Marshall finally entered Benedikt’s room and carefully set him onto his bed. Now that they were safe, the exertion of his kidnapping task caught up at once, and Marshall rested his hands on his knees, breathing hard. He did not move until his heart stopped thudding, tense in fear that the sound was so loud it would stir Benedikt awake, but the other boy remained still, his chest rising and falling in the barest of motions.
Marshall dropped to a crouch. He watched him—resolute just to watch him—like he had done these past few months, a pair of eyes following Benedikt’s every move in fear that Benedikt would do something foolish. It was strange to be so close again when he had gotten used to being a shadow. Strange to be near enough that Marshall could reach out with his fingers—and suddenly his hand was hovering forward, brushing a blond curl out of Benedikt’s face. He shouldn’t. Benedikt could wake upon disturbance, and the last thing Marshall needed was to break his most important promise to Juliette.
“How mighty you are,” he whispered quietly. “I am grateful that our roles are not switched, for I would have dove headfirst into the Huangpu should I be left in this world without you.”
Before the White Flowers, Marshall’s childhood had been dreary hallways and snatches of fresh air when he managed to wander out. If his mother grew too occupied with her dressmaking, Marshall was trekking into the fields behind the house, skipping stones on the shallow creeks and scraping moss from the rocks. There was no one else for miles—no neighbors, no kids his age to play with. Only his mother hunched over her sewing machine day after day, her gaze caught out the window, waiting for his father to return.
She was dead now. Marshall had found her body, cold and still one morning, tucked in bed as if she were merely frozen in sleep.
A soft sigh. Marshall’s hand stilled, but Benedikt continued breathing evenly, his eyes closed. Abruptly, Marshall stood, tightening his fists in reminder to himself. He was not supposed to be here. A promise was a promise, and Marshall was a man of his word.
“I miss you,” he whispered, “but I haven’t left you. Don’t give up on me, Ben.”
His eyes were burning. Staying here a second longer would undo him. Like a curtain being drawn across the stage, Marshall stood up and trailed out from his former apartment, fading back into the darkness of the night.
Twenty
Benedikt awoke in the morning with his head pounding something awful. It was the glare of light in his eyes that had roused him out of sleep, and it was the glare of light now worsening the ache at the base of his skull, the feeling reverberating outward and down his spine like some skeletal menace was pinching at his nerves.
“Christ,” he muttered, lifting a hand to block out the sun. Why hadn’t he pulled his bedroom blinds before going to sleep?
Benedikt bolted upright. When had he even gone to sleep?
The moment he started to move, his shoulder pulled with a sharp discomfort, and he glanced down to find a small pool of blood on his sheets—entirely dried by now, having seeped from the shallow wound. Benedikt rolled his arms around gingerly, testing the extent of his injuries. He was stiff but otherwise fully functioning, at his usual level, anyway. The wound had closed on its own, and he had no clue how long he had even been lying here, letting his body knit itself back together.
Flabbergasted, Benedikt pulled his legs to his chest, resting an arm on his knees and pressing the flat of his hand into his forehead, trying to push the headache back. He tried to visualize the last thing he could remember, and all he saw were bullets in the night, the raging inferno of the safe house in the background. He had been charging toward a Scarlet, pistol in his hand, and then . . .
Nothing. He had no idea what happened next. He didn’t even know where his gun had gotten to.
“How is that possible?” he asked aloud. The house did not answer him. The house only stirred with his voice, shifting and exhaling in the way that all small spaces did every once in a while.
Suddenly, so viciously that Benedikt was almost bowled over, he caught the faintest whiff of a scent—of gunpowder and pepper and deep, musky smoke.
Benedikt shot to his feet. Marshall. The pain came to him all over again, like the first morning he had awoken and remembered, remembered that this apartment was empty, that Marshall’s room was empty, that his body had been left to cool on the floor of an abandoned hospital. Benedikt was losing it. He could smell him. As if he had been here. As if he were not gone.
With a ragged inhale, Benedikt yanked a new jacket out of his wardrobe and tugged it on, hardly bothering to go easy on his throbbing shoulder. What was the point? What was one more point of pain against the whole smorgasbord? He was a damn walking collection point for grievances and grief.
He closed all the doors in his apartment—three times—then walked the short distance to the main Montagov residence, letting himself in. Before any of the White Flowers in the living room could take notice of him, Benedikt was slinking up the stairs, climbing to the fourth floor. Unprompted, he walked into Roma’s bedroom, shutting the door after himself.
Roma jumped, immediately whirling around on his desk chair. He had a cotton pad in his hand and a mirror in the other. There was a wound on his lip, running scarlet red.
“I was looking for you all night,” Roma snapped, throwing the mirror down. “Where the hell did you go? I thought you were dead in a ditch!”
Benedikt slumped onto Roma’s bed. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t”—Roma stood, then rested his hands on his knees, his voice pitching up ten octaves—“remember?”
“I guess I hit my head and got myself home.”
“You were there one second and nowhere the next! The fight hadn’t even dispersed before you were gone. I almost got flayed because I kept looking around and searching—”
Benedikt got to his feet too, cutting his cousin off. “I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
Roma threw his hands into the air. He was exerting so much energy in that one motion that his cheeks flushed with color. “I am hardly arguing with you.”
Silence. Roma’s expression shifted from annoyed to thoughtful to grim within the span of seconds as the two Montagovs stared at each other, having a silent conversation with nothing but facial expressions. They had grown up together. No matter how far they were pulled apart, the language of childhood was not one easily forgotten.
“You can’t keep working with Juliette,” Benedikt finally said, tearing right into the wound of the matter. “Not after this. Not after what they did to us.”
Roma turned away, placing his hands behind his back now. He was buying time. He only paced when he couldn’t puzzle through his answers.
“This whole thing was orchestrated,” Roma said in lieu of an answer. “The blackmailer struck again, had us think the Scarlets were responsible, had the Scarlets think we were—”
“I know it was orchestrated. I’m the one who figured it out,” Benedikt cut in, seconds away from giving his cousin a hefty shake. What part of this was hard to understand? What part of this was hard to see? “But her people chose to set those fires. Her people burned children to death.”
Roma swiveled around. “Juliette is not her people.”