Until she did.
Juliette stirred awake, although her eyes stayed closed. For a long second, she wasn’t sure why she had awoken, and yet she had. For a long second, she did not know why she remained still, and then she did.
Juliette bolted upright. There was a dark figure at the foot of her bed, rummaging through her coat. The window was wide open, the white satin curtain blowing like a second phantom.
Juliette pulled the knife from under her pillow and threw it.
The mysterious intruder immediately grunted. He was masked, clothed in black from head to toe, but her blade had embedded into the side of his arm, a shining thing that reflected the light as the intruder jerked around, trying to pull it out. By then Juliette was already up, launching herself on the intruder and throwing him to the floor. She rammed her elbow into his neck, keeping him down.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
The intruder bucked and kicked her off. He wasn’t bothering with the knife in his arm anymore. He was trying to get out.
Juliette’s head slammed hard into the bedframe, colliding with such intensity that she was immediately seeing double. Though she recovered fast, pushing herself onto her stomach with a livid cough, the intruder was already up. There was something in his hands. Something blue.
The vaccine.
The intruder ran out.
“No!” Juliette yelled. “No—goddammit!” She staggered to her feet, then shoved on her shoes. She pulled her coat around her shoulders so roughly that her weapons almost fell out, but with one hand digging around for her pistol, she kicked open her door and slapped a hand repeatedly on the one next door. The intruder was already out of sight. Downstairs, though the floor was dark and the fountain was switched off, the front door was wide, wide open.
“Roma!” Juliette hissed. “Roma, get outside now!”
She took off running. The good thing about having no pajamas to change into was that she was dressed already, her coat billowing after her like a cape in the wind. She charged into the night, searching the streets.
There.
“Juliette!”
Her head whipped back. Roma was coming toward her, his hair disheveled, but otherwise fully dressed too.
“What’s going on?”
“Go the other way, circle around the forest patch,” Juliette snapped, pointing down the street, where it led into a dense cluster of trees. “He took the vial! Find him!”
Pulling the safety on her pistol, Juliette sprinted directly into the trees. She twisted in and out of the thin bamboo trunks, shoes coming down on the dead leaves underfoot, and spotted a flash of movement: a blur of the intruder swerving sharply left. She didn’t hesitate. She aimed and shot, but he ducked, and the bullet missed. Again and again, Juliette shot into the night, sending her bullets upon the briefest flash of movement, but then the intruder dove into a particularly dense grouping of bamboo, and by the time Juliette was there too, she had lost sight of him.
“Tā mā de,” she spat, kicking a bamboo stalk. She should have known better; outside the safety of her house, without her usual retinue of Scarlet guards, she should have slept with one eye open, or at least with all her valuables clutched close to her chest. She had known there was someone after them, someone on their tail. But how was she to know that some masked man would climb in through the damn second-story window? And why take the vaccine? Why not just kill her?
Juliette smacked the bamboo again. It didn’t make her feel any better. It just made her hand throb. She couldn’t tell her father about this. He would use it as another reason why Juliette needed backup—needed a group of men watching her surroundings for her, as if they wouldn’t have been just as useless in this situation, stationed outside her room. As if they wouldn’t have just gotten in her way.
Do better. Juliette’s fist closed hard. Never mind her father. If she wanted to prove to herself that she didn’t need any damn help, she had to stop letting her guard down. She was the heir of the Scarlet Gang. How was she to hold on to an empire when she couldn’t hold on to the belongings in her pocket?
Footfalls suddenly sounded off to the side, and Juliette whirled to attention, pointing her pistol. The crunching leaves came to a stop. Juliette relaxed and put her pistol away. “Did you see him?”
“Not a flicker,” Roma replied, approaching cautiously. “We lost the vaccine?”
“Yeah,” Juliette grumbled. “And my knife.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?”
Roma folded his arms. His gaze was pinned on her, and Juliette suddenly resisted the urge to wipe at her face. It was bare, her cosmetics removed before she slept.