These Violent Delights: Chapters 13–18

Though she hadn’t expected to find much but a scant office complex when she wandered out here into the industrial edges of the Chinese part of the city, she was met with the absolute bustle of activity in the Labor Daily’s offices: people running around with bundles of paper and typewriters clutched in their arms as they yelled for the latest update on a batch that had proceeded forward into printing.

Shaking her head, she reached into the pile of drawings and pulled a few out, resolving not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Juliette had perfected the art of dishonest guiles; she hid her identity when necessary, then wielded it like a weapon when the time came.

Only the man suddenly looked a little amused, too, much to Juliette’s chagrin.

“Well, it must be my lucky day,” Mr. Zhang declared when she entered, putting his fountain pen down. Despite his laudatory tone, he was frowning as he spoke.

Her eyes returning to the Communist before her, Juliette relaxed and made him see what she wanted him to see, letting out a small, careless laugh, vacuous as could be.

The blade embedded perfectly into the front door with a deep, sonorous thud.

“I’m sorry,” she settled on, though her apology was confused and, as a result, disingenuous.

For a moment Juliette almost feared that she hadn’t absolved the burgeoning grudge.

But they faded into the background when he was painting, thinking of nothing save the movement in his wrist and the arc of his paintbrush, a task so careful, so tedious, so beautiful.

He was nineteen years old now and the habits hadn’t faded; they had simply winnowed down and condensed themselves into the tightest possible ball, leaving behind one single wish, which rested atop a pyramid of other impossible desires.

He appeared to be teasing, buffing up his own bravado, but Benedikt started to frown.

“Ben, Ben, precious thing, I was only being facetious.”

Both of them were silent for a moment, staring at each other in a rare bout of confusion.

It gave Benedikt a sudden dip in his stomach, an urge to snatch the words he had just said out of the air, to shove them back into his mouth so Marshall could go back to his usual, relaxed disposition.

It became a place to come and go, ships crowding in for a chance of the life inside the banks, for trading houses and foreign consulates buzzing with power.

She had started this story with vigor, with the sort of energy that came with holding a rapt audience.

“Focus, Juliette.”
It was a moot command. Juliette didn’t require any focus when they approached the Consul-General of France because when the men spoke, she simply faded into the background.

He wasn’t wearing a mask, either. His green eyes blinked at her unfettered, reflecting the golden lights above them.

Her feminine beauty was a concept as fleeting as power.

If she acquired a tan, put on some weight, and let a few decades pass, the street artists would not be rendering her face to sell their creams anymore.

Chinese and Western standards alike were arbitrary, pitiful things.

“No, thanks. My affection is not won with such humdrum energy.”

Reluctantly, she took a step forward and raised her hand; Roma did the same. They didn’t need to speak to make the complementing gesture. They had always known how to predict what the other was about to do.

Despite their stance, the moves, the steps, the angle of their hands—despite everything about the waltz that determined she was the subservient partner, Juliette started to dictate where they were stepping.

Where the loose sleeves of his dress shirt billowed with the light wind, his hands were perfectly still, not a single tremor to the steady grip on his weapon.

After the incident in the French Concession gardens, it had been bedlam in the Cai mansion.

In her head, instead of dendrites and synaptic nerves, she fancied there lived a map of her city, overlying her temporal lobes and amygdala pairs until all that she was made of was the places she had been.

But amid those, there were either factory owners who were Scarlet funded or White Flower associated, or workers with grubby faces, living under gangster rule but ambivalent to the way the scales turned.

Lord Cai and Lord Montagov were simply staring at each other from opposite sides of the room, both seated behind their respective tables on their halves of the warehouse.

Beside him, Benedikt Montagov sat with a neutral expression, looking like a pensive stone statue.

With great reluctance, she concluded that none of the White Flowers seemed more volatile than Tyler, who was practically trembling in his seat in effort to keep silent.

Everybody was having an unspoken conversation, one person asking the ubiquitous question and another giving the most minuscule shake of the head.

Lord Montagov thrived off the love of other people. He preened when surrounded and raged when stared at.

Roma’s dramatics were embarrassing him, and that gave Roma a perverse sort of pleasure.

It smelled of sweat and piss and there were so many voices shouting over one another that this could have been a gathering for delinquents, but there was no doubting the exorbitant design of this place.

“There is no way to know if the vaccine is real,” Benedikt cut in. “If you are speaking about the Larkspur, he sounds like an utter charlatan.”

Mostly because his own anger was the precise opposite—an uncontrollable wave of fire that knew no subtlety.

“Roma, I truly cannot fathom what else there is to do,” Benedikt admitted.

When he finally seemed to have ruminated on it for some time, he said, “Pass me that bucket over there.”