Last Violent Call (Secret Shanghai, #3.5)(28)
“It looks to be healing nicely,” he remarked when he pulled the old bandage off. He dropped the reddened gauze into the sink.
Juliette craned to look, one hand still clutching her scarf and the other holding her qipao up at the front. “Will it leave a scar?”
“Probably not.” Roma opened a bottle of antiseptic. He set the cap down on the sink edge.
“Good. I wouldn’t want to offend you by putting a new one over yours.”
A wince. He was rather sensitive about the time he had thrown a knife at her.
“Stop teasing,” he muttered. “I am very unhappy about each scar you pick up.”
Juliette softened. For her, a scar here and there was a rare occasion nowadays, and more likely to be the result of her getting too overzealous with her cooking. The only person in the world who might be protected forever from scars was Rosalind—immortal, unaging Rosalind—but even she was carrying terrible ones from the past.
The thought of her cousin brought a sigh to Juliette’s lips. Through the mirror, she caught Roma’s gaze flickering up as he secured the bandage, asking without words what was on her mind.
“I have been thinking,” Juliette began. “What are we to do if nothing comes of our plan?”
“You mean if no attackers come find Mila here?” Roma pulled her qipao up. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
“It is good for her safety, yes.” Juliette lowered her arms, letting him fasten her collar again. “But much as I would like to, we cannot look after her indefinitely. She’s her own person. We need to let her go sooner or later.”
Her qipao latched into place. Roma smoothed his hands along her shoulders, carefully avoiding her injury.
“You sound conflicted,” he remarked.
Juliette sighed again. It was a colossal sound. “Because if it comes to letting her go, then I feel like we’ve failed. I want us to maintain our safety, protect our identities. But I also want us to do what is right. And one cannot be wholly realized without the other, because the more we play hero, the larger the targets grow on our backs.”
They could use their contacts, issue a region-wide proclamation to demand Milyena be left alone. But then it would rub up against the wrong people, and someone would go digging, and if their identities came into the open…
Roma smoothed his hand along her back now, as if he were trying to smooth away the imaginary targets that Juliette had dreamt up.
“I know, dorogaya,” he said lowly. “We will walk this balancing act for the rest of time. The life we chose is a perpetual tightrope.”
It twisted at her heart to hear aloud. She would do it all again if she could. She would take all the same steps—relive every agonizing moment and accept every old wound—if it meant this future here. But she was so intensely aware that this life of hers was a self-regarding one; each day that passed, it was her and Roma choosing themselves over the world. At what point did it turn them rotten? How many times did they need to wave off the cries knocking at their door before they became hardened to the humanity that used to make their whole world?
“I suppose I wonder sometimes,” she said, “how it would look if we swayed on the tightrope a little more.”
She looked into the mirror to her side. Watched him.
“You mean if we didn’t focus so much on hiding,” Roma clarified.
“Is that terrible?”
“Of course not.” The set of Roma’s brow softened. “We didn’t actually come out here to hide, darling Juliette. We came here to live. If hiding is what brings us the safety to do so, then we abide by it. If a day comes when we cannot reconcile our intention to live with hiding anymore, then we shed some of our acquired mystique appropriately. We don’t need to make up our minds right this moment.”
Juliette couldn’t quite fill her lungs. She didn’t know if it was because of the terrifying thought of emerging from their safety, or because Roma speaking in his sense of grandeur always took her breath away a little.
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Why can’t it be?”
She turned around properly, facing him. Time brushed up against her cheek and asked her to take a breath, but she only held still, reveling in the swirl of emotion shaking through her ribs. Her heart turned itself inside out, read aloud the writing in red on her arteries and valves, told her pointedly that love was never wholly the grand battles and explosive deeds. Love, she thought, was that kernel of warmth nestled deeper in her chest, glowing with a sense of comfort whenever Roma’s eyes were on her—the same comfort she’d first found when they were fifteen, everlasting.
Juliette put her scarf on the sink edge. She stretched her arms out. “Come closer, please?”
He obliged.
A breath in. A breath out. Her nose pressed into his neck and his cheek leaning against her head.
“Hey,” Juliette said. The word was muffled because she hadn’t bothered drawing away first.
“Hmm?”
“We should have a fight.”
Roma made a perplexed sound, thinking he had misheard her. “I beg your pardon?”
“We’re too content with each other all the time,” she continued. “It’s unnatural.”
A pause. Then Roma spluttered with laughter, his whole body shaking with the absurdity of her statement. Juliette pulled back to scowl at him, and he only laughed harder.