“Therein lies the rub,” her father remarked evenly.
Juliette slammed her hands down on the desk.
“Send me into the French Concession,” she said. “Whoever this is, I can find them. I know it.”
For a long moment, Lord Cai said nothing. He only stared at her, like he was waiting for her to say she was kidding. Then, when Juliette did not offer an alternative, he reached into a side drawer by his desk and pulled out a series of photographs. The black-and-white images were grainy and too dark, but when her father set them down, Juliette felt her stomach turn, a rolling sensation tightening her gut.
“These are from the White Flower club,” Lord Cai said. “The . . . what was it? Xiàngrìkuí?”
“Yes,” Juliette whispered, her eyes still latched on the photos. Her father hadn’t actually forgotten the name of the club, of course. It was only that he refused to speak Russian, even if it was so easy to lapse into the language from Shanghainese with the sounds so similar—perhaps even more so than Shanghainese and the actual Chinese common tongue. “Podsolnukh.”
Lord Cai pushed the photographs even closer. “Take a good look, Juliette.”
The victims of the madness in September had gouged their own throats out, clawing and clawing until their hands were gloved in blood. These photos did not only show torn throats. Of the faces that Juliette could catch, they no longer resembled faces at all. They were eyes and mouths torn until they were no longer circular in shape, foreheads with golf-ball-sized holes, ears dangling from the thinnest inch of a lobe. If it were possible to photograph in color, the whole scene would have been drenched in red.
“I am not going to send you into this alone,” Lord Cai said quietly. “You are my daughter, not my lackey. Whoever is doing this, this is what they are capable of.”
Juliette breathed out through her nose, the sound loud and grating. “We have one lead,” she said. “One lead, and it says this mess is coming out of foreign territory. Who else is able? Tyler? He’ll be killed with a knife to the throat before the insects get him.”
“You’ve missed the point, Juliette.”
“I haven’t!” Juliette screeched, though she suspected she had. “If this blackmailer came out of the French Concession, then I will find them by merging right into their high society. Their rules, their customs. Someone will know. Someone will have information. And I will get it out of them.” She lifted her chin. “Send me in. Send Kathleen and Rosalind as accompaniment if you must. But no entourage. No protection. Once they trust me, then they will talk.”
Lord Cai shook his head slowly, but the motion wasn’t one that indicated refusal. It was more or less an action to digest Juliette’s words, his hands absently reaching for that mysterious letter again, folding it further into quarters, then eighths.
“How about this?” her father said quietly. “Let me think about what we shall do next. Then we figure out if you are to enter the French Concession like a covert operative.”
Juliette mocked a salute. Her father shooed her, and she skittered off. As she was closing the door after herself, she peered through one last time and found that he was still staring at the letter in his hands.
“Careful, Miss Cai!”
Juliette squealed, narrowly stopping herself from stepping right onto a maid crouching in the hallway.
“What are you doing there?” she exclaimed, her hand pressed to her heart.
The maid grimaced. “There is just a bit of mud. Don’t mind me. It’ll soon be clean.”
Juliette nodded her thanks, turning to go. Then, for whatever reason, she squinted at the clump of mud the maid was working at, and sighted, stuck inside the clump that had been smeared into the threads of the carpeting, a single pink petal.
“Hold on,” Juliette said. She got to her knees, and before the maid could protest too loudly, she stuck her finger into the mud and dug the petal out, dirtying her nails. The maid winced more than Juliette did; Juliette only wrinkled her nose, looking at what she had unearthed.
“Miss Cai, it’s just a petal,” the maid said. “There have been a few clumps here and there these past months. Someone is not wiping their shoes properly before coming in.”
Juliette’s eyes shot up immediately. “You’ve found these over months?”
The maid looked confused. “I—yes? Mud, mostly.”
A rumble of noise erupted in the living room below: distant cousins, arriving for a social call over the mahjong tables. Juliette sucked in a breath and held it. The mud was smeared right near the wall, a splotch small enough that truly nobody but an eagle-eyed maid looking for places to clean could have spotted it. It was also near enough to the wall that it could have been left by someone pressed up against her father’s office door, listening in.