Page 3 of Our Violent Ends
Juliette grimaced. “Yes.”
It sounded like a stampede was starting on the floor below. The people on the upper level were certainly starting to panic too, hurtling out of their seats and rushing for the exit, but the two doors on either side of the theater—markedEVENandODDfor the seat arrangements—were rather thin, and all they managed to achieve was a bottleneck situation.
Kathleen made an indecipherable noise.“He’s not doing anything... he’s taking his seat!”
“Oh, don’t mock me!” Juliette hissed.
This situation was not ideal. But she would salvage it.
She scrambled to her feet.
“Someone was trying to shoot the merchant.” Juliette made a quick glance over the railing. She didn’t see Roma anymore. She did see the merchant pulling his suit jacket tightly around his middle and securing his straw hat, trying to follow the crowds out of the theater.
“Go find who it was,” Kathleen huffed. “Your father will have your head if the merchant is killed.”
“I know you’re joking,” Juliette muttered, “but you might be right.” She pressed her pistol into her cousin’s hand and took off, calling over her shoulder, “Talk to the merchant for me!Merci!”
By now the bottleneck at the door had thinned enough that Juliette could push through, merging into the main anteroom outside the second floor of Screen One. Ladies dressed in silk qipao were screaming inconsolably at one another, and British officers were clumped together in the corner to hiss hysterics about what was going on. Juliette ignored it all, pushing and pushing to get to the stairs, to get down to the ground floor, where the merchant would be emerging.
She skidded to a stop. The main staircase was far too crowded. Her eyes darted to the side, to the maintenance stairs, and she tore the door open without a second thought, barreling right through. Juliette was familiar with this theater; it was Scarlet territory, and she had spent parts of her early childhood wandering around this building, peering into the different screening rooms when Nurse was distracted. Where the main staircase was a grandiose structure of polished flooring and arched, wooden banisters, the maintenance stairs were made of cement and void of natural light, relying on naught but a small bulb dangling at the middle landing.
Her heels clacked loudly, turning the corner of the landing. She stopped short.
Waiting there, by the door into the main lobby, was Roma, his gun raised.
Juliette supposed she had grown predictable.
“You were three paces away from the merchant,” she said. She was surprised her voice remained level.Ta ma de.There was one knife strapped to her leg, but in the time it would take to reach for it, she would be giving Roma plenty of time to shoot. “You left him just to find me? I’m flattered—”
Juliette swerved with a hiss. Her cheek radiated heat, swelling from the harrowingly close contact of the bullets that flew by her head. Before Roma could think to aim again, Juliette ran the quickest survey of her options, then dove through the door behind her, surging into the storage unit.
She wasn’t trying to escape. This was a dead end, a thin room crowded with stacked chairs and cobwebs. She only needed...
Another bullet whizzed by her arm.
“You’re going to blow this place up,” Juliette snapped, spinning around. She had come to the very end of the storage space, her back pressed to the thick pipes that ran along the walls. “Some of these pipes carry gas—put a hole in one and the whole theater bursts into flames.”
Roma was hardly threatened. It was as if he could not hear her. His eyes were narrowed, his expression scrunched. He looked unfamiliar—properly foreign, like a boy who had pulled on a costume and hadn’t expected how well it would fit. Even under the dim lights, the gold of his clothes glimmered, as bright as the twinkling billboards outside the theater.
Juliette wanted to scream, seeing what he had been made into. She could hardly catch her breath, and she would be lying if she said it was only because of her current physical exertion.
“Did you hear what I said?” Juliette eyed the distance between them. “Put that gun away—”
“Do you hearyourself?” Roma interrupted. In three strides, he was close enough to point his gun right in Juliette’s face. She could feel the heat of the barrel, hot steel an inch away from her skin. “You killed Marshall. You killed him, and it’s been months, and I haven’t heard a word of explanation from you—”
“There is no explanation.”
He thought her a monster. He thought she had hated him the whole time, so viciously that she would destroy everything he loved, and hehadto think that if he was to keep his life. Juliette refused to drag him down just becauseshewas weak-willed.
“I killed him because he needed to die,” Juliette said. Her arm whipped up. She twisted Roma’s gun away, letting it clatter at their feet. “Just as I will kill you. Just as I will not stop until you kill me—”
He slammed her into the pipes.
The effort was so forceful that Juliette tasted blood inside her lip, sliced by her own sharp teeth. She stifled a gasp and then another when Roma’s hand tightened around her throat, his eyes murderous.
Juliette was not frightened. If anything, she was only resentful—not at Roma, but at herself. At wanting to lean in even while Roma was actively trying to kill her. At this distance between them that she had willingly manufactured, because they had been born into two families at war, and she would rather die at Roma’s hand than be the cause of his death.
No one else is dying to protect me.Roma had blown up a whole house of people to keep Juliette safe. Tyler and his Scarlet men would go on a rampage in the name of defending Juliette, even if they too wanted her dead. It was all one and the same. It was this city, divided by names and colors and turfs, but somehow bleeding the exact same shade of violence.
