If Juliette had thought hard enough, perhaps she could have worked it out sooner, could have stopped this. She had always known: Rosalind was angry—angry at the world, at the place she had been given. But what she wanted was not to change her place; it was to find something that made her place worth it.
Juliette turned to Rosalind, her eyes stinging. “I decided to love a White Flower,” she managed, each word slicing at her tongue. “You helped a White Flower set destruction onto this city. It is not the same!”
“I loved him,” Rosalind said. She denied none of it. She was too prideful to deny it once she had been caught. “Tell me, if Roma Montagov had asked, wouldn’t you have done it too?”
“Don’t speak about me as if I’m not right here in the room,” Roma interrupted before Juliette could answer. His tone was stern, if only to disguise how shaken he was. “Juliette, sit down. You look as though you are near fainting.”
Juliette folded herself upon the floor and dropped her head into her hands. Wasn’t Rosalind right, in a way? However it had happened, she had loved Dimitri enough to betray her family, feed him information to whatever ends he wanted. Juliette had loved Roma enough to kill her own cousin in cold blood. Rosalind was a traitor, but so was she.
Marshall cleared his throat. “Just to be sure that I am following,” he said. “Dimitri Voronin . . . is the blackmailer? And you are his lover—”
“Not anymore,” Rosalind cut in.
Marshall took the correction in stride. “You were his lover, both his source for Scarlet information and his”—he trailed off, thinking briefly—“what? Monster keeper?”
Rosalind turned her head away. “Untie me, and I will give you answers.”
“Don’t.”
The command came from Kathleen, who had remained quiet until now. The ceiling light flickered, and underneath it, Kathleen’s eyes looked utterly black.
“You owe us that much, Rosalind,” Kathleen said. She tossed the paper onto the table; by now, Kathleen had scrunched up the list so much that it was nothing but a tiny ball, bouncing off the surface and flying to the floor. “I won’t tell you how deeply you have betrayed us. I think you know. So speak.”
Slowly, Juliette put a hand on the floor and started to get back onto her feet. “Kathleen—”
Kathleen spun. “Don’t defend her. Don’t even think about it.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Juliette straightened to her full height, dusting off her hands. “I was going to ask you to take a step back: Rosalind is about to stand.”
Just as Rosalind shifted, Benedikt lunged forward and yanked Kathleen toward him, stopping Rosalind from bowling her sister over with the chair’s leg and making a run for the door. Heavens knew how she expected to escape her bindings even if she got to the door.
“Yes, fine!” Rosalind snapped, finally reaching a breaking point as her chair came back down with a defeated thump! “Dimitri wanted to take over the White Flowers, and when one of his associates came in contact with Paul Dexter’s remaining monsters, I went along with his plan to destroy this city. Is that what you want to hear? That I am weak?”
“No one ever said you were weak,” Marshall replied. “Merely foolish—as the best of us have been known to fall prey to.”
Roma waved for Marshall to stop speaking.
“Backtrack,” Roma said. He looked over his shoulder briefly and exchanged a glance with Juliette. “What do you mean, take over the White Flowers? Paul Dexter’s last note went to someone in the French Concession—how did Dimitri even get ahold of it?”
If Rosalind had her hands free, this would have been the time she placed a delicate palm to her forehead, smoothing down the long wisps of hair around her face. But she was bound, subject to interrogation by family and enemy, and so she only stared ahead, her jaw tight.
“Your search through the French Concession would never have led anywhere,” Rosalind whispered. “In the event of my death, release them all. It was an instruction to the servants at a different property Paul owned in the Concession, on White Flower territory. When they didn’t pay rent, Dimitri stormed the place and found the insects before they could be released.” Her eyes closed, like she was remembering the scene. No doubt she would have been called upon to examine their findings; no doubt she must have seen to the fates of the servants, perhaps a simple bullet to shut them up, perhaps thrown into the Huangpu River so no one could follow Paul Dexter’s last trail.