“Has there been another letter?”
Lord Cai sighed, lacing his fingers together. He said, “Selin, you must be tired.”
“It is my bedtime, yes,” Kathleen replied easily, taking the cue to leave. She was out in seconds, the office door closing behind her before Juliette could say good night. Her father must know that she would merely fill Kathleen in afterward about what was going on. She supposed it made him feel better to think the rest of the family wasn’t getting involved in this, that the fewer people knew, the less likely it was to explode into a troublesome matter.
“The blackmailer strikes again,” Lord Cai said, finally retrieving an envelope from his desk drawer and passing it to Juliette. “The largest sum yet.”
Juliette reached forward, first examining not the letter inside but the envelope itself. It was the same each time. Utterly plain and remarkable, save for one detail: they were all postmarked from the French Concession.
“Tiān nǎ,” she breathed, pulling out the letter and reading its contents. A truly outrageous amount. But they had to send it. They had to.
She tossed the letter back onto her father’s desk, letting out a tight breath. Back in October, she thought she had killed the monster of Shanghai. She had shot Qi Ren, watched as the bullet studded into his heart and the old man seemed to crumple in relief, freed from the curse that Paul Dexter had set on him. His throat had split open and the mother insect had flown out, landing on the wharf of the Bund with finality.
Then Kathleen found Paul Dexter’s letter—
In the event of my death, release them all.
—and the screaming followed immediately. Juliette had never run faster. All the worst-case scenarios flashed through her mind: five, ten, fifty monsters, ravaging the streets of Shanghai. Each and every one of them a starting point of infection, their insects flying from civilian to civilian until the whole city was dead in the gutters, throats torn to shreds and hands bloody to the wrist. Instead, Juliette found only one dead man—a beggar, by the looks of him—slumped up against the exterior of a police bureau. The screaming had been the shopper who’d spotted him, and by the time Juliette arrived, the small, panicked crowd had already dispersed, wanting to avoid interrogation if the Scarlet Gang became involved.
Dead men on the streets of Shanghai were as common as starving men, desperate men, violent men. But this one had been murdered, his throat slit right down the middle, and next to him, pinned to the wall with the bloody knife that did it, was the insect that had flown out of Qi Ren.
To any other observer, or to the police detective who would later examine the scene, it was nonsensical. To Juliette, the message was clear. Someone was out there, holding on to the other insects that Paul Dexter created. They knew what the insects did and the damage they could wreak if released.
The first blackmail letter, demanding a sum of money in exchange for the city’s safety, came a week later. They had been coming ever since.
“Your thoughts, daughter?” Lord Cai said now, his arms relaxed on either side of his chair. He was watching Juliette carefully, cataloging her reaction to the demand. He asked for her thoughts, but it was plain that her father had already made up his mind. This was merely a test to ensure that Juliette’s judgment aligned with the correct course of action. To ensure that she was a good heir, fit for leading the Scarlet Gang.
“Send it,” Juliette replied, swallowing the tremor in her voice before it could escape. “Until our spies figure out where the hell these letters are coming from and I can put the blackmailer six feet underground, we keep them happy.”
Lord Cai remained quiet for a second, then another. He reached for the letter, let it dangle between his fingers.
“Very well,” her father said. “We send it.”
Alisa had fallen back into her old habits, eavesdropping in the rafters. She was crammed inside that ceiling space above her father’s office again, having crawled down from a broken crevasse between the drywall in the sitting room of the third floor.
“Ouch,” she muttered, moving the weight of her body off her knee. Either she had grown taller in these last few months, or she still wasn’t fully recovered from lying in a coma for weeks. She used to be able to squeeze herself small enough that she could squirm along these rafters, then drop into the hallway outside her father’s office when she wanted to leave. Now her limbs felt awkward, too stiff. She tried to lean down, but her balance tilted immediately.
“Shit,” Alisa whispered, gripping the rafter hard. She was thirteen now. She was allowed to curse.
Below, her father was deep in discussion with Dimitri: him behind his desk, Dimitri seated with his feet up. Their voices, unfortunately, were soft. But Alisa had sharp hearing.
“Curious, is it not?” Lord Montagov asked. He had something in his hands—perhaps a notecard, perhaps an invitation. “No threat, nor violent action. Merely a demand for a sum of money.”
“My lord,” Dimitri said evenly. “If I may, I would argue that the message is rather threatening.”
Lord Montagov scoffed. “What? This old line?” He flipped the paper over, and Alisa confirmed that it was indeed a notecard—thick and cream-colored. Expensive. “Pay up, or the monster of Shanghai resurrects. It is tomfoolery. Roma destroyed that wretched monster.”
Alisa swore she saw Dimitri’s jaw twitch.
“I hear that the Scarlets have already received multiple threats, starting from months prior,” Dimitri insisted. “They have paid the amount demanded each time.”
“Ha!” Lord Montagov turned toward his window, opting to observe the street below. “How are we to know it is not the Scarlets pulling this, a scheme to loosen the gold in our pockets?”
“It is not,” Dimitri replied surely. A beat passed. Then he added, “My source reports that Lord Cai believes the threat to be real.”
“Interesting,” Lord Montagov said.
“Interesting,” Alisa echoed up in the rafters, so quietly that she was audible only to the dust motes. How would Dimitri know what Lord Cai believed?
“Then the Scarlet Gang are merely made up of fools, which we have known all along.” Lord Montagov threw the card to the floor. “Forget it. We are not paying an anonymous blackmailer. Let them do their worst.”
“I—”
“It is marked from the French Concession,” Lord Montagov interrupted, before Dimitri could get another word in edgewise. “What are the French to do? Will they walk themselves here and intimidate us in their ironed suits?”
Dimitri had no further leeway to argue. He merely leaned back into his seat, lips pursed, thinking for a long moment.
“Indeed,” he said eventually. “Whatever you believe to be correct, then.”
The conversation turned to the White Flower clientele lists, and Alisa frowned, wriggling along the rafter. Once she was far enough from her father’s office not to be overhead, she slowly eased herself down a thin gap in the wall to emerge in the hallway. This house was a Frankenstein-esque experiment in architecture: multiple apartment blocks mashed together with barely finished stitching. There were so many nooks and crannies above and below various rooms that Alisa was surprised only she alone used them to get from place to place. At the very least, she was surprised no White Flower had accidentally pressed up too close to a wall and fallen through the floorboards when they trod upon a loose tiling.