“I guess I hit my head and got myself home.”
“You were there one second and nowhere the next! The fight hadn’t even dispersed before you were gone. I almost got flayed because I kept looking around and searching—”
Benedikt got to his feet too, cutting his cousin off. “I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
Roma threw his hands into the air. He was exerting so much energy in that one motion that his cheeks flushed with color. “I am hardly arguing with you.”
Silence. Roma’s expression shifted from annoyed to thoughtful to grim within the span of seconds as the two Montagovs stared at each other, having a silent conversation with nothing but facial expressions. They had grown up together. No matter how far they were pulled apart, the language of childhood was not one easily forgotten.
“You can’t keep working with Juliette,” Benedikt finally said, tearing right into the wound of the matter. “Not after this. Not after what they did to us.”
Roma turned away, placing his hands behind his back now. He was buying time. He only paced when he couldn’t puzzle through his answers.
“This whole thing was orchestrated,” Roma said in lieu of an answer. “The blackmailer struck again, had us think the Scarlets were responsible, had the Scarlets think we were—”
“I know it was orchestrated. I’m the one who figured it out,” Benedikt cut in, seconds away from giving his cousin a hefty shake. What part of this was hard to understand? What part of this was hard to see? “But her people chose to set those fires. Her people burned children to death.”
Roma swiveled around. “Juliette is not her people.”
And Benedikt snapped. “Juliette let your mother die! Juliette killed Marshall!”
His voice crashed across the room with the same intensity of a cannon, landing with complete devastation. Roma rocked like he had been physically hit, and Benedikt, too, clutched his stomach, bearing the kickback of his words.
That—that was the central point which they could not forgive. Even mothers could be forgiven, in a city soaked in blood. But Marshall Seo could not be.
“I know,” Roma spat. The volume came unwillingly, like he hadn’t wanted to shout, but that was the only way this conversation could be tolerated. “I know, Benedikt. God, don’t you think I know?”
Benedikt laughed. It was the most humorless sound, somehow blunt and bladed at once. “You tell me. Because you sure act like everything can be forgotten, gallivanting off with her like this.”
“He was my friend too. I know you two were a hell of a lot closer, but don’t act like I didn’t care.”
“You don’t get it.” Benedikt couldn’t think past the roar in his head. Could hardly breathe past the twist in his throat. “You just don’t get it.”
“What, Benedikt? What could I possibly not get—”
“I loved him!”
Across the room, Roma exhaled out once, letting the rest of his anger go in that short breath. Quick as his surprise came, it was gone in the next beat, like he was kicking himself for being surprised at all. Benedikt, meanwhile, put his hand to his throat, like he could swallow his words, could return them inside his lungs where they once lived undisturbed. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have said anything at all . . . but he had said it. And he didn’t want to take it back. He meant it.
“I loved him,” Benedikt said again, softly this time, only to feel what those words tasted like on his tongue a second time.
He had known all along, hadn’t he? It was only that he could not say it.
When Roma looked over, his eyes were glistening. “This city would have destroyed you for that.”
“It has destroyed me anyway,” Benedikt replied.
It had always taken, and taken, and taken. And this time, it took too much.
Roma strode toward him. For half a second, Benedikt considered that Roma was coming to attack him, but instead, his cousin drew him into a fierce hug, arms as steady as steel.
Slowly, Benedikt returned the embrace. Doing so felt like seizing a gasp of his childhood, plainer days when his biggest worry was the sparring mat and whether he was going to get the wind kicked out of him. It never mattered even if he did. Roma always helped him back up again.
“I’ll kill her,” Roma whispered into the quiet of the room. “On my life, I swear it.”
Twenty-One
March 1927
Juliette slammed down the telephone receiver, letting out the faintest scream. She sounded so much like a whistling teakettle that one of the maids at the end of the hallway peered over her shoulder, checking if the sound had come from the kitchen.