Last Violent Call (Secret Shanghai, #3.5)(24)

“Are you not the ones hunting each of them down?” she hissed.

Maybe-Ilya tried to shoot again, rising onto his knees. Juliette finally returned fire, a bullet missing his side as he dove back to the ground in haste.

“Idiot girl, do not blame us. If anything, we need the girls alive. We are doing our damn best to knock them out and keep them unharmed.” When the man fired again, Juliette moved a second too slow, her breath coming heavy. A red-hot bullet grazed her shoulder. She flinched, and as she drew her elbow closer to keep the wound unmoving, the man attacked, pushing her into the ground as she had done to him before, gun to her head.

“Explain yourself,” she demanded, even in her precarious position.

She smacked her head up, tried to swivel. With a curse, Maybe-Ilya made a face so ferocious that spittle had gathered at the corners of his mouth.

“We are merely on a retrieval mission that you are interrupting,” he spat. “It is not our fault that they are brainwashed to kill themselves the moment we get near.”

Juliette froze in horror. He brought his gun down, intending to strike her hard and knock her out.

But before the arc could finish, Maybe-Ilya went limp. Someone from above hauled him right off her, carelessly tossing his slumped body aside.

“Christ, Juliette, you could have waited two minutes.”

Her vision focused on her savior, framed by the morning sun. Roma had never looked so beautiful, even while he was glaring at her. She most definitely had blood on her lip when she grinned in return.

“Stop looking so happy that you got beaten up.”

Roma reached down, hauling her onto her feet with a strong hand.

“I did not get beaten up,” Juliette corrected, finding her balance. “My opponent looks just as bad as me, so it would be more accurate to say that I got into a fierce scuffle.”

It didn’t seem like Roma was very entertained by her levity. He fussed over the dirt smears on her elbows, trying to brush her clean.

“Don’t worry about the rest of them,” he assured her as he nudged her hair out of her face, wincing at the bruising that was surely appearing along her forehead. “I knocked them out without exchanging too many pleasantries. I figured you would get the information.”

“That I did.” Juliette blew a piece of hair out of her eyes. “How did you know I ducked in here?”

“I have an internal compass that centers on you instead of true north.”

Juliette gave him a wry look.

“Well,” Roma added, gently padding his fingers along the ridge of her jaw, “I also saw the signs of a struggle in the dirt outside and figured you had dragged someone in here. What did he say?”

The man she had dragged in—maybe Ilya, maybe not—lay prone with one arm at an awkward angle. He was going to have terrible pins and needles when he woke up. For a moment, as Juliette walked up to him slowly and used her foot to straighten his arm, she considered pointing her gun and killing him, securing some safety for Mila in the quickest possible way. Only then his words echoed once more in her mind.

We are merely on a retrieval mission.… It is not our fault that they are brainwashed to kill themselves the moment we get near.

It hadn’t sounded like a lie, which meant killing him would be fruitless. The two girls in Shanghai had been marked as suicides, after all. The other two girls hadn’t left signs of a struggle, only blood everywhere. At last, it seemed they had finally gotten an answer for what had been done to Mila in the facility.

“Depending on which way we look at it,” Juliette answered, putting her gun away, “either something that improves this situation or makes it much, much worse.”





10


They had tied them up. Roma had watched with some light concern as Juliette got overly enthusiastic with the task, going as far as to wrap rope around one of the men until he looked near mummified.

Once they were secured and still knocked out, Roma had left Juliette to watch over them while he hurried back to their house. Zhouzhuang was small enough that it took no more than twenty minutes to wake Mila up and bring her to the alley, where she approached each unconscious man cautiously and inspected their faces.

“No,” Mila had answered after a moment. “I don’t recognize any of these people.”

“Then I have bad news about what they’re doing down here,” Juliette said.

It is not our fault that they are brainwashed to kill themselves the moment we get near. Roma had barely comprehended the words while Juliette was explaining. Mila was still terribly pale, digesting the news by sitting down at the end of the alley, staring at her own hands in horror. He figured that she needed a moment, so he tilted his head at Juliette, asking her to step a few paces away with him so they could talk out of her hearing range.

“Are you all right?” Juliette asked.

He cupped her chin in concern. “You’re the one with the bruised face, and you are asking me?”

“I know this hurts you more than it hurts me.” She scrunched her nose in jest, then immediately winced when it pulled her muscles. The fabric of her dress was entirely brown-red at her shoulder, but the color had stopped spreading, which meant she wasn’t bleeding anymore.

“Don’t be a comedian,” Roma muttered. “I really do have phantom physical pain watching you.”