Juliette spat a curse. “Who was present, Alisa? Your father? Inner circle?”
By now Alisa had gotten to her feet. Juliette’s concern was scaring her. “No, not Papa. But Roma and Dimitri—”
A bullet went off in the distance, outside the temple walls. To anyone else, it could have sounded like a rickshaw crash or a food cart coming up hard against the sidewalk. But Juliette knew better. She shot off, tearing through the courtyard, already reaching for the weapons on her body. By the time she was approaching the gate of the temple walls, the scene was already unfolding before her: twenty, thirty gangsters, and civilians—so many civilians nearby, looking stunned.
Too many civilians for gunfire. Too many likely victims of stray bullets. The gangsters in the brawl had realized too, else there wouldn’t be so many going at hand-to-hand combat now, else there wouldn’t be a White Flower half strangling Tyler, almost pressing her cousin to the floor.
Without slowing in her run, Juliette jumped over the threshold of the temple entrance and pulled the knife sheathed at her thigh. When she threw, the blade pierced into the White Flower’s neck smoothly, striking its target with nary a sound before the White Flower pitched sideways and fell.
“You’re welcome,” Juliette snapped, coming to a stop in front of Tyler and holding out a hand.
Tyler grinned. He gripped her fingers and stood. “Thank you, dearest cousin. Duck.”
Juliette dove to the side without questioning it. A White Flower lunged forward, and Tyler engaged, but as Juliette spun around, still locked in her crouch, her gaze shot through the chaos and locked right with another figure who had paused in the fray.
“Tā mā de,” she muttered. Roma.
A sudden prickle of an idea occurred to her. As Roma marched forward, locked on her for a target and probably intent on running a dagger through her heart, Juliette formed her plan. He wouldn’t respond to her messages, wouldn’t work with her any longer, but she needed him. Who better to know whether there was a White Flower sect collaborating with the Communists than Roma Montagov, heir of the White Flowers? If he would speak to her only to fight the blood feud, then Juliette would use the blood feud.
Juliette shot to her feet, trying to make a break for it. She could cut an easy path through the brawl. She could stay low and dart through that empty pocket of space. . . .
Someone grabbed her by the back of the neck. Juliette sensed a blade—or something—about to come down on her, and her hands launched up. She pulled, yanking the arm over her shoulder until she heard a socket pop. Her attacker shouted. Just as he tried to bring the knife in his other hand down, Juliette darted out of the way and spun around, pressing her forearm against her attacker’s neck, both of her feet braced against the concrete road.
It wasn’t Roma who had grabbed her; it was Dimitri Voronin. A quick snap of her eyes confirmed Roma was still trying to fight through the thick of the brawl, but he was on the move toward her.
“Juliette Cai,” Dimitri greeted, acting like they were exchanging pleasantries. “I heard you grew up a socialite. Where did you learn to grapple like a street urchin?”
“I gather you don’t know much about socialites.”
Using his height against him, she hooked a foot behind his knee, grabbed a fistful of his hair, and slammed Dimitri’s head into the ground. She kept moving, emerging from the fight and scanning the temple walls quickly. Alisa had followed her out, peeking from the archway of the temple entrance.
Juliette shot a look over her shoulder. Roma was still watching her. Good.
“Come with me.”
Alisa blinked, taken aback by Juliette’s sudden appearance before her. “What?”
Without waiting for an answer, Juliette hauled Alisa by the arm and took off.
Twenty-Three
Juliette pulled Alisa back into the courtyard. Briefly, she thought she caught Rosalind and Kathleen out of the corner of her eye, but her cousins needed to stay by her mother’s side, and so they did not come after her, nor ask what she was doing.
“I promise I’m not going to hurt you.” Juliette glanced over her shoulder again. Roma had made it out of the crowd, a splatter of blood on his collar. His eyes were ablaze, vivid in their violence. “I just need to bait your brother somewhere quiet. Run!”
They ran until Juliette found a thin alleyway. She shoved Alisa in fast, sparing no time before she kicked several trash bags, stacking them tall so they acted like a barricade. Then she pushed Alisa to hide, slotted behind the bags and out of view.
It wasn’t that she was trying to scare Roma. She simply had a feeling that Alisa didn’t need to see whatever was going to happen next.
Roma came into view, his chest rising up and down from exertion. With one glance at the tight grip he had on the pistol in his hand, Juliette knew she was right.
“Why are you doing this?” Roma spat. His expression was hateful—but his words were tortured. Like he wished she would just disappear instead, so that he didn’t have to deal with her, so that he didn’t have to be vengeful. “What the hell are you doing?”
Juliette held out her hands. As if showing that she was unarmed would make any difference.
“Listen to me for a second,” she pleaded. “I have information. About the blackmailer. It might be coming from within the White Flowers. I’m here to help—”
Juliette flinched, narrowly sidestepping his first shot.
“I was going to make it quick,” Roma intoned. “As a mercy. For what we once were.”
“Will you listen to me?” Juliette snapped. She sprang forward, and the gun went off again, missing her, but so barely that she felt the heat skim her shoulder. His pistol was still smoking when she closed her hand around the middle of the barrel. Roma tried to shoot again, but by then Juliette had turned the pistol skyward, letting him empty out three bullets before she thumped a hand hard on the inside of Roma’s elbow. His arm slackened, and she threw the gun out of his grip.
“This wasn’t hard for you to understand a month ago,” Juliette hissed. “The city is in danger. I can help you.”
“And you know what I have realized since then?” His hand darted into his pocket for another gun, and Juliette tackled him fast, throwing him to the ground of the alley and using her two hands to pin his arm to the floor. The move was familiar, like that first time Roma ambushed her near Chenghuangmiao, but if the memory meant anything to him, Roma didn’t show it.
“I have realized,” he continued, keeping his arm still for that moment, “I do not care about this city, or the danger it brings onto itself. I cared for people, and now the people are gone.”
He kicked out, and Juliette rolled away to avoid the hit, swallowing her wince of pain when she landed hard on her elbows and her forehead nearly smacked into the rough wall of the alley. Roma was up in the blink of an eye, looming over her with the gun, and she didn’t think; she just lunged. This was a true fight now—vicious and unflinching. Each time Roma tried to shoot, Juliette tried to disarm, but he had not known her so long for nothing, and he predicted her moves well enough that Juliette’s head was soon spinning from colliding against the concrete ground multiple times. Throwing herself out of harm’s way too fast and too hard was painful, but it would sure as hell be more painful if she didn’t avoid his quick hits and strikes.