Last Violent Call (Secret Shanghai, #3.5)(14)

“Just you,” Roma replied, deadpan. “Your punishment for the terrible defamation earlier.”

Juliette breathed a laugh. “Sorry.” She nudged her nose against his ear. “I’ll make it up to you. Don’t send me away.”

She felt the shiver that ran along him. His gaze darted to the hallway.

“I suppose I will forgive you and hold that offer on reserve.”

“Superb.” Juliette bounced over to another seat at the table, taking a stack of the papers. “Now, what are we really doing?”

“Trying to find the articles that Mila mentioned,” Roma answered, his focus switching back in a blink too. “But Shanghai has far too many papers.”

With a toss of her hair, Juliette flicked through the first few in her pile. “We could sift out the publications that started more recently,” she suggested. “Those are more propaganda than they are news.”

Roma grumbled under his breath. “Still leaves a rather tall stack.”

Together they scanned for a few minutes, pushing the recent publications into a pile at the end of the table. When Juliette’s attention wandered briefly, her gaze went to their hallway, to that image of Yulun and Mila sleeping again.

“Roma,” she said, cutting into the quiet that had settled in the kitchen. “What do you think those experiments did to the girls?”

“What do you mean?” Roma replied, still flipping through the headlines. “Other than what Mila mentioned?”

Juliette hummed a noise. “It only seems strange to me that Lourens would be experimenting with this.”

She remembered what Celia had told her in a hush, almost a year after she and Roma had fled. Rosalind getting sick, then recovering with the most bizarre side effects. Now she had been recruited by the Nationalists to make use of what no one could understand—her inability to age, her rapid healing, never needing sleep—and Lourens was the one who had done it. These days, Juliette was as close as ever with Celia, but she hadn’t spoken to Rosalind in years. Not since Rosalind had betrayed her and Juliette had responded in kind by keeping her tied up at a safe house and forcing her to divulge everything she knew about her then-lover. Though Juliette eventually released her cousin, she thought about their last encounter constantly. Whether there had been anything she could have done so that they hadn’t left each other on such a sour note. Whether Rosalind was beating herself up over it as well, because as far as Rosalind was aware, that was the last time she’d seen Juliette alive.

Rosalind had been one of her best friends. As angry as Juliette was at the time, the years had mellowed her out, had meant she missed Rosalind more than she blamed her for making a mistake. Still, a long time had passed. She had no way of knowing who her cousin had become, working as a national assassin. What her cousin had been made into by Lourens’s hand.

“He is an incredibly talented man,” Juliette went on. He had already saved Rosalind before he met Mila, if she was understanding their time line correctly. “What is the need for these small experiments? It is a feat to have others do your bidding, very well, but from what we have heard, Lourens had invented immortality already. I am having trouble believing there isn’t more to it, perhaps existing outside of Mila’s understanding.”

Roma had grown still. It took Juliette a few seconds to realize it wasn’t in reaction to what she had just said, but rather that he had spotted something in the newspaper before him.

“You are correct. This is beyond belief.” With a smooth swivel, Roma turned the newspaper spread so that it was facing her, allowing Juliette to scan the text. He pointed to a paragraph at the very bottom corner and read aloud:

“?‘… Initially suspected as foul play, the deaths of two Russian showgirls in the French Concession have now both been ruled as suicides. After analysis, investigators have deemed their wounds to be self-inflicted, and are working with the possibility that these cases are inspired by the madness that swept the city five years ago.’?”

“What?” Juliette blurted. When Roma lifted his gaze to meet her eyes, they looked at each other with equal befuddlement. “The madness? Our madness? There’s no chance the two girls decided to go imitating an event they weren’t even in the city for. Surely it was made to look that way.”

Roma folded up the paper, sliding it to the other side of the table so it wasn’t in his line of sight anymore. “I can’t imagine why someone’s killing them by clawing their throats out either. You don’t go eliminating experiment subjects if you want the research. Nor do you wait three years if it’s a pressing matter of shutting them up.”

The clock in the kitchen ticked loudly. It echoed across the dark green wall tiles, each passing second louder than the previous as the sound built and built. With a sigh, Juliette stretched her hand out on the table, and Roma leaned forward to lace his fingers through hers.

“I don’t suppose Paul Dexter has risen from the dead to invoke chaos?” she murmured. “The other option would be Dimitri, and I would rather deal with undead Paul.”

Roma’s grip tightened on her hand for a moment. Then he loosened his hold, tapping his index finger against the soft pad of her palm.

“Hang on,” he said. “There’s an interesting thought, actually. How did we solve this the first time around?”