And Benedikt snapped. “Juliette let your mother die! Juliette killed Marshall!”
His voice crashed across the room with the same intensity of a cannon, landing with complete devastation. Roma rocked like he had been physically hit, and Benedikt, too, clutched his stomach, bearing the kickback of his words.
That—that was the central point which they could not forgive. Even mothers could be forgiven, in a city soaked in blood. But Marshall Seo could not be.
“I know,” Roma spat. The volume came unwillingly, like he hadn’t wanted to shout, but that was the only way this conversation could be tolerated. “I know, Benedikt. God, don’t you think I know?”
Benedikt laughed. It was the most humorless sound, somehow blunt and bladed at once. “You tell me. Because you sure act like everything can be forgotten, gallivanting off with her like this.”
“He was my friend too. I know you two were a hell of a lot closer, but don’t act like I didn’t care.”
“You don’t get it.” Benedikt couldn’t think past the roar in his head. Could hardly breathe past the twist in his throat. “You just don’t get it.”
“What, Benedikt? What could I possibly not get—”
“I loved him!”
Across the room, Roma exhaled out once, letting the rest of his anger go in that short breath. Quick as his surprise came, it was gone in the next beat, like he was kicking himself for being surprised at all. Benedikt, meanwhile, put his hand to his throat, like he could swallow his words, could return them inside his lungs where they once lived undisturbed. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have said anything at all . . . but he had said it. And he didn’t want to take it back. He meant it.
“I loved him,” Benedikt said again, softly this time, only to feel what those words tasted like on his tongue a second time.
He had known all along, hadn’t he? It was only that he could not say it.
When Roma looked over, his eyes were glistening. “This city would have destroyed you for that.”
“It has destroyed me anyway,” Benedikt replied.
It had always taken, and taken, and taken. And this time, it took too much.
Roma strode toward him. For half a second, Benedikt considered that Roma was coming to attack him, but instead, his cousin drew him into a fierce hug, arms as steady as steel.
Slowly, Benedikt returned the embrace. Doing so felt like seizing a gasp of his childhood, plainer days when his biggest worry was the sparring mat and whether he was going to get the wind kicked out of him. It never mattered even if he did. Roma always helped him back up again.
“I’ll kill her,” Roma whispered into the quiet of the room. “On my life, I swear it.”
Twenty-One
March 1927
Juliette slammed down the telephone receiver, letting out the faintest scream. She sounded so much like a whistling teakettle that one of the maids at the end of the hallway peered over her shoulder, checking if the sound had come from the kitchen.
With a sigh, Juliette retreated from the telephone, her fingers red from the excessive cord twirling. At this point the switchboard operators probably recognized her by voice alone, given she was calling so many times a day. She had no choice. What else was she to do? Suffice it to say, after Tyler’s arson, their cooperation with the White Flowers had ended, and when Juliette asked her father if it would not be beneficial to meet at least once more, her father had thinned his lips and waved her off. She couldn’t comprehend why Lord Cai would be eager to work with the White Flowers one moment, and when Juliette was finally onto something—when she needed their resources to find the identity of the Frenchman who had transformed into a monster—suddenly it was no good working with the enemy.
Who was the one whispering into her father’s ear? There were too many people coming and going from his office to ever begin making a list. Had they been infiltrated by White Flowers? Was it the Nationalists?
“Hey.”
Juliette jumped, her elbow banging against the jamb of her bedroom door. “Jesus.”
“It’s Kathleen, actually, but I appreciate the holiness,” Kathleen said from upon Juliette’s bed. She flipped her magazine. “You look stressed.”
“Yes, I am stressed, biǎojiě. How perceptive of you.” Juliette pulled her pearl earrings out, setting them onto her vanity and massaging her lobes. It turned out that wearing earrings and pressing a receiver to her ear for hours at a time did not go well together. “Had I known you were home, I would have roped you into helping me.”
At this, Kathleen closed her magazine, sitting up quickly. “Do you need my help?”
Juliette shook her head. “I jest. I have it handled.”
For the past week, since the White Flower safe house burned to the ground and Roma hadn’t responded to any of her delivered messages, Juliette had been calling every French hotel in their directory, asking a series of the same questions. Was any guest acting peculiar? Was anyone making a mess in their rooms? Leaving behind what might look like animal tracks? Making too many noises at random hours of the night? Anything—anything—that might signal someone keeping control of monsters or turning into a monster themselves, but Juliette had gotten nothing but false leads and drunks.
She heaved a long exhale. At present, gravel was crunching from somewhere outside, beyond Juliette’s balcony doors. When Kathleen walked over, peering through the glass, she reported, “That looks like your father coming home.”
Seconds later, Juliette identified the sound of tires rolling down the driveway.
“You know what strikes me as strange?” she asked suddenly. The front door opened and closed. A burst of voices downstairs signaled the arrival of visitors accompanying her father’s return, interrupting an otherwise leisurely late morning. “There has only been one attack thus far, two if we count the train. And it is awful of me, but I cannot help but feel as though there should be more.”
“But there have been sightings,” Kathleen said. She leaned up against the balcony glass. “Numerous sightings.”
“Largely at the workers’ strikes,” Juliette countered.
The first time, she had brushed it off. Roma thought it to be a rumor; she had thought the same. Only now the rumors were coming from police officers and gangsters, more and more of them arguing that they were unable to defend their post—defend against the striking workers as they tore down their factories and stormed the streets—because they had spotted a monster in the crowd.
“I don’t know,” she went on. “I imagine releasing insects would spread fear much faster than mere sightings.”
Kathleen shrugged. “We have labeled this person a blackmailer for a reason,” she said. “It is not Paul Dexter. The purpose isn’t chaos. The purpose is money and resources.”
But still, Juliette bit down on the inside of her cheeks. Something did not sit right with her. It was like she was looking directly at a picture and seeing something else because someone had already told her what to look for. Just as she had charged into a wonton shop without thinking about how it didn’t make any sense for it to be a vaccine center. She had merely assumed from the beginning—from the moment she laid eyes on that flyer—because that had been the case once before.