It was unlikely. Juliette wondered what she was missing.
“If all who wish to speak have spoken, then let us bid Cai Tailei a safe passage away.”
The priest stepped aside, gesturing for the relatives nearest to him to begin saying their goodbyes. Each person in the cemetery today clutched a flower in their hands: a faded pink, for though it was customary to use white for mourning, the Scarlet Gang would never use white flowers under any occasion.
Lady Cai stepped up and tossed her flower into the grave. The casket already lay inside, closed, as shiny as the headstone. Once the procession finished, the grave would be closed with dirt and laid softly with new grass.
Juliette clenched her fists tight, nodding as her mother motioned for her to go on. How fortunate it was that she was a modern girl who did not believe in the afterlife. Otherwise, she would certainly burn in hell for this.
“Oh, Juliette.” Lady Cai brushed her daughter’s face as she passed. “Don’t look so somber. Death is not the end. Your dear cousin performed tremendous feats in his time alive.”
“Did he?” Juliette said softly. There was no challenge in her voice. It would be foolish to voice resentment now, when she was standing and Tyler was dead.
“Of course,” Lady Cai reassured her, taking her daughter’s monotony for grief. She clutched Juliette’s hands, holding them steady. “He made the Scarlets proud. He stopped at nothing to protect us.”
He should never have had the power to do so. We should not have the power to do this. And yet it was all a lost cause, wasn’t it? If it were not the Scarlets stopping at nothing to consume the city, it was someone else.
“I will go pay my respects,” Juliette rasped, swallowing every bitter word that she wanted to throw in her mother’s face.
Lady Cai smiled, and with a squeeze on their enjoined fingers, stepped back to let Juliette proceed. For the briefest moment, Juliette imagined what her mother would say if she knew—knew what blood had once tarnished her palms, knew what blood was running traitorous inside Juliette’s veins.
Perhaps there was a possibility that she might be forgiven.
But mercy and blood feuds had never mixed well together.
Juliette approached the grave, peering down at the casket. There was already an abundance of flowers scattered upon the smooth wooden lid.
“Maybe you would have made a better heir, Tyler,” Juliette whispered, crouching to throw her flower in. When it landed, its petals appeared far paler than the others. “But I have a feeling the title is soon going to be rendered null.”
Once, Juliette could never have considered a future without the Scarlet Gang—a future where they were not in power. That was before a monster tore through their numbers, before a madness incited revolution. That was before politicians marched their armies in and filled the streets with their artillery.
Once, she had wanted power. But beneath it all, maybe it was never power she wanted.
Maybe it was safety.
Maybe there was another way to get it, away from being heir to a crumbling empire.
Juliette rose to her feet. Her hands felt clawlike, still folded over an invisible flower. Someone was coming up behind her and it was time to take her leave, but for a second longer, she hovered around Tyler’s headstone, committing its features to memory.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice so quiet she could be heard only by herself . . . and Tyler, wherever he was. “If there is a life after this, one that is free of the blood feud, I hope we can be friends.”
?
Juliette slipped away from the funeral after-activities without notice, tipping her hat low and falling out of step with her relatives once they exited the cemetery. Kathleen quirked a brow in her direction, but Juliette shook her head, and Kathleen merely looked to the front of the footpath again, pretending not to see. The Scarlets walked onward in the direction of their parked cars, and Juliette pivoted onto a smaller street, melding deeper into what was once Scarlet territory.
Soldiers. Soldiers everywhere. Juliette pulled at the sleeves of her dress and tried to walk without letting her posture slump. The French Concession and International Settlement were closed: no one in, and no one out. That could not last for long—the foreign concessions were never built to operate as their own self-contained territories, and once they came to an agreement with the Nationalists, the barbed wire and makeshift fences would go down. For now, people steered clear in fear of the armed soldiers along Boundary Road, and so that was where Juliette went, to the rooftop of a building at the outer bounds of the Chinese part of the city, just out of view of the foreign soldiers peering through their rifle scopes. There was no telling what this building once was. Perhaps a small noodle shop, or a tailor’s parlor. When Juliette trekked up, she saw shattered glass and ripped ledgers left behind on the emptied shelves.