“Roma,” Juliette called shakily. “Step aside.”
“No!” Benedikt snapped. “Juliette, stop.”
Juliette swiveled around, her fists clenched. “You heard what Rosalind said,” she hissed. Though she attempted a volume only for Benedikt, there was no doubt that everyone present could hear her. “You know what violence is to come. How many Communist meetings has Lord Montagov sent Marshall to? How many times has his face been sighted there? Who is to say if his name is on a kill list when this city erupts? This is a way to keep him safe.”
Benedikt reached for his gun. Juliette smacked it out of his hands immediately, her wrist crossing with his, her eyes ablaze. Benedikt did not try it a second time. He knew he would not win. In his expression, there was only hard disappointment.
“Is it for his safety?” he asked, hoarse. “Or is it for Roma’s?”
Juliette swallowed hard. She released her hold on Benedikt Montagov’s wrist. “Roma,” she called again, unable to look over. “Please.”
A long moment of silence passed. Then: the sound of rifles clacking against shoulder straps, heavy boots starting to walk. Roma had stepped aside.
Benedikt kept his eyes pinned on Juliette, like he didn’t dare to look away, didn’t dare watch Marshall be hauled off. The least that Juliette owed him was to hold his gaze, own up to the decision she had made.
“He will be safe,” she said. The marching footfalls grew farther and farther away.
“Safe inside a cage,” Benedikt replied, his jaw tight. “You sent him off to a prison sentence.”
Juliette would not be chided like this. As if there had been any other choice. “Would you rather your cousin be shot?”
At last Benedikt turned away. Miraculously, no onlookers had come to see the commotion. Miraculously, even after the soldiers marched off with Marshall, the street remained empty, and now it was only the three of them out in the open, Roma standing by the sidewalk with his arms to either side of him like he didn’t know what to do with himself.
“No,” Benedikt said dully. He started to walk, toward the city center. Merely three paces away, he paused again and spoke over his shoulder. “I would rather the two of you not burn the world down each time you choose each other.”
Thirty-Seven
Juliette wasn’t one who liked relying on eavesdropping, but she was out of options. With her heels and dresses, she wasn’t the sort of person who was very good at being sneaky, either, which meant her current predicament was truly a last resort. At any moment, she almost expected someone to wander out into the gardens and ask what she was doing, hanging from a guest bedroom balcony, leaning as closely as she could to the open window of her father’s office.
“。 . . forces?”
Juliette shifted forward, trying to hear more than a few snippets of each sentence. Fortunately, it was past dusk, and the purpling hour of the night obscured her strange position against the walls of the house. There weren’t many Scarlets around the house to catch her like this anyway. She had been sitting on the couch all afternoon, observing the quiet around her. For however many hours Juliette wasted away in the living room, dragging a sharp nail down the armrest, the front door had not opened once—no one coming in, no one going out.
In the twenty-four hours that had passed since learning Dimitri Voronin was the blackmailer, Juliette had assigned messengers to watch every corner of the city. Until Rosalind gave up a location, there was no way to seek Dimitri. Until the Nationalists actually acted, until the Scarlets acted, there was no way to know how the coming fight would unfold if Dimitri were truly going to unleash madness on behalf of the Communists. Lord and Lady Cai feigned ignorance. When Juliette gave them Rosalind’s accusation about the coming massacre, passed off as a rumor on the streets, her father had waved her off with assurances that this was nothing she needed to concern herself with. Which made no sense. Since when was the heir of the Scarlet Gang supposed to remain unconcerned? This was her job.
“。 . . numbers . . . unknown.”
Juliette cursed under her breath, hooking her leg over the balcony when it sounded as though the meeting in Lord Cai’s office was ending. The thing was, she had been waiting to hear something—anything—from the eyes she had placed across the city. Scarlet messengers were commonly prone to false reports. Even when nothing was awry, the more dramatic ones who wanted to prove themselves always came in with a whisper or two picked up from unreliable sources.
Juliette was playing eavesdropper in her own house because she had received absolute silence. And silence didn’t mean the city had settled into peace and harmony. It meant the messengers weren’t reporting to her anymore. Someone—multiple someones—had clammed them up, and after all, there were only two people in this gang higher-ranked than her. Her parents.