A honk came from afar. Cars, rumbling down the residential driveways.
She merely thought she had found a companion. An equal. Someone to see her—her, just as she was, not a Scarlet, not a dancer, but Rosalind.
It was her fault for thinking that she was enough to change someone. Monsters and money and the city on strings—up against Rosalind, who hadn’t even wanted to go along with it in the first place, who had only done so out of hope that he would be happy once he had the city, that they could be happy and no one could touch them. The world in one palm and her in another.
But someone who wanted the world would never stop before they had it, everything else be damned. It was hardly a competition.
She was foolish to think that her friends could be kept safe, that she could be the hand guiding him away from chaos. She had never possessed any power here. She had never mattered. Days had passed in that safe house with no change. In the end, this was the harsh truth: Rosalind had left everyone she cared about for someone who was not coming. Rosalind had hurt everyone she cared about, risked their very lives, all for someone who was long gone.
Rosalind tore her pistol from her pocket and shot at the door handle. The sound grated on her ears as the bullet struck once, twice, three times. The walls seemed to shrink from her, smooth silver and gold wallpaper inching back from the violence rarely brought into places like these.
The handle fell. The door inched open. And when Rosalind nudged into the apartment, she found it entirely vacated.
She couldn’t help it. She laughed. She laughed and she laughed, tracing her eyes along every missing thing. The apartment had never been well decorated to begin with, but now the papers on the table had disappeared; the maps atop the grand piano were gone. When she peered into the bedroom, even the sheets were stripped.
“We can live here forever, can’t we?”
She had twirled with those sheer curtains, splaying the lace across her head like some bridal veil. Had thrown her arms up, delirious in her happiness.
“Don’t get too excited, love. We’re only here until we rise higher.”
“Must we? Can we not live a quaint existence? Can you not be a good man?”
“A good man? Oh, Roza—” Rosalind trailed her hands along the bookshelf, finding only dust, even though it could not have been more than a few days since the worn paperbacks were cleared away. “Ya chelovek bol’nói. Ya zloi chelovek. Neprivlekatel’nyi ya chelovek.”
When the monsters were sent in for the Scarlet vaccine, she had said she didn’t think she could do this anymore. Had that prompted the decision to abandon her? Or was it because she had gotten caught, because she could no longer supply Scarlet information?
“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.