Page 65 of Our Violent Ends
It wasn’t Roma who had grabbed her; it was Dimitri Voronin. A quick snap of her eyes confirmed Roma was still trying to fight through the thick of the brawl, but he was on the move toward her.
“Juliette Cai,” Dimitri greeted, acting like they were exchanging pleasantries. “I heard you grew up a socialite. Where did you learn to grapple like a street urchin?”
“I gather you don’t know much about socialites.”
Using his height against him, she hooked a foot behind his knee, grabbed a fistful of his hair, and slammed Dimitri’s head into the ground. She kept moving, emerging from the fight and scanning the temple walls quickly. Alisa had followed her out, peeking from the archway of the temple entrance.
Juliette shot a look over her shoulder. Roma was still watching her. Good.
“Come with me.”
Alisa blinked, taken aback by Juliette’s sudden appearance before her. “What?”
Without waiting for an answer, Juliette hauled Alisa by the arm and took off.
Twenty-Three
Juliette pulled Alisa back into the courtyard. Briefly, she thought she caught Rosalind and Kathleen out of the corner of her eye, but her cousins needed to stay by her mother’s side, and so they did not come after her, nor ask what she was doing.
“I promise I’m not going to hurt you.” Juliette glanced over her shoulder again. Roma had made it out of the crowd, a splatter of blood on his collar. His eyes were ablaze, vivid in their violence. “I just need to bait your brother somewhere quiet.Run!”
They ran until Juliette found a thin alleyway. She shoved Alisa in fast, sparing no time before she kicked several trash bags, stacking them tall so they acted like a barricade. Then she pushed Alisa to hide, slotted behind the bags and out of view.
It wasn’t that she was trying to scare Roma. She simply had a feeling that Alisa didn’t need to see whatever was going to happen next.
Roma came into view, his chest rising up and down from exertion. With one glance at the tight grip he had on the pistol in his hand, Juliette knew she was right.
“Why are you doing this?” Roma spat. His expression was hateful—but his words were tortured. Like he wished she would just disappear instead, so that he didn’t have to deal with her, so that he didn’t have to be vengeful. “What the hell are you doing?”
Juliette held out her hands. As if showing that she was unarmed would make any difference.
“Listen to me for a second,” she pleaded. “I have information. About the blackmailer. It might be coming from within the White Flowers. I’m here tohelp—”
Juliette flinched, narrowly sidestepping his first shot.
“I was going to make it quick,” Roma intoned. “As a mercy. For what we once were.”
“Will you listen to me?” Juliette snapped. She sprang forward, and the gun went off again, missing her, but so barely that she felt the heat skim her shoulder. His pistol was still smoking when she closed her hand around the middle of the barrel. Roma tried to shoot again, but by then Juliette had turned the pistol skyward, letting him empty out three bullets before she thumped a hand hard on the inside of Roma’s elbow. His arm slackened, and she threw the gun out of his grip.
“This wasn’t hard for you to understand a month ago,” Juliette hissed. “The city is in danger. I canhelpyou.”
“And you know what I have realized since then?” His hand darted into his pocket for another gun, and Juliette tackled him fast, throwing him to the ground of the alley and using her two hands to pin his arm to the floor. The move was familiar, like that first time Roma ambushed her near Chenghuangmiao, but if the memory meant anything to him, Roma didn’t show it.
“I have realized,” he continued, keeping his arm still for that moment, “I do not care about this city, or the danger it brings onto itself. I cared for people, and now the people are gone.”
He kicked out, and Juliette rolled away to avoid the hit, swallowing her wince of pain when she landed hard on her elbows and her forehead nearly smacked into the rough wall of the alley. Roma was up in the blink of an eye, looming over her with the gun, and she didn’t think; she just lunged. This was a true fight now—vicious and unflinching. Each time Roma tried to shoot, Juliette tried to disarm, but he had not known her so long for nothing, and he predicted her moves well enough that Juliette’s head was soon spinning from colliding against the concrete ground multiple times. Throwing herself out of harm’s way too fast and too hard was painful, but it would sure as hell be more painful if she didn’t avoid his quick hits and strikes.
“Roma!” Juliette spat. Her elbow slammed hard against a stack of bricks, having finally writhed out of their grapple with his blade in her hand.Victory.She threw the blade, hearing it clatter and spin out of the alley. “Listen to me!”
He stilled. She almost thought she had gotten through to him, but then his eyes narrowed, and he hissed, “The time for listening has long passed.”
He dove for the blade.
From the very moment he raised his arm, Juliette knew he had aimed too high. Roma had always been a bad thrower, which never made any sense because he was so damn good with his bullets. But he loosed his grip from the end of the alley, and time slowed down; Juliette tracked the blade, predicting it to sail so far above her head that it was comical—
Then Alisa Montagova stood up from her hiding place, scrambling to her feet and calling out a plea to end the fight.
“Please, don’t hurt each other—” Before Juliette could think, could even take a moment togasp, she shot up, diving in front of Alisa. She didn’t realize what she had done—not really—until she came to a stop in front of the other girl and there was the hardthunk!by her ear.
