“Listen to me,” Benedikt said lowly. “You’ll be shot on sight.”
“Move aside.”
Roma’s voice was lifeless. So too were his eyes, a mass of darkness swallowing up his stare. The strangest thing was that Benedikt recognized himself in that expression, recognized that same twisted sense of rage that showed itself in recklessness.
Is that what I looked like?
“You said we were coming here to check on the vaccine!” Benedikt hissed. He made another grab for the jar in Roma’s hands. “Now, instead, you’re running off with some concoction to blow up the Scarlet house a second time. That’s not what Juliette would have wanted!”
“Don’t tell me what Juliette would have wanted!” Roma snapped. “Don’t tell—”
Benedikt took his chance to dive for the jar. Roma saw it coming and darted back two steps, but Benedikt outright lunged, pushing his cousin to the linoleum floor and pinning his arm down. Lourens made another concerned noise but otherwise remained motionless by the tables, his eyes swiveling about the scene.
“At least wait,” Benedikt said, his knees on Roma’s stomach. “Wait to see why. Since when did Juliette have any reason to take a dagger to her own heart—”
“So they killed her,” Roma seethed. “They killed her, and they’re going to get away with it—”
Benedikt pushed on Roma’s attempt to sit up. “This isn’t some murder on the streets, this is the Scarlet Gang! You’ve always known the danger of gangsters. You live it every day!”
Roma stilled. He breathed in, then again, then again, and suddenly Benedikt realized it was because his cousin was struggling to fill his lungs.
“She would never,” he managed. “Never.”
Benedikt swallowed hard. He couldn’t allow this. It was for Roma’s own good.
“There are Scarlets everywhere in the city right now,” he said slowly. “They’re plotting something. You cannot go make it worse.”
His words had the opposite effect. Benedikt had intended to pacify, and instead a vein started to throb at Roma’s neck. Roma shoved Benedikt off, fast, and got to his feet, but Benedikt wouldn’t give up so easily. He lunged for the jar again. When he only managed to catch Roma’s wrist, he switched from trying to wrest away the explosive and simply grabbed ahold of his cousin with both hands, keeping him from opening the lab’s doors, keeping him from running through the building and out into the night.
Roma came to a halt. Slowly, he turned around. The deadness in his eyes had acquired a murderous glint.
“Tell me,” he said. “Were you not the one who sought revenge when you thought Marshall was dead?”
Benedikt scoffed. That was a mistake. The fire in Roma’s eyes only grew stronger.
“I never stormed into the Scarlet house. I never did anything rash!”
“Maybe you should have.”
“No,” Benedikt spat. He hardly wanted to think about Marshall right now, when he was trying to talk Roma out of a death wish. “What good could it have done?”
“What good?” Roma hissed in echo. “It doesn’t matter, does it? He came back to life!”
Roma tried to pull away; Benedikt would not relinquish. In a flash, Roma had his pistol in his free hand, but it was not to point at Benedikt.
He brought it to his own temple.
“Hey.” Benedikt froze, afraid that any sudden movement would nudge at the trigger. All he could hear through his ears was the sound of rushing blood. “Roma, don’t.”
“Roma, do not be a fool,” Lourens urged from where he stood.
“So let go of me,” Roma said. “Let go of me, Benedikt.”
Benedikt let out a low breath. “I will not.”
It was a standstill, then. It was a matter of Benedikt believing that his cousin could not be this lost, and yet he was not certain. He could not know if in the next few seconds Roma would call him on his bluff and splatter his brains across the lab.
Benedikt let go.
And at that very moment, the lab door flew open, illuminating the figures who stood at the threshold.
“Roma! What are you doing?”
Roma whirled around, releasing an audible gasp at the sound of the voice. Benedikt, already facing the doors, could only blink. Once. Twice. It wasn’t a hallucination. Juliette Cai was really standing there, wearing a ridiculous hat, with Alisa behind her, both of them panting for breath as if they had been on a long run.
“Look,” Benedikt said faintly, hardly hearing his own words as they slipped out. “You got your resurrection too.”
Roma didn’t seem to hear him. He was already dropping his pistol like it had burned him, dropping the jar in his other hand. Benedikt dove to catch it, not daring to find out how explosive materials would react when thrown against the hard floor. By the time he had caught the jar, saving it from smashing upon the linoleum at their feet, Roma had already reached Juliette, kissing her hard on the mouth. The embrace was so fierce that Juliette immediately stretched one of her hands back, trying to cover Alisa’s eyes.
Alisa darted under Juliette’s hand and mimed a gag to Benedikt. Benedikt was still in such shock that he couldn’t laugh along.
“Are you okay?” Roma and Juliette asked in unison the moment they broke apart.
Benedikt got to his feet. The jar remained intact. He passed it to Lourens, and Lourens took it quickly, shelving the explosive away. They were hurrying to put it out of Roma’s sight, but with Juliette here now, Benedikt doubted Roma even remembered why he wanted that jar.
“I thought you were dead,” Roma was saying to Juliette. “Don’t ever do that to me.”
“The better question is,” Benedikt cut in, “why are you so fond of faking deaths?”
Juliette shook her head, her arm twining around Roma’s as she hurried him back into the lab. She gestured for Alisa to come along too, letting the doors fall closed.
“Faking my death would have required actually producing a false corpse, as I did for Marshall,” Juliette said evenly. “All I did here was lie. I never meant for it to reach you. It shouldn’t have leaked past the Scarlet circles.” She sighted Lourens, still warily hovering by the worktables. “Hello.”
“May I return to bed now?” Lourens asked wearily.
“No,” Juliette answered before any of the Montagovs could. “You need to hear this too. There’s a purge coming. That’s why I lied. To push it off.”
“A what?” Roma was still in a daze, blinking rapidly to clear the mist over his eyes.
Juliette placed her hands on one of the tables. It looked like she was physically bracing herself, and when she lifted her head to speak . . . it was not Roma she was looking at but Benedikt.
“There’s an execution order for your heads. White Flowers are to be treated as Communists, and just before dawn breaks, Scarlets and Kuomintang soldiers alike are going to start shooting and arresting. The command has been given. Anyone opposing the Nationalists is to be eliminated. We have to go.”
“Wait—what?”
Roma’s voice rose another octave, prompting Alisa to reach out and hug his arm. Benedikt, meanwhile, simply exhaled a breath, letting the information sink in. A full-city purge. At last the Nationalists had pushed themselves into full throttle, intent on taking Shanghai.