his hand flopped onto his desk. He closed his hands around a framed photograph of an elderly woman. His mother. “Don’t—you have no quarrel with me.”
“The Larkspur told us everything,” Roma said tightly. His eyes were on the photograph in Zhang Gutai’s hands. “We’re sorry it has to be this way. But it must.”
“The Larkspur?” Zhang Gutai wheezed. Blood loss sent him crashing onto the floor. He swayed, barely holding on to enough life to remain sitting. “That… charlatan? What does… he have to… say—”
Juliette fired again, and the Communist slumped over. His blood soaked the photograph beneath him completely, until his mother’s stoic expression was covered with a sheen of red.
Slowly, Juliette walked over, then nudged his shoulder with her toe to roll him onto his back. His eyes had already glazed over. Juliette turned away, putting her pistol into her pocket. It felt like the moment needed more ceremony, perhaps a solemn air, but all that was present in this room was the cold stink of blood, and Juliette wanted to get away fro
m it as soon as possible.
She would be a callous killer for as long as she was doing something right. She cared for little else.
“Someone’s coming,” Roma warned. He had his head tilted toward the door, listening for the rustle of footsteps bounding up the staircase. “Climb through the window.”
Juliette did as she was told. She clambered one leg out the glass pane and yelled a warning down to Marshall and Benedikt, who startled to see her appear, her neck splattered with dots of red. They were even more startled when she said, “Marshall Seo, catch me,” and dropped down, leaving Marshall a split second to quickly open his arms. Juliette landed with a neat, polite bounce.
“Thank you.”
An alarm started to blare from within the building. On the first sharp note, Roma quickly lowered himself through the window until he was hanging from the ledge by his fingers. When he let go, he managed to land with a firm plop upon the grass.
“Did you do it?” Benedikt asked immediately. “Is the monster dead?”
Just as Roma was about to nod, Kathleen burst around the corner, her breath coming fast.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” she demanded. “I saw you make it to the second floor!”
Juliette blinked. Under the bleary sunlight, her hands were still stained with the evidence of her crime. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I did.”
Kathleen jerked back. She swore softly.
“Then it didn’t work,” she breathed. “The madness. Listen.”
A short, sharp scream. A chorus of rough shrieking. Gunshots, in quick successions.
“No,” Juliette breathed. “Impossible.”
She sprinted forward. Someone called out after her and someone else made a grab for her elbow, but Juliette shook them off, coming around the building and returning to the scene of her crime. She didn’t have to push the front doors, nor as much as reach for them. Through the panel of glass running vertical down the wood, she saw three workers inside tear at their throats, falling in utter synchrony.
“No,” Juliette muttered in horror. “No, no, no—” She kicked the nearby wall. Her shoe scuffed a dirty mark onto the pristine white.
It hadn’t worked.
“Juliette, come on!” Kathleen grabbed her wrist and hauled her back, hauled her to the side of the building once again, right before the doors burst open and those who were yet uninfected ran for safety. Her cousin must have intended for them to keep moving, but Juliette couldn’t do it. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that the White Flowers were looking at her, were watching to see how she would react, and still she could not hold her strength. Her knees grew weak. She gave in to the fatigue without resistance and sank to the soft grass, digging her fingers into the dirt and scrunching, until the cool soil was squirming into her nails.
“Hey!”
Police whistles. Someone must have signaled them upon hearing gunshots. Or a worker inside, having made the call to the nearest station, begging for help. When the uniformed men came into view, however, it was no surprise that they would instead focus on the five gangsters lurking by the building and begin heading over.
On a day like this, as revolution stirred all around the city, the police were itching to make arrests.
“Go,” Roma muttered under his breath to Benedikt and Marshall. “Merge into the alleys until they lose you. We will reconvene on the rooftop of Jade Dragon.”
Jade Dragon was the restaurant not two blocks away from here, easily the tallest building on its street and constantly packed with customers and patrons. The sheer chaos of large restaurants meant that gangsters could often slip in and out of its tall staircases whenever they pleased, climbing to the rooftops and using them for lookouts. Benedikt and Marshall shot off to the west; Kathleen said, “Juliette, come on,” but Juliette refused.
“You go too, Kathleen,” Juliette intoned. “Follow the same plan.”
“What about you—”
“They can arrest you, but they cannot arrest me. They would not dare.”
Kathleen sucked in her cheeks, eyeing Juliette warily, and then Roma, who yet remained, his arms folded. “Be careful,” she whispered, before the three policemen approached and she darted away, gone in a blink.
“Under the jurisdiction of—”
“Scram,” Roma interrupted in Russian. The policemen did not understand him. They did not need to. They only needed to hear the Russian and eye his clothing before realizing that this was the heir of the White Flowers. Then their jaws grew clenched, exchanging terse looks. Then they were forced to back away without another word, hurrying off in the direction Benedikt and Marshall had run in the hopes that an arrest was not entirely lost.
“Juliette,” Roma said when the policemen disappeared. “You have to get up.”
She could not. She would not. She had surpassed anger and rage, moved into numbness instead. She had been stoking the fire in her chest for so long that she had not noticed how intently she had been burning, but now the blaze was extinguished, and she found that nothing remained there except a charred space, hollow where her heart was supposed to be.
“Why should I?” she asked. “The Larkspur tricked us. He tricked us into doing his dirty work.”
With a sigh, Roma dropped to a crouch. He leveled himself with her fallen state. “Juliette…”
“Zhang Gutai was never guilty, yet I executed him,” Juliette went on, hardly listening to Roma. “What did we even achieve? Only more bloodshed—”
“Don’t you dare,” Roma said. “Don’t you dare fall apart now, dorogaya.”
Juliette’s head jerked up. Her breath snagged in her throat, twisting her whole esophagus sour. What did he think he was doing? She was already down. He may as well kick her a few times just to make sure she was dead.
“I shot him,” Juliette told Roma, as if he had not noticed, “in cold blood. He was not hurting me. He begged for his life.”
“We took a calculated risk to save millions. You fired for Alisa. For the smallest chance of saving an innocent life. Get it together. Now.”
Juliette breathed in. She breathed in and in and in. How many more times could she do this? How many more faux monsters would be torn down with unbidden violence in their path toward finding the real one? How was she any different from the killers that lurked in this city—the ones that she was trying to stop?
She didn’t realize she was crying until her tears hit her hand. She didn’t realize that teardrops had started running down her face faster than the pace of her rapid heartbeat until Roma’s stiff posture softened and his hard eyes grew worried.
He reached for her.
“Don’t,” Juliette managed, her breath hitching, her hand rising to knock his fingers back. “I don’t… need your pity.”
Slowly, Roma lowered himself onto the ground until he, too, was kneeling. “It is not my pity you have,” he said. “You made the right choice, Juliette.”
“We hunt the monster to stop it from bringing devastation to this city.” Juliette held her bloody hands out. “But this—this is monstrosity.”
Roma reached for her again. This time Juliette did not stop him. This time he smoothed his thumbs across her cheeks to dry her tears and she leaned into him, her head resting on his chest and his arms wrapping around her—familiar, foreign, fitting.
“A monster,” he said against her hair, “does not mourn.”
“Did you mourn?” Juliette asked, barely audible. She did not need to clarify what she meant. They both saw it in their minds: the explosion, the damage, the blood and the lives and the burning, burning red.
“I mourned,” Roma said just as softly. “I mourned for months, years outside the gates of the cemetery. Yet I don’t regret choosing you. No matter how cruel you think yourself, your heart beats for your people. That’s why you shot him. That’s why you took the chance. Not because you are merciless. Because you have hope.”
Juliette looked up. If Roma turned, even the slightest, they would be nose
to nose.
“I regret that I was ever put in the position to choose,” Roma continued. His words were faint, whispered into the world while the streets roared with sirens, the building beside them teemed with chaos, and policemen along every street corner screamed for order. But Juliette heard him perfectly. “I hate that the blood feud forced my hand, but I can’t—I did what I had to do and you may think me monstrous for it. The feud keeps taking and hurting and killing and still I couldn’t stop loving you even when I thought I hated you.”
Love. Loved.
Hated. Love.
Juliette pulled away, but only to look Roma in the eye, her pulse beating its crescendo. He did not flinch. He met her gaze, steady, unwavering.
In that moment, all Juliette could think was: Please, please, please.
Please don’t break me again.
“So you,” Roma went on, “cannot fool me any longer. You are the same indomitable girl I would have laid my life down to save. I made my choice to believe in you—now you make yours. Will you keep fighting, or will you crumble?”
She had spent a lifetime doing both. She could hardly tell the difference between the times when she was fighting and the times when she was barely holding herself together, crumbled pieces staggering forward step-by-step. Maybe those two were one and the same.
“Answer me something first,” she responded with a whisper.
Roma seemed to brace. He knew. He knew what she was going to ask.
“Do you still love me?”
Roma’s eyes shuttered closed. A long second passed. It seemed that Juliette had misspoken, had come across a crevasse and misjudged her leap, spiriting down, down an endless dark rip—
“Do you not listen to me when I speak?” he answered shakily, his lip quirking up. “I love you. I have always loved you.”
Juliette had thought her heart hollow, but now it was encased with gold. And it seemed certain then that her heart remained functional after all, because now it was bursting, bursting—
“Roma Montagov,” she said fiercely.
Roma seemed to startle at her tone. His eyes grew wide, bordering on concerned. “What?”
