Juliette eyed the broken glass on the floor.
“Go sit down, would you?” Roma suggested. There was no sympathy in his voice. All his words were level, betraying no emotion. “I’ll get you another drink.”
Without waiting for her response, he turned and left, and Juliette frowned, supposing she had no choice except to slink up to a table and drop into a chair, putting her head in her hands.
“So—” Roma returned, setting a glass in front of Juliette as he sat down too.
Juliette suppressed a sigh. She knew what was coming.
“—you are working on a vaccine?”
“Yes.” Juliette rubbed her forehead, then winced, knowing she was smearing product all over her fingers. She should have snapped for him to mind his business, but she was bone-weary of this dance, this routine of dead ends and useless information. It hardly occurred to her that she needed to stop before she was saying, “We have some papers that Paul left behind.”
This was exactly why Lord Montagov had given Roma his task. To pick up all the information Juliette let slip.
“And what will you do,” Roma asked, seeming not to notice as Juliette reached right into her drink and took out an ice cube, rubbing it along her fingers to clean the makeup off, “when you re-create the vaccine?”
Juliette barked a harsh laugh. Suddenly she was glad for the darkness of the hall, each bulb of the chandeliers above twinkling dimly, not only to hide the mess she had made of her makeup, but the mania she was sure had entered her expression.
“If it were up to me,” she said roughly, “I’d send it through the whole city, put a protective casing on everyone so the blackmailer loses power.” A knife materialized between her fingers, and she stabbed the blade into the table, crushing the ice cube into fractions. “But . . . my father may listen to Tyler instead. We may give it only to the Scarlets, then sell it to everyone else, and it will merely be a pity for those who cannot afford it. It is the smart option, after all. The profit-making option.”
Roma said nothing.
“You don’t have a lot of time left,” Juliette went on, only because she knew she had his full attention now. “You should begin a campaign to capture our information so that the White Flowers distribute the vaccine into the market first.”
Juliette yanked the knife out of the table, and ice shards flew in all directions, scattering on the small wooden tabletop. It was always going to be hope that ruined her. Hope that she had presented a terrible thing to him on a platter, and he would not do it, hope that he might care enough to keep the information to himself.
Why would he? He had no reason to care for her when she had given him so many reasons to hate her. And yet she was foolish enough to test him anyway.
“It’s time,” Roma finally said. Juliette looked at him quickly, but he had long moved past the topic at hand. “We need to go to the facility in Kunshan. It may be our very blackmailer.”
“Somehow, I doubt it,” Juliette muttered. She put her knife away and stood, dropping into a mocking curtsy as if they were nothing more than dance partners taking leave for the night. “I’ll see you at the railway station tomorrow.”
Without waiting for further retort, Juliette grabbed her coat and exited the dance hall, plunging back out into the night.
From the roof of Bailemen, Marshall leaned into the cold breeze, letting his hair flutter with the wind. It was a precarious drop down to the pavement—one slip of his shoes and he’d plummet over the edge, falling along the straight wall of the dance hall with nothing to grab on his way down. Just at the thought, his grip tightened on the pole beside him, and he clung a little closer to the towered peak at the center of the building.
Movement flashed below. The glimmering lights of Bailemen reflected off the rain puddles that had collected on the streets earlier, spelling PARAMOUNT BALLROOM backward in red and yellow. Marshall was hardly surprised when he watched Juliette storm out from the dance hall and stomp right into one of the puddles, as if ruining her shoes might improve her mood.
“I wonder what Roma did,” Marshall said aloud.
He got his answer—in a roundabout way—when Roma emerged from Bailemen a minute later and stopped some distance into the road, ignoring the rickshaw runners calling for his business. Instead, he turned his head skyward and emitted one short yell. Marshall ducked out of view, just in case Roma caught sight of him, but he shouldn’t have worried. In seconds, Roma had stormed off too, in the opposite direction of Juliette.