And Kathleen wanted answers.
She trekked up the stairs, single-minded in her task. Her sister had promised. Even oceans apart, it had been her, Rosalind, and Juliette—promising to protect one another, promising that they were untouchable so long as they stuck together. What was possibly more important than that?
Kathleen stopped outside Rosalind’s door, ignoring the Scarlet standing guard. She knocked, her knuckles coming down harshly enough to hurt.
“Rosalind, open the door.”
“She’s hardly in a position to be walking around,” the Scarlet said. “Just go in.”
“No,” Kathleen managed. “No, I want her to get up and look me in the eye.”
Never had Kathleen felt such treachery stab her through the gut. She understood if Rosalind had lost her loyalty to the Scarlet Gang. She understood if Rosalind had finally snapped, determined to ruin the Cai name after years and years of being kept out from the core of the family. That alone was something Kathleen could forgive, even if it was a slap to Juliette’s face.
What Kathleen couldn’t comprehend was why she hadn’t been told.
“Rosalind,” she snapped once more.
She was answered with silence. Too much silence. When she finally tried to open the door, it was locked.
“How long has it been since you checked in on her?” Kathleen demanded.
The Scarlet blinked, staring at the handle that wouldn’t turn. “Merely an hour.”
“Merely an hour?”
Something was wrong. That much was immediately clear. The Scarlet quickly waved for Kathleen to take a step back. She shifted out of the way, and the Scarlet kicked the door hard, blowing it off its hinges with a thud. The door whipped back against the wall and the room came into view: an empty bed, a chair pushed over, and the window wide open, the gossamer curtains blowing in the breeze.
Kathleen rushed to the window. There was a rope hanging over the ledge, made entirely of bedsheets, secured to one of the legs of the four-poster bed. It trailed down, down, down to the flower beds below, where the roses were trampled into the soil.
Kathleen heaved a long, bitter sigh. “She made a run for it.”
If Roma hadn’t been polishing his pistol in the storage room on the ground floor, he wouldn’t have heard the rustle in the alley outside.
The window was pulled open, the afternoon sunlight pouring into the dusty corners, reflecting off the brass lamps. When he set the cloth down, he heard a splash and then a quiet curse. It sounded like a girl whimpering in pain, footsteps coming nearer and nearer.
Roma’s immediate thought was that it was Alisa—that she had managed to escape and had found her way back home. Without even thinking, Roma pushed the window as wide as it would go and climbed through, his shoes clunking down on the wet clay ground outside. Nothing on the northern side. He spun around.
And saw Rosalind Lang, dressed in what looked like a nightgown, a heavy coat thrown over her shoulders.
Roma resisted the urge to rub his eyes, wondering if he was hallucinating. His lack of sleep in the last few days might finally be getting to him, because if Rosalind’s presence here wasn’t strange enough, her bedraggled state certainly was.
Then a beat passed, and Rosalind pulled a pistol from her coat. She raised it fast, seeming to expect a fight.
Roma didn’t return the gesture. He only raised his hands slowly and said, “Hello. What are you doing here?”
There was humor in this—it wasn’t lost on him, despite the utterly unhumorous situation. Once upon a time, before Roma met Juliette, before Roma rolled a marble at her feet and fell in love with her, he had been sent into Scarlet territory with another mission.
He had been sent in for Rosalind.
That was why his father had started to suspect him in the end. Rosalind Lang had become the talk of the town as the best dancer the Scarlet burlesque club had ever seen, and there had been plans for Roma to mingle into the Scarlet crowds, to get closer to Rosalind and obtain Scarlet information under the guise of a great, star-crossed love affair. Instead, Roma had heard rumors of Juliette Cai’s return to Shanghai and had switched gears while crossing onto Scarlet territory, wanting to see this terrible Scarlet heir for himself.
He hadn’t stood a chance. The moment he saw Juliette Cai for the first time, saw that smile playing on her lips, standing there at the Bund, it was a done matter. That false star-crossed love affair pivoted and turned real. Roma would claim, in reporting back, he hadn’t had any luck with their plan, yet he kept slinking into Scarlet territory regardless. Of course his father caught on.