A honk came from afar. Cars, rumbling down the residential driveways.
She merely thought she had found a companion. An equal. Someone to see her—her, just as she was, not a Scarlet, not a dancer, but Rosalind.
It was her fault for thinking that she was enough to change someone. Monsters and money and the city on strings—up against Rosalind, who hadn’t even wanted to go along with it in the first place, who had only done so out of hope that he would be happy once he had the city, that they could be happy and no one could touch them. The world in one palm and her in another.
But someone who wanted the world would never stop before they had it, everything else be damned. It was hardly a competition.
She was foolish to think that her friends could be kept safe, that she could be the hand guiding him away from chaos. She had never possessed any power here. She had never mattered. Days had passed in that safe house with no change. In the end, this was the harsh truth: Rosalind had left everyone she cared about for someone who was not coming. Rosalind had hurt everyone she cared about, risked their very lives, all for someone who was long gone.
Rosalind tore her pistol from her pocket and shot at the door handle. The sound grated on her ears as the bullet struck once, twice, three times. The walls seemed to shrink from her, smooth silver and gold wallpaper inching back from the violence rarely brought into places like these.
The handle fell. The door inched open. And when Rosalind nudged into the apartment, she found it entirely vacated.
She couldn’t help it. She laughed. She laughed and she laughed, tracing her eyes along every missing thing. The apartment had never been well decorated to begin with, but now the papers on the table had disappeared; the maps atop the grand piano were gone. When she peered into the bedroom, even the sheets were stripped.
“We can live here forever, can’t we?”
She had twirled with those sheer curtains, splaying the lace across her head like some bridal veil. Had thrown her arms up, delirious in her happiness.
“Don’t get too excited, love. We’re only here until we rise higher.”
“Must we? Can we not live a quaint existence? Can you not be a good man?”
“A good man? Oh, Roza—” Rosalind trailed her hands along the bookshelf, finding only dust, even though it could not have been more than a few days since the worn paperbacks were cleared away. “Ya chelovek bol’nói. Ya zloi chelovek. Neprivlekatel’nyi ya chelovek.”
When the monsters were sent in for the Scarlet vaccine, she had said she didn’t think she could do this anymore. Had that prompted the decision to abandon her? Or was it because she had gotten caught, because she could no longer supply Scarlet information?
“I would have abandoned them for you,” she admitted to the empty room. She had always known who he was. She had always known him as a White Flower. The truth was that she hadn’t cared. The blood feud did not stoke a fury in her heart like it did to others in Shanghai. She had not grown up here, had no ties to the people. The fighting on the streets seemed like a show she might catch in the theaters; the gangsters running their errands were interchangeable faces she could never keep track of. Kathleen had a kind heart, Juliette had blood ties, but Rosalind? What had this family ever given Rosalind to deserve her loyalty? Incompetence from her father and irreverence from the Cais. Year after year, the bitterness festered so deeply that it had developed into a physical hurt—one that stung as much as the current injuries on her back.
Had they just accepted her, had they seen her for what she could do, she could have offered the Scarlet Gang her life. Instead, they gave her scars and wounds—she was marked if she bit her tongue and stayed; she was marked if she tried to make something of herself and strayed. Scars upon scars upon scars. She was a girl with nothing else now.
Rosalind walked to the desk and was startled to find a slip of paper pinned to the wood of the table. For a second, as her heart leaped to her throat, she thought it might be an explanation, instructions on where she could go now, something to say that she had not been left behind.
Instead, as she drew closer, she read:
Goodbye, dear Rosalind. Better to part now than when the havoc really begins.
He had known she would come looking. He had long planned to clear out the apartment and leave her with nothing but a pitiful note. Rosalind tore the paper out, bringing it closer to her eyes as if she might be misreading the messy scrawl. When the havoc really begins? What more was coming? What more would descend on the city?
Rosalind turned around, facing the apartment windows. She watched the trees wave, watched the sun beat on.
And in that very moment, a loud scream tore through the streets, warning about a monster on the loose.
“See anything yet?” Roma asked, putting aside the eighth folder he had finished going through.
“Rest assured,” Marshall replied, “if we find something, we’re not going to remain silent and wait patiently for you to ask.”
Without looking, Benedikt reached over with a wad of paper and thudded Marshall over the head. Marshall nudged out with his foot to kick Benedikt, and Roma grinned, so pleased to have the three of them together again he hardly cared that they were cramped in the tiny Scarlet safe house where Marshall was living, papers spread out on every inch of flooring. No matter how small, he would always be fond of this apartment now. It had kept Marshall safe.
It had brought Juliette back to him.
“Don’t be a clown,” Benedikt said. Though he was also flipping through a folder with one hand, he held a pencil in the other, scribbling miniature sketches on the discarded pieces of paper. “Focus, or we’re not going to finish going through the profiles.”
There was a sect within the White Flowers working with the Communists; to find a lead, they would have to sift through all the information they had on their own gang. Receipts, import logs, export logs—gangsters who ran anything on behalf of the White Flowers had to keep an account of their ongoings. Technically, at least. In truth, it was not as if gangsters were very good at bureaucratic records; that was why they were gangsters and not politicians. When Roma carried over the boxes, he had managed most of the haul on his own, with Benedikt holding only one so that Roma’s vision was not obscured.
“I cannot help it.” Marshall threw the file in his hands aside, picking up another with a sigh. “I’ve been bottling up my wisecracks for months, and now they must come out all at once.”
Benedikt scoffed. He thwacked Marshall again, this time with his pencil, but Marshall grabbed his whole hand instead, grinning. Roma blinked, the paper in front of him suddenly the least interesting thing in the room.
He met his cousin’s eyes. Does he know? Roma mouthed.
As Marshall let go and turned to fetch the last file in his pile, Benedikt mimed a slash across his throat. You shut your mouth.
Benedikt!
I mean it, Benedikt mouthed furiously. Stay out of this.
But—
There was almost an audible clack from Roma’s jaw when he snapped his mouth shut, his teeth biting together the moment Marshall turned around again. Marshall looked up, sensing something in the air.
“Did something happen?” he asked, bewildered.
Roma cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he lied. “I—uh—heard something.” He pointed in the direction of the door. “Maybe off Boundary—”