Her father walked close then, and when Juliette continued staring at her feet, he grasped her jaw, bringing her gaze up firmly.
“But we punish traitors,” he finished. His fingers were like steel. “And if Juliette wishes to defect to the White Flowers’ cause, then she may leave and die along with them.”
Lord Cai let go. His hands dropped to his sides, and without another word, he swept out of her bedroom. The door closed behind him with a subdued click that seemed incongruous with the promise he had made. He would not break it. Her father had never broken a promise in his life.
“Māma.”
The word came out as a sob. Like that ragged screech for help in childhood when she had scraped her knee playing outside, summoning her mother to come comfort her.
“Why?” Juliette demanded. “Why do we hate them so much?”
Lady Cai turned away, shifting her attention to the mess on the floor. With her back to Juliette, picking up the brushes and powders, she remained quiet, as if she did not know what—or who—Juliette was talking about.
“There must have been a reason,” Juliette continued, angrily swiping at the prickle in her eyes. “The blood feud has raged on since the last century. What are we fighting for? Why do we kill one another in a never-ending cycle if we do not know what the original slight was? Why must we remain enemies with the Montagovs when nobody remembers why?”
And yet wasn’t that the root of all hatred? Wasn’t that what made it so vicious?
There was never a reason. Never a good one. Never a fair one.
“Sometimes,” Lady Cai said, setting the brushes back onto the vanity, “hatred has no memory to feed off. It has grown strong enough to feed itself, and so long as we do not fight it, it will not bother us. It will not weaken us. Do you understand me?”
Of course Juliette understood. To fight hatred was to upset their way of living. To fight hatred was to deny their name and deny their legacy.
Lady Cai dusted her hands, looking at Juliette’s sullied carpet with little more than vague unsettlement in her eyes. When her gaze flickered over to Juliette herself, the expression turned to a deep, deep sadness.
“You know what you did, Cai Junli,” her mother said. “Do not try to convince me, for I am finished here until you remember yourself.”
Then Lady Cai exited the room too, each click of her heels reverberating tenfold in Juliette’s ears. Juliette stood there in her lonesome, listening as the door was locked from the outside, unable to stop the sob that rose again to her throat.
“I regret nothing!” Juliette screamed, making no move to follow the receding footsteps. She did not bother banging on her door, did not attempt to tire herself out. The only thing that followed her mother out was her voice. “I refuse to remember a falsehood! I defy you!”
The footsteps faded entirely. Only then did Juliette crumple into a ball, squeezing herself as small as she could upon the carpet, and let herself cry, let herself rage and scream into her hands. For the city, for the dead, for the blood that ran in rivers on the streets. For this cursed family, for her cousins.
For Roma.
Juliette choked on her next sob. She thought she had killed the monster of Shanghai. She thought she was hunting new monsters, born of deviant science and greed. She was wrong. There was another monstrous entity in this city, worse than all the others, feeding all the others, rotting this whole place from the inside out, and it would never die until it was starved. Would no one starve hatred? Would no one take it upon themselves to cut off its every source of nourishment?
Enough.
Juliette took in a deep, shaky breath, forcing her tears to come to a staggering stop. When she wiped her eyes clear again, she looked around her room carefully, taking inventory of every item that had not been removed.
“Enough,” she whispered aloud. “That’s enough.”
No matter how thoroughly her heart lay shattered, she would reassemble the parts, even only temporarily, even only to get through the next hour.
Before she was the heir of the Scarlet Gang, she was Juliette Cai.
And Juliette Cai was not going to accept this. She was not going to lie down and let other people tell her what to do.
“Get up. Get up. Okay—get up.” She rose to her feet, her fists tight. Upon her finger, the piece of string sat heavy, soaked with rain and dirt and who knew what else, yet still it clung to her skin with admirable strength.
They had cleared her bedroom—taken the pistol from under her pillow, the revolvers hiding with her clothes, the knives slotted in her bookshelves. The door was indeed locked, but she was not locked in. After all, there was still a balcony adjoined to her room. She could slide the glass aside and jump. She couldn’t circle the house and disrupt the party downstairs—not without weapons—but she could run. Her father had meant it. Exile was an option.
But what was the point? What was the point of running if she had no one to run with? If she had no one to go to? Roma was either already dead or soon to be placed in front of a Scarlet bullet. Juliette was one girl—no power, no army, no means of enacting rescue.
Juliette reached into her wardrobe, retrieving the shoebox sitting under her dresses. Her arms brushed the beads dangling from the fabric, and as the room chimed with a light, musical tinkling, Juliette rocked back and sat down hard on the floor, her fingers braced on either side of the box.
She pulled the lid open. It was as she had remembered. The items remained the same.
A poster, an old train ticket, and a grenade.
The box had sat untouched for so long, a keepsake of knickknacks Juliette had once pulled from the attic because the items looked too glamorous to rot among the broken lampshades and discarded bullet casings. She wondered if the Scarlets had not removed this from her room because they had not thought to open the box, or if it was so absurd to think that she would use a grenade to do damage that they did not bother.
Juliette closed her palm around it. To her left, the reflection in the vanity mimicked her movements, the glass capturing her fretful expression when she glanced up.
“How would the war proceed if I killed them right now?” Juliette asked, speaking to herself, to the mirror, to the city itself as it ground to a halt in this cold, hollow room. “They mingle beneath me, prominent Nationalists and war generals. Maybe Chiang Kai-shek himself has stepped in. I would be a hero. I would save lives.”
A burst of laughter echoed up from the floorboards. Glasses clinked together, toasts given to celebrate mass slaughter. The blood feud had been bad enough, but it was something Juliette believed she could change. Now it had grown to unrecognizable proportions, split bigger than it ever needed to be. Scarlet against White Flower, Nationalist against Communist. Dissolving a blood feud was one thing, but a civil war? She was too small—far too small—to meddle with a war that spanned across the country, that spanned across their whole forsaken history as a nation.
Another burst of laughter, louder this time. Let her drop an explosive to her bedroom floor, and it would send down a direct blast, strike all the people in the living room. Juliette felt the rush of loathing take root in her. She condemned the city for its hate. She condemned her parents, her gang. . . . But she was equally terrible. One final act of violence to end it all. She was angry enough to do it. No more Scarlet legacy. No more Scarlet Gang. If she was dead too, she didn’t need to live with the pain of her terrible act—herself and her parents, in exchange for bringing down everyone else in the house.