Roma pushed his hair out of his eyes. His pulse was still raging, his palms slightly damp. “It is . . . it’s complicated.”
“Nothing in this world is complicated, only misunderstood.”
Roma peered at Alisa, his nose scrunching. Alisa scrunched the exact same button nose back, and the siblings suddenly seemed like mirror images of the other.
“You are entirely too wise for your young age.”
“You are nineteen. It is not far by much.” Alisa tapped her knee. “Does Papa know?”
“It was his idea,” Roma muttered. Seeing that he could not keep his sister in the dark anymore, he started at the beginning, from the moment Lord Montagov called him into his office to discuss the plan and then the snide, knowing glance Roma had caught from Dimitri in the living room.
“The last of it was in Zhouzhuang,” he finished. “Then the Scarlets blew up our safe house, and I figured the alliance was called off.”
Alisa was staring at the wall of the alley, clearly mulling through the events. The gears in her head were turning, her frown deepening. She wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything. It was a waste of energy to try.
“I almost wanted to stay.”
Alisa’s frown disappeared quickly, surprised by his sudden pivot. “In Zhouzhuang?” She snorted. “It’s so quiet.”
“We need a little quiet. This city is always so loud.” Roma tipped his head up, staring at the flurrying clouds. The desire to run had been pulling at the edge of his mind for years: a constant whisper surrounding the idea of escape. He remembered one late night leaning on his windowsill, his cheek still smarting from Lord Montagov’s discipline, wishing he could pick himself up and fade into a life somewhere outside these city boundaries. He wanted air that didn’t smell like factory smoke. He wanted to sit under the cover of a large tree, lean upon the trunk and see nothing but green for miles. Mostly, that night in 1923, he wanted Juliette back, and he wanted to take her and run, far from the clutches of their families.
Only he also knew exactly what that meant: leaving the White Flowers without an heir, carving open a space that any hateful soul could fill.
“It is loud because you listen,” Alisa said.
“It is loud because everybody’s always talking at me.” Roma sighed, pressing the heel of his bloody palm into his eyes. Constant demands from the White Flowers. Constant demands from his father. Constant demands from the city itself. “I entertain that it must be nicer to live simply instead. To catch fish and sell it on the fresh market every day for livable wages instead of trading mounds of opium for amounts of cash we’ll never need.”
Alisa thought on it. She pulled her legs up to her chest and leaned her arms on her knees. “I think,” she said, “that is something you say because we have been rich all our lives.”
Roma smiled tightly. Indeed. They had never been born for a simple life, and so they did not deserve it either. It had taken generations to climb to where they were now, and who was Roma to throw it away?
All the same, that part of him never seemed to go away. The part that wanted to run, the part that wanted a different life. If only he could erase every memory of his earlier years, maybe he could erase these thoughts too, but he would always remember lying in a park with Juliette—fifteen and carefree, his head in her lap and her lips pressing a soft kiss to his cheek, the grass under his fingers and the birds fluttering in song on the branches above him. He would always remember that little nook where nothing could disturb them, a world of their own, and thinking this—this is the only complete happiness I have ever felt.
It was that part of him he could never kill, and when Juliette was stitched into those memories like a finished hem, how could he ever kill her?
A sound came from the other end of the alley then—a pebble skittering across the pavement. Seconds later Benedikt came into view, frowning at the sight of his two cousins on the ground.
“What are you doing? We need to go.”
Roma got to his feet without argument, nudging the first-aid box out of sight and reaching a hand out to Alisa. “Come on.” He ruffled her blond hair as she stood, the two of them trailing after Benedikt as they made their way home.
It wasn’t until they were trekking back into White Flower territory and Alisa started dragging her feet upon the gravel that Roma suddenly blinked, his eyes coming to the back of Benedikt’s head. He hadn’t thought much about how his cousin had found them. But now, as Benedikt chided Alisa to walk properly and stop ruining her shoes, he realized that he had heard no footsteps before Benedikt’s approach.