Page 19 of Our Violent Ends
“No particular reason,” she answered, flashing a smile. “Don’t work too hard, hmm?”
Juliette hurried away, almost short of breath. It was a stretch. There were plenty of peony plants across the city and even more patches of mud where those plants grew.
Then she remembered her father at that dinner so many months ago, when he had claimed there was a spy: no ordinary spy, but someone who had been invited into the room, someone who lived in this house. And she knew—she justknew—that this particular petal came from the peonies at the Montagov residence, from the back of the house where the petals shed from the high windowsills and settled into the muddy ground.
Because five years ago, Juliette was the one tracking these all over the house.
Kathleen was inanotherCommunist meeting.
It wasn’t that Juliette kept sending her to them, but rather that the Communists kept meeting up, and if Kathleen was going to maintain appearances and get invited back to the next ones through the contacts she had painstakingly cultivated, then she had to keep showing up, as if she were another worker and not the right hand of the Scarlet heiress.
At last Kathleen finished pinning down her hair, having adjusted her whole style in the last five minutes while the speaker at the front talked about unionizing. She had learned by now that the initial speakers never had much of a point to them: they were there to ramble until the important people arrived and the seats filled well enough to avoid rustling when latecomers shifted into the open gaps. No one paying attention to Kathleen when she tuned out and squinted into a handheld mirror from her pocket, determining that the complicated plaits Rosalind had made earlier were a little too bourgeois for this meeting.
“Excuse me.”
Kathleen startled, turning at the soft voice behind her. A little girl, missing two front teeth, was holding one of Kathleen’s pins.
“You dropped this.”
“Oh,” Kathleen whispered back. “Thank you.”
“That’s okay,” the girl lisped. She was swinging her legs, glancing momentarily at the woman seated to her left—her mother, perhaps—to check whether she would be told off for talking to a stranger. “But I liked your hair better before.”
Kathleen swallowed a smile, reaching up to touch the pinned curls. Rosalind had said the same, lavishing praise on herself as she was plaiting. Her sister was rarely in the mood to sit around and chat these days. She would likely not refuse if Kathleen caught her around the house and asked for a moment of her time, but the trouble was precisely that she was never around.
“I liked it too,” Kathleen replied quietly, and turned back in her seat. She almost wished she hadn’t taken it out now, ruining her sister’s handiwork.
The room suddenly broke into applause, and Kathleen hurried to follow suit. As the speakers changed, she sat up in her seat and tried to shift her attention back to listening, but her thoughts kept wandering, her hands idly reaching up to touch her hair. Their father had visited again last week, more insistent on their move out to the countryside. Rosalind had rolled her eyes and stormed off, which their father hadn’t taken very well, and Kathleen had been the one left behind to entertain his theatrics about the state of the city and where its politics were taking it. Maybe that was the way the two of them split their duties. Rosalind talked back and pushed all his buttons, but when their father wasn’t watching, she stuck her nose into his work and did his business for him. Kathleen smiled and nodded, and when their father needed the assurance, she did everything expected of the thoughtful, demure Kathleen Lang that this city knew. She had always known that adopting this name would mean taking a part of her sister’s personality, if not for the sake of appearances, then purely for the sake of ease. Sometimes her father spoke to her as if he had truly forgotten that the real Kathleen was dead. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she spoke the name “Celia” before him again.
Kathleen shifted in her seat. Nevertheless, she was more worried about Rosalind than she was worried about herself. If she was being honest, she was a little miffed that Rosalind had stopped her from going to Juliette’s aid so many months ago, yet found no problem hanging around the cabarets on neutral territory, socializing with Frenchmen in the city’s trade network.
How can we be on the same side when they will never fall?Rosalind had said.They are invulnerable. We are not!
Nothing had changed. Rosalind and Kathleen were still set apart from the rest of the Scarlet Gang carrying the Cai name, but suddenly let it be a task that gave Rosalind a sense of self-decided purpose, and here she was, uncaring about vulnerability. Maybe it was inevitable in a city like this. Each and every one of them, taking on a path of destruction, even if they knew better, even if they would warn someone else off it. Rosalind didn’t like Kathleen’s involvement with the Communists; Kathleen thought it was utterly foolish for Rosalind to play diplomat. Who cared if their father threatened to move them? He had no true power over them, not anymore, not in Shanghai. Filial piety be damned. One word from Juliette, and he would have to tuck tail and turn away, pack his bags and depart the city alone.
“We are absolutely not leaving,” Kathleen muttered to herself as another round of applause swept the room, drowning her out. She sat back, resolute to pay attention as debate began, as one Communist argued that it was the foreigners causing the problems in this city, not the gangsters, and another rebutting that the only solution was to kick them all out. The planning started—the very reason why Kathleen was here, leaning forward in her seat as probable strike locations were determined and timelines constructed for the ultimate destruction of foreign imperialism.
It was at that moment her gaze wandered—only for the briefest scan of the room. She didn’t know what it was that had inspired her to do so, but her attention snagged on a foreign face. When she blinked once more, Kathleen realized by his clothing that it was no foreigner at all but a Russian White Flower.
Kathleen frowned. She returned her attention to the front, but pulled up the collar of her coat, hiding as much of her face as she could.
Dimitri Voronin,she thought, her mind racing.What areyoudoing here?
Eight
Let me guess,” Juliette said, pulling the car door after herself. “You’ve discovered that I am a secret revolutionary and now you are taking me to the outskirts of the city for execution.”
From the driver’s seat, Lord Cai glanced over at her with a furrow of his brow. Then he pushed a button on the dashboard, letting the engine rumble to life.
“I am begging you to stop watching the Wild West films coming from America,” he said. For someone who likely had not driven a car in years, her father spun the steering wheel and pulled out of the driveway with expert maneuvering. “They’re rotting your brain.”
Juliette twisted in her seat and peered out the back window, waiting for other cars to follow behind them. When none came, she turned to the front again and put her hands in her lap, pursing her lips.
This was mightily strange. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d gone anywhere without an entourage—or at leastoneother Scarlet for backup. It wasn’t that her father needed protection, not when he was the one who had taught her how to use a blade at three years old, but having a group of men clustered around him at all times was about posture, and she didn’t think he ever went into public without that protection.
“So,” Juliette tried, “where are we going?”
“You managed to get into this car without asking questions,” her father replied plainly. “Now refrain until we arrive.”
