Page 103 of Our Violent Ends
“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—”
Benedikt jolted forward. “Wait a minute. There really is something.”
Roma arched a brow. His cousin really knew how to act. He had even drained his face of blood, his cheeks as white as the paper sheets on the floor.
Then he heard the screaming too, and he realized that Benedikt wasn’t playing along. “You don’t think—”
“Guài wù!”
The White Flowers bolted to their feet. Roma was the first one out, scanning the street in disbelief, his hand going to his gun. Benedikt and Marshall followed closely. Perhaps it was not a good idea to be out in the open, especially for Marshall, in what would be Scarlet territory. Mere weeks ago it would have been a declaration of war; now they were already in the midst of one, and no one had the energy to fight another.
“There hasn’t been a monster attack in months,” Roma said. “Why strike now?”
