What had gotten her there was her birth.
“It hardly makes sense,” Juliette whispered. She reached out with her fingers. The cold press of the mirror sank into her skin. “Be angry at me for how we were born. Be angry that you were born a Lang. But you never wanted Scarlet heirdom. You never wanted the city. You wanted to be important. You wanted adoration.”
So why would she be the blackmailer? How did gathering guns and money help? How did lurking in the shadows with monsters and madness bring her anything that she might desire?
“Lái rén!” Juliette called.
A maid popped her head in immediately at the summons. She must have been waiting nearby, hearing the ruckus Juliette was making. “How may I help, Miss Cai?”
“Can you make a call to Kathleen?” Juliette waved her arm, trying to think. The Communist strongholds kept moving. The gangsters were still trying to dissolve them at the Nationalists’ command, but otherwise it had been relatively quiet. The Communists, too, were waiting to see how this would turn out. “She should be at the . . . Mai Teahouse? Or maybe—”
“Can’t, xiǎojiě,” the maid interrupted politely before Juliette could waste more time guessing Kathleen’s location. “Since the takeover, the telephone control centers have not been restaffed yet. Some lines near the railway station are down too as they fix the tracks.”
Juliette cursed under her breath. So communication across the city was piss-poor. Without workers at the control centers, there was no one to direct and connect calls.
“Fine,” Juliette grumbled. “I will send a messenger the old-fashioned way, then.”
Rosalind’s room had been cold, but Juliette didn’t realize she was shivering until she returned to the warm hallway again, hurrying down the steps and into the living room. As soon as she started to scribble a note by the tables, the front door opened, and Kathleen stepped in.
“Kathleen!”
Kathleen didn’t hear her. She continued walking, her eyes glazed. She looked deep in thought.
Juliette set the pen down, hurrying into the first-floor hallway in pursuit. “Kathleen!”
Still no response. Juliette finally got close enough to set her hand on her cousin’s shoulder.
“Biǎojiě!”
At last Kathleen turned around, registering Juliette’s presence with a start. She put a hand to her heart, her black gloves fading into her deep blue qipao.
“You scared me,” Kathleen said breathlessly.
“I called your name at least three times!”
Kathleen blinked. “Did you?”
“Well—” Juliette looked around. There was no one else in the hallway, so she joked, “Technically not?”
Kathleen quirked her brow. Juliette waved a hand, seeing that she was getting sidetracked, and hooked her arm through her cousin’s, dragging her back out into the living room and up the stairs. As they walked, she talked as fast as she could, covering what Roma had told her and what conclusion she had come to, ending with how she had run home immediately and started searching through Rosalind’s things, only to find nothing upon her desk.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Kathleen said, coming to a firm stop at the top of the staircase, the two of them on the second floor, right outside Lord Cai’s office. It was presently empty. He was out somewhere: maybe in the Concessions, gauging the temperament of the foreigners; maybe meeting with Chiang Kai-shek himself, drawing up the final collaboration plans between Scarlets and Kuomintang.
“You were looking for a slip of paper on her desk?”
Juliette nodded. “It may have been moved since I last saw it, but she had so much paper there, and now there’s nothing—”
“They’re all in my room!” Kathleen exclaimed. “Juliette, I’ve been sifting through them for days, trying to find clues for where she went.”
Juliette stared at her cousin for a long moment. Then she made fists and pretended to thud them down on Kathleen, raining light blows on her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me? I spent so long digging through her room!”
“Tell you?” Kathleen echoed, slapping her hands at Juliette’s fists. “How was I to know you would need something among those papers?”
“Oh, hush—” Juliette windmilled her arms, gesturing for Kathleen to lead on. They hurried, almost ramming into a servant, before piling into Kathleen’s room, where the curtains stirred with the open window. Juliette could hardly remember the last time she had come in here; she couldn’t remember the last time she had sat down among Kathleen’s magazines and shoe racks, upon the thick quilt piled on her bed. It was always in and out, poking a head through to call her cousin to attention, or it was Juliette’s room where they congregated.
“Voilà,” Kathleen said, pulling Juliette from her brief reverie. With a quiet “oof!” Kathleen dug forth an arm’s cradle of papers from her shelf and tossed it all atop her bed. Ink and prints glimmered under the late-afternoon sun streaking through the window, and Juliette got to work, sifting through the papers. She only wanted the list. Then she would know if Pierre was a mere coincidence. Maybe they could even find Rosalind by finding one of the names on the list.
Just as Juliette’s eye snagged on a smaller piece of paper at the corner of Kathleen’s bedspread, there was a loud knock on the door downstairs. The sound reverberated through the house. Curious, Kathleen walked to her doorway and peered out, listening while Juliette lunged for the paper and shook it from the pile.
“It’s this!” Juliette cried. “Kathleen, it’s the list!”
“Wait, wait. Hush for a second,” Kathleen chided, pressing her finger to her lips.
Juliette tilted her head right as the voice wafted up:
“An attack! There’s a monster attack in the city!”
Deep in the French Concession, where the city remained yet quiet, Rosalind was making a racket trying to get into an apartment on Avenue Joffre. She could see people passing on the street below her, but the duplex walls were thick, and the glass of its windows muffled the sound. Even the gardens below were rustling quietly with the wind, green shrubbery and yellow flowers entwining together. So peaceful with its own business, like every person she had passed on her way here. She hated it. She wanted them all to burn, to suffer as she was suffering.
“Open this door,” she demanded. Her voice bounced in the corridor. No amount of polished tiles and chandeliers could soften her pitch or her near hysterics. “Is this how it’s going to be? Has it all been a lie to you?”
Rosalind knew the answer. Yes. It was. Like some pitiful creature, she had ensnarled herself in a trap, let herself be sheared and skinned and slaughtered, and now the hunter was walking away with the job well done. She had been waiting in one of their other Concession safe houses for the past week, sending word along that she wanted to run. He had said he would come for her; she just needed to be patient as he finished up his business.
“Goddammit.” Rosalind gave up on the door, her arms trembling with exertion. It wasn’t love that she had chased—at least not in the physical sense. If all she had wanted was a warm body, she had her pick at the burlesque club: an unending list of men who would throw themselves at her for consideration. She didn’t care about that. She never had.