Last Violent Call (Secret Shanghai, #3.5)(21)

Roma grabbed her elbow, yanking her to her feet. The sewer pipe didn’t extend high enough for them to stand properly.

“They can’t find us here, dorogaya. What’s going to happen when they find us here?”

And just like that, Juliette snapped back into alertness, the last few hours before the explosion flashing back into her head at rapid speed. The execution order on the Montagovs. Her rebellion against her own family. It wasn’t over because Dimitri was gone. The soldiers would kill Roma on the Scarlet Gang’s orders. The Scarlet Gang would drag her back and punish her.

“Let’s go,” Juliette commanded, pulling herself back through the drain. Her fingers burned on the charred metal, but she gritted her teeth and labored through it. Large flames remained at the scene. Burned bodies, unrecognizable past their skeletal shapes. As soon as Roma clambered out, Juliette pushed the drain back into place, and then they ran, deep into the city.

For almost a week afterward, they laid low at an abandoned safe house on Thibet Road, recovering and waiting and asking each other again and again if they were certain. At last, while their gravestones were being carved elsewhere in the city, they made up their minds, and Celia found the transport to usher them out of Shanghai in the dead of night.

Juliette craned her head, letting her eyes focus in the dim moonlight. She reached for Roma’s cheek, then smoothed her thumb along a faint scar on the highest point.

Though they were here now, the day of that explosion had been the last day they spent alive as Shanghai’s infamous heirs. The people who had clambered out from that drain were changed—mere shadow selves. They emerged back into the world, deciding that they had done what they could for their city and it was time to choose themselves, at long last.

They could never let go of Shanghai entirely, though. Roma was waiting to summon Alisa; Juliette thought about her parents more often than she cared to admit. She knew that she would never make contact again, that unlike Roma’s relationship with her sister, her goodwill with her parents had been severed entirely when she defied them. All the same, there was an aching crevasse in her body that missed their presence, out of habit and familiarity that she would never be able to fully erase.

“You won’t ever lose me,” Roma murmured in the present. “You made me do a pinkie promise, remember?”

“Actually,” Juliette corrected, “I was promising you, but you never promised me.”

Roma’s eyes finally fluttered open. In that narrow strip of silver streaming through the window, his pupils were so large that his gaze was wholly black.

“I would have assumed,” he said slowly, “that our marriage vows shortly afterward implied a returned promise.”

Juliette stubbornly stuck her pinkie out. With a huff of air, Roma dragged his hand over and curled their pinkies together.

“You won’t ever lose me,” he repeated, sounding so serious even with the jest in their actions. “And I love you, to have and to hold as my unlawfully wedded wife, until the universe itself goes poof.”

Juliette’s lip twitched. “Stop changing your vows. Your first ones were better.”

“It’s late, lǎopó. I need functioning thought to be eloquent.”

The remnants of her dream felt further away now. Distant, like the city was.

“Go back to sleep,” Juliette said. She released their pinkies. “You can barely keep your eyes open.”

“As long as you sleep too.” He made a noise of protest, then retrieved her hand before it could escape and propped her palm against his chest in the limited space between their bodies. “I will be right here if you wake up again.”

Juliette searched his gaze. Nodded. In response, Roma dropped a kiss on her forehead, short and sweet and tired.

Then he waited, looking at her instead of going to sleep.

“What?” Juliette asked.

“You haven’t kissed me back,” he said.

Juliette held in her titter. Feigning a begrudging sigh, she returned the kiss on his lips. No matter how she pretended, the seconds she lingered there told the truth.

When Juliette pulled away, Roma made a satisfied smile and settled to return to sleep.

“Such a big baby,” she said fondly.





9


Despite her lack of rest, Juliette was up at the crack of dawn, chopping shrimp in the kitchen. The dreams hadn’t returned when she fell asleep again, her unconsciousness offering the comforting void of nothing until the first hint of day brushed against her eyes.

Roma was still fast asleep in the living room. He had one arm dangling over the edge of the sofa and the other propped under his head as a new makeshift pillow after Juliette extricated herself. The morning had only started to emit light, and the world outside hovered in a purplish tone that let dreaming and waking prevail on the same plane.

Juliette brushed a handful of shrimp into a bowl. She was quite a good cook, contrary to natural assumption—or at least she was better at cooking than Roma was at driving. Which, given, was a low bar to reach, but she had yet to burn anything too badly.

Just as she started on the next clump of shrimp, she heard the front door open. Her knife stilled, head tilted to take in the sound. As soon as footfalls entered the living room and started to pad in her direction, however, Juliette relaxed, recognizing the steps and putting her knife down.