Last Violent Call (Secret Shanghai, #3.5)(10)
If he didn’t love Juliette so much, he would really spend every waking moment in fear of what went on in that mind of hers. But because he loved her, and he was clearly out of his mind too, he only turned and steered her back into the house. After returning to Zhouzhuang, the priority had been getting Yulun out of the car and giving Mila a blanket so she would stop shaking. Only then did Roma and Juliette come back to the car and heave the dead body out of the trunk—well, Roma heaved and Juliette issued instructions while lugging merely one ankle. Roma was very certain that Juliette herself possessed the strength to be throwing dead bodies into canals, but she always liked pleading weakness. Perhaps she just preferred watching him sweat instead.
When they entered the house again, Yulun was awake. They had set him on the sofa, with Juliette fretting the whole time about the material fraying at the sides and pressing uncomfortably if Yulun put his head down. Roma had voiced his doubt that Yulun would mind being scratched by the sofa, but Juliette had hurried for a pillow nonetheless, and now Yulun was looking confusedly at the green cushion beside him, cross-stitched with the top half of a frog.
Juliette didn’t have the patience for cross-stitching. She had learned that rather late into her project. Not that it had stopped her from keeping her half-completed frog around anyway.
“So,” she said, her voice carrying as she wandered into the adjoining kitchen. She had left the kettle on the stove to boil. “Start from the beginning.”
“The beginning of the attack?” Yulun asked.
“Or the beginning of everything?” Mila continued softly.
Roma leaned against the wall, widening his eyes at Juliette for the briefest second when she turned around holding the kettle. That had been a little eerie. Maybe this was how people felt when he and Juliette spoke in accidental unison.
“The beginning of everything, of course,” Roma said. He hesitated a moment, then added in Russian, “You can switch if you want. We will understand.”
Mila pulled the blanket closer to her shoulders. Her Chinese was accented, words coming slowly while she considered what she wanted to say, so there was no doubt it would be easier to explain in her native tongue. But she shook her head. She patted Yulun’s arm, indicating that she wanted him to be following along too, and he wouldn’t if she switched.
“The beginning,” Mila said. She fiddled with the corner of the blanket. “It is a commonplace story, I suppose. I am an orphan from a small town you have never heard about. Life was hard. Work doing menial labor was harder. After I turned fourteen, I was starting to scratch into the last of the savings that my mother had left me, and I needed to find some way to earn more or risk starving to death. Then one day… well, it was like some sign from the heavens when I saw an advertisement seeking paid volunteers for an experiment.”
An experiment. Roma supposed this was where the story stopped being commonplace. He nodded his gratitude when Juliette came back into the living room, giving him a steaming teacup and setting three more cups down on the table.
“I followed the posting to a facility in Vladivostok. It seemed perfectly ordinary. The facility hosted five of us, all girls my age. They gave us communal housing. Food at regular hours. They even gave us nicer clothes because the ones we came in with were getting shabby.”
“Who is they?” Juliette asked, sitting next to Mila. Roma took a sip of tea.
Mila hesitated. “That depends, I suppose,” she decided. “There was a board of men in charge of the overall operation who would come into the facility every once in a while. But we interacted the most with two scientists who lived with us at the facility. A young man who only went by Mr. Pyotr and an elderly man named Lourens Van Dijk.”
Roma spat out his tea. At least he was still holding the cup, so it occurred in a dignified manner, all the water caught neatly. Judging by the way Juliette pressed her hand to her mouth to hide her upturned lips, though, he gathered that she thought otherwise.
“What?” Yulun asked, eyes growing wide. “Why did you react like that?”
“Lourens”—Roma coughed to regain his composure, setting the cup on the fireplace mantel—“is an old friend of ours.”
“Speak for yourself….” Juliette smoothed away her amusement, her hands tucking under her arms instead. “That nutty scientist only ever gave me headaches. And a slice of orange.”
“He—” Roma frowned. “I remember the orange slice, but why did he give you headaches?”
“Do you forget? His work in the labs persistently messed up Scarlet supply. You stole our products and changed them nearly every month.”
Yulun suddenly straightened up, clutching onto this first bit of concrete evidence that he had been correct about their identities. Still, Juliette’s claim was rather inaccurate, so Roma couldn’t resist arguing: “But that wasn’t Lourens’s fault. That was mine.”
“Yes, correct. You also gave me headaches. Frequently.”
Roma winced. There was nothing more he could say to that in his defense. Indeed, he used to make himself a thorn in Juliette’s side frequently, if only because the city had forced them apart and it was better to get her hatred than nothing at all. These days, though he didn’t need to resort to being a menace anymore, he still liked rolling onto her side of the bed when she was ignoring him for a book and receiving the honor of being smacked away with her pillow.