“Call it off,” Marshall demanded. His voice turned to steel. He hated when he sounded like this. It wasn’t him. “Call it off now.”
“I can delay it,” General Shu said evenly. “I can continue delaying it. But I cannot call it off. No one has that power alone.”
Marshall’s fists tightened. He imagined marching out right now, through the line of soldiers, past the tall, tall walls bordering the mansion. . . .
“So you tell me as if I should be grateful?” he asked. “You tell me as if I should bless the Kuomintang that they are only soon to be dead?”
General Shu was not bothered by Marshall’s outburst. He never was. “I tell you so you realize what is left out there. Your former gangsters whose lives hang on a thread. Your Scarlet heir under her father’s thumb, your White Flower heir with nothing left under his command. What remains for you? The only place where you are needed is here. As the Kuomintang leadership flock into the city, as the number of meetings rise, as they look to see where the next generation of capable leaders may stem from—you are needed.”
The telegram crinkled under Marshall’s fingers. He was biting the inside of his cheeks so hard that he could taste the metallic tang of blood. The White Flowers were crumbling. The White Flowers hardly qualified as a gang any longer, never mind an empire that could exert power against the city.
“You cannot help your friends by running out,” General Shu continued. “But you can help by staying with me. I am willing to train you in your studies, your potential for leadership. I am willing to bring you up the chain of command, to be my son in proper public view.”
A Nationalist prodigy. An obedient son, one who had stayed in the house that day he found his mother dead, who hadn’t fled the very second he envisioned living only with his stranger of a father. He wondered how much of his past he needed to erase, whether it was his history as a gangster or his history flirting with boys that would be more of a scandal.
“Do you promise?” Marshall asked hoarsely. “We can save my friends? You will help me?”
You will not abandon me? You will not leave me to fend for myself?
General Shu nodded firmly, rising to his feet too. “We can be a family again, Marshall, so long as you do not fight me. We could do grand things, make grand change.”
Marshall released the telegram, let it flutter back upon the table.
“I will keep your friends safe,” General Shu finally said. “I will protect them to the very best of my ability, but I will need your help. Don’t you want a purpose? Don’t you want to stop running?”
“Yes,” Marshall replied quietly. “Yes, I would like that.”
“Good,” General Shu said. He dropped both his hands on Marshall’s shoulders, giving a squeeze. It almost felt fatherly. It almost felt gentle. “Very good.”
If Roma looked at one more map, he feared he would fry his brain.
With a huff, he pushed all the papers out of the way, dragging a hand through his hair and mussing his careful combing beyond repair.
A mess. Everything was a goddamned mess, and he couldn’t begin to imagine how the White Flowers could survive this. His father kept himself locked in his office. The other powerful men in the White Flowers were either mysteriously missing or had outright signaled their intent to disappear. It hadn’t been like this immediately after the takeover, but it seemed the more time passed, the clearer it was that there was no reverse button. Their contacts in the foreign concessions were lost; their agreements with militia forces across all territory had collapsed.
Lord Montagov had very few options. Either gather his numbers together and wage outright battle on two groups of politicians—Communist and Nationalist alike—or tuck tail and disintegrate. The first was not even in the realm of possibility, so the second it needed to be. If only his father would actually open his door when Roma knocked. So many years of Roma trying to prove himself, and for what? They would have ended up here anyway, a city in flames, whether Roma behaved or not.
“Roma!”
Roma sat upright, stretching his body so he could peer through his half-open door. It was late at night, the light at his desk flickering at random. Something was wrong with the wires in the house, and he suspected it was because the electric factories and power lines across the city were still sitting in ruins.
“Benedikt?” Roma called back. “Is that you?”
His lamp made a sound. With a suddenness that almost gave Roma a fright, the bulb went out completely. At the same time, footsteps were thudding up the stairs and down the hall, and when Benedikt burst through Roma’s door in a complete rush, Roma’s immediate instinct was to assume his cousin had had an epiphany for Marshall’s rescue.
Then Benedikt slumped to rest his hands on his knees, his face so pale as to look sickly, and Roma bolted to his feet. Not an epiphany.
“Are you okay?” he demanded.
“Have you heard?” Benedikt gasped. He staggered forward, looking as if he would fall.
“Heard what?” In half-darkness, his sight guided only by the light of the hallway, Roma smacked his hands along his cousin’s arms. He found no wounds. “Are you injured?”
“So you haven’t heard,” Benedikt said. Something about his tone brought Roma’s eyes up, snapping to attention. “There are confirmed reports. Nationalists, Communists, Scarlets—they’re all talking about it. I wager it was not supposed to leak past the Scarlet circles, but it did.”
“About what?” Roma resisted the urge to shake his cousin, if only because color still had not returned to Benedikt’s pale cheeks. “Benedikt, what are you talking about?”
Benedikt did stumble to the floor then, landing hard into a sitting position. “Juliette is dead,” he whispered. “Dead by her own hand.”
Juliette was not dead.
She was, however, at risk of collapsing from overexertion, given how hard she had run across the city. In an effort to hurry as fast as possible, she had possibly twisted her ankle and blown out her lungs. Perhaps lungs did not blow out so easily, but the tightness in her chest said otherwise. Affording herself a mere minute of rest, Juliette pulled her hat low over her face and leaned against the exterior wall of White Flower headquarters, heaving for breath behind the building.
She had managed to push the purge to four in the morning. Any later than that and her ruse could fall through if the Nationalists demanded further explanation.
The plan had unfolded so smoothly that Juliette just knew something was going to go wrong. She had succeeded in sneaking into her father’s empty office, succeeded in forging a letter with his handwriting, and stamped it in his name. To the Chinese, a man’s personal stamp was as good as an unforgeable signature, never mind how insensible that was given Lord Cai locked his in a drawer Juliette knew how to open. She had succeeded in pressing down the ink, in folding up the letter with its contents brief and succinct: My daughter is dead, a dagger to her own heart. While I understand the importance of revolution, please allow all Scarlets to mourn until daybreak before any action is taken. She had even succeeded in prodding the unconscious messenger awake and threatening him at knifepoint to take the letter and deliver it to the same Nationalist who had sent Lord Cai the last correspondence, promising that she would peel his skin like a sliced pear if he tattled about Juliette being alive.