Instead, she lifted her head and moved her hands away.
Her throat had healed over, still stained with red but looking as if it had never been cut.
Mr. Kuznetsov emitted a strangled noise. His bodyguard, meanwhile, whispered something indecipherable and advanced toward her, but when Rosalind held a hand out, he complied, too stunned to do anything else.
“I suppose I’ll tell you now,” Rosalind said, slightly breathless. She wiped the blood from her chin and rose onto one foot, then the other. “Haven’t you heard of me? The Nationalists need to do a better job of their propaganda.”
Now it was dawning on the merchant. She could see it in his eyes, in that expression of disbelief to be witnessing something so unnatural before him, connecting it with the stories that had started spreading some few years ago.
“Lady Fortune,” he whispered.
“Ah.” Rosalind finally straightened upright, her lungs recovering. “That’s a misnomer. It’s just Fortune. Catch.” In a smooth motion, she retrieved one of her gloves to clasp the lip of the vase and swipe it off the table. The bodyguard caught the vase quickly when she tossed it at him, likely preparing for some attack, but the vase only landed in his palms softly, nestled like a wild animal made of porcelain.
Fortune, the rumors whispered, was the code name for a Nationalist agent. Not just any agent: an immortal assassin who could not be killed despite multiple attempts, who didn’t sleep or age, who stalked the night for her targets and appeared in the guise of a mere girl. Depending on how much flourish was added to the stories, she was specifically a menace for the surviving White Flowers, going after them with a coin in hand. If it landed on heads, they were killed immediately. If it landed on tails, they were given the chance to run, but no target had yet managed to escape her.
“Abominable creature,” Mr. Kuznetsov hissed. He lunged back to give her a wide berth between them—or at least he tried. The merchant had yet to take three steps before he crashed abruptly to the floor. His bodyguard stood stock-still in shock, freezing with his hands around the vase.
“Poison, Mr. Kuznetsov,” Rosalind explained. “That’s not such an abominable way to die, is it?”
His limbs started to twitch. His nervous system was shutting down—arms going soft, legs turning to paper. She took no pleasure in this. She did not treat it like vengeance. But she would be lying if she said she didn’t feel righteous with each hit, as if this was her way of sloughing away her sins layer by layer until she had answered entirely for her actions four years ago.
“You…” Mr. Kuznetsov heaved in. “You didn’t… touch the… tea. I was… I was watching.”
“I didn’t poison the tea, Mr. Kuznetsov,” Rosalind replied. She turned to his bodyguard. “I poisoned the vase that you touched with your bare fingers.”
The bodyguard tossed the vase away with a sudden viciousness, smashing it to pieces by the four-poster bed. It was too late; he had been holding on to it for longer than Mr. Kuznetsov. He lunged for the door, perhaps to seek aid, perhaps to wash his hands of the poison, but he, too, crumpled swiftly to the floor before he could make it out.
Rosalind watched it all with a blank stoniness. She had done this many times. The rumors were true: she did sometimes carry around a coin to give the Nationalists fuel for their propaganda. But poison was her weapon of choice, so it didn’t matter how far they ran. By the time her targets thought they were being let free, they had already been hit.
“You…”
Rosalind walked closer to the merchant, placing her gloves into her pocket.
“Do me a favor,” she said dully. “Send Dimitri Voronin my regards when you see him in hell.”
Mr. Kuznetsov stopped wheezing, stopped moving. He was dead. Another assignment had been fulfilled, and the Nationalists were one step closer to losing their country to imperialists instead of Communists. Moments later, his bodyguard succumbed too, and the room fell into a hollow silence.
Rosalind pivoted for the sink by the bar, spinning the faucet as far as it would go and rinsing her hands. She splashed the water down her neck next, scrubbing with her fingers. All this blood was her own, yet disgust was bitter on her tongue when she saw the sides of the sink staining while she cleaned, as if specks of a different poison were dropping off her skin, the kind that contaminated her soul instead of her organs.
“It’s easier not to think about it,” her cousin used to say, back when Shanghai had a blood feud between two rival gangs, back when Rosalind was the right hand of the Scarlet Gang’s heir and watched Juliette kill people day after day in the name of her family. “Remember their faces. Remember the lives taken. But what’s the point in mulling on it? If it happened, it happened.”
Rosalind breathed out slowly, turning the faucet off and letting the rust-colored water swirl down the drain. Little had changed in the city’s attitude toward bloodshed since her cousin’s death. Little except swapping gangsters for politicians who pretended there would be some semblance of law and order now. An artificial exchange, nothing different at its core.
A rumble of voices echoed from the hallway outside. Rosalind stiffened, making a scan of her surroundings. While she didn’t think she could get prosecuted for the crimes committed here, she did need to make her escape before she could test out that theory. The Kuomintang had put itself in charge of the country, positioning its governance as an upholder of justice. For the sake of its image, its Nationalist members would throw her to the wolves and disown her as an agent if she were caught leaving dead bodies outside the city, even when their secret covert branch gave every instruction.
Rosalind tilted her chin up, flexing the new smooth skin at her throat while she searched the compartment ceiling. She had studied the blueprints of the train before she boarded, and when she spotted a thin, barely visible string dangling near the light fixture, she pulled a panel of the ceiling free to reveal a metal hatch leading directly to the top of the train for maintenance.
As soon as she had the hatch down, the wind rushed into the room at a roar. She gave herself a foot up using the nearby drawers, removing herself from the crime scene with nimble speed.
“Don’t slip,” she told herself, climbing through the hatch and emerging into the night, teeth chattering against the frigid temperature. “Do not slip.”
Rosalind closed the hatch. She paused for the slightest moment, gathering her bearings on top of a speeding train. For a dizzying moment, she was struck with a sense of vertigo, convinced that she would tip over and fall. Then, just as quickly, her balance adjusted, her feet planted steadily.
“A dancer, an agent,” Rosalind whispered to herself as she started to move across the train, her eyes on the end of the carriage. Her handler had drilled the mantra into her head during her earliest training days, when she had complained about being unable to move fast, unable to fight as traditional agents might—excuse after excuse for why she wasn’t good enough to learn. She used to spend every night on a brightly lit stage. The city had built her up as its dazzling star, the dancer that everyone had to see, and talk moved faster than reality ever could. It didn’t matter who Rosalind was, or that, really, she was only a child dressed up in glitter. She swindled men and beamed at them like they were the world until they passed over the tips she wanted to see, and then she switched tables before the song could even change.