These Violent Delights: Chapters 5–12

A smattering of sound came from right outside Juliette’s bedroom door then.

Rosalind kicked out with her foot suddenly, using the momentum to push her body upright, sitting so fast that her coiffed hair whipped into her eyes.

Juliette jerked to attention, using the vanity mirror to peer at Rosalind.

None of the household staff knew how to deal with Juliette. She was too bold, too brazen, too Western, while they were too new, too uncertain, never comfortable.

“Shoo,” Rosalind chided, smacking the slipper away and biting down on her laugh. “Go attend to your duties.”

All she cared about was the Scarlet Gang, about whatever immediate dangers and tribulations they were facing on a day-to-day basis.

He leaned forward, like he could persuade her with mere eye contact. All it did was show Juliette that he hadn’t quite brushed out a clump of pomade in his sweep of dark-blond hair.

The foreigners had only claimed the nearby land in these recent years as they became more brash with their legal power.

The White Flowers would let the foreigners continue practicing their laws over a space that didn't seem to belong to either of them, and the pompous merchants with their floral coats and polished shoes stepped aside when the gangsters ran amok on the streets.

In his mind, she had been gray and gaunt, but always alert, always ready to smile when Roma walked up to her bed.

She had not been told about the murder, only that Lady Montagova had at last succumbed to illness.

“Just because I had reason to enter their burlesque club does not mean I can gallivant through their hospital—”

“Papa, don’t make me laugh.”
Lord Montagov shrugged flippantly, but there was something in his eyes that Roma didn’t like.

“The lā-gespu is a man,” he snapped right into Juliette’s face, his voice a reedy hiss.

Kidnapping was a lucrative business.

In a split second, she ran through all the possibilities: an affronted merchant wanting comeuppance, a greedy foreigner wanting ransom, a confused addict on the streets who hadn’t recognized her by the sparkly beads of her foreign dress....

In a split second, she ran through all the possibilities: an affronted merchant wanting comeuppance, a greedy foreigner wanting ransom, a confused addict on the streets who hadn’t recognized her by the sparkly beads of her foreign dress....

Roma still smelled as he used to: like gunmetal and mint and the softness of a gentle zephyr.

He acted flippant, but Juliette was tracking his erratic pulse as it thudded away beneath her fingers.

Begrudgingly, slowly, Juliette removed her knife from Roma’s throat and raised her hands high.

They walked in tense, palpable silence.

Mid-October, the air warm but becoming brisk, workers bantering by the port-side as they volleyed packages into waiting boats.

It was almost funny now, how Roma had startled upon hearing her Russian—flawless, if a little stilted from a lack of practice.

But she would return to find him anyway, thinking herself shrewd, thinking herself clever. For months they flirted and pretended and toed the line between enemy and friend, both knowing who the other was but neither admitting to it, both trying to gain something from this friendship but being uncareful, falling too deep without knowing.

Between the cracks in the pavement, a black speck dotted the cement, ordinary upon a mere, cursory glance.

He stood too, squinting at the culpable object on the ground.

When Benedikt picked up the single dead thing and showed it to his wayward friend, he expected Marshall to make some crude comment or construct a song about the fragility of life.

“That,” Marshall deadpanned, “is disgusting.”

In tense silence, interspersed only by the occasional toot of a car chugging along the nearby street, Benedikt used the knife to slit the thin skin atop one of the dead insects.

The remnants of old China were stronger here, amid the various paraphernalia—the pipes and the oil lamps—that had been brought over from before the turn of the century.

She eyed the bodies slumped against the walls of the den. “I doubt these people are as docile as they look.”

A few centuries ago, when this place was still the home estate of a royal or a general, it might have been opulent and lush.

“Will you accept a gift from me to make up for my insolence?”

Her voice came out in a sneer, but the derision wasn’t directed at Kathleen.

Lady Cai mulled over that for a long moment.

“My sources say that the Communists may be the cause of this insipid madness.”

For thousands of years, the worst crime in China was a lack of filial piety.

He would have rather disowned her than let her back in Shanghai wearing a qipao, and Kathleen would have rather packed her bags and made her own way across Europe than go on being her father’s prodigal son.

Da Nao left the break room without any fanfare.

A sudden splashing noise by the wharf startled Kathleen out of her reverie, prompting her to hop off the ledge and back onto the ground outside the cotton mill.