Crossed by the Stars: A Second-chance, Slow-burn Romance

by LJ Evans

  “I’d like to go to Vanya’s place in Avalyn Beach tomorrow. He already agreed. I’m hoping to convince Jada tonight. I want to keep those with knowledge of our location to a bare minimum, which also means keeping the team as small as possible.”

  He nodded. “It’s a good idea. Flying?”

  “Not with the injury to her ears.”

  The drive down the coast would be long but better than pushing our luck with her hearing.

  “We’ll debug everything before we leave, switch cars several times, and take some detours to ensure we aren’t followed,” Cillian said.

  “Her phone is tapped,” I said more than asked.

  He gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Most likely. The Kyōdaina may not be able to keep up with the Russians in the cybercrime arena, but they still know how to bug a phone.”

  This was why I trusted him with my life. It wasn’t just that he could make plans on the fly—and often did—it was that he understood the darkness of our world. He also knew every angle to keep a client safe, when to dial it up, and when to dial back.

  “I’d like to know what the police investigation turns up. Any way you can make that happen?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we know some folks. We’ll keep you informed. Reinard is already conducting his own investigation into Rana’s team.”

  I grimaced.

  “She asked for it,” Cillian said, and that did surprise me. “She needs to know what happened as much as you do.”

  I doubted it, but I did believe that Rana felt guilty about what had happened.

  Cillian pulled a bracelet out of his pocket.

  “It’s a GPS tracker that only Reinard and I have access to. If you can get her to put it on, it’ll help us find her if we need to.”

  I took it, unsure if I could get Jada to do anything but determined to try.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  He nodded and walked out the front door. I locked it behind him and then placed my forehead against it, trying to get my bearings, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to tell Dawson when I made the call in about thirty seconds.

  The silence in the apartment was loud after the constant noise of the hospital. I hoped it allowed Jada to sleep better than she had there. Even drugged to the max, she’d been restless overnight. I knew because I hadn’t gotten a wink myself. I’d reclined in the hospital chair, listening to the murmurs and groans escaping her lips even when she’d been passed out. I’d listened and tormented myself with all the ways I might have been able to prevent her from being hurt to begin with.

  I pushed off the door, poured myself a finger of whiskey, and then sat down on my couch with my phone on the coffee table. Before I could come up with another excuse not to call, I hit the number for the satellite phone Dawson was using on his trip. I slammed half the whiskey while waiting for him to answer. After four rings, he finally picked up.

  “Hey, can I call you back in a few?” he said breathlessly as if I’d caught him running, and I couldn’t help the small smile it brought to my lips. Honeymooners. Then, my smile slipped, realizing I was going to take both of their joy and throw it out the window.

  “Unfortunately, not a good idea,” I said.

  There was shuffling on the other end before he finally asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t really know how to say this…except to start with the same words you told me. She’s okay. Or she will be.”

  “Fuck…” Dawson’s voice trailed off. “What the hell is going on?”

  “A bomb went off in her apartment.”

  Dawson choked. “What?”

  “Killed one of her detail. The blast threw her into the coffee table. According to Rana, she and Nyra only got down one flight of stairs before Jada passed out. They had to call in backup to carry her out to the ambulance.”

  “How bad is she hurt?”

  “She’s lucky, Daws. Really lucky.” My voice broke, and I forced myself to continue anyway. “She has a couple bruised ribs, a few cuts and scrapes, tinnitus that will likely heal.”

  “I knew there was more going on than either of you said. Your text was pretty shady.”

  There wasn’t accusation in his voice, more like resignation and understanding.

  “I didn’t keep it from you to even the score,” I told him. “I…Jada… We didn’t want you to have to come home for this.”

  “She’s family, Dax. We’ll always come home for her.”

  My throat clogged, wishing Jada was awake to hear the call. I didn’t have a chance to respond before Dawson spoke again, “Violet wants to talk to her.”

  “I just got her to go to sleep. Can I text you when she’s awake?”

  He mumbled something I couldn’t decipher to Vi before returning to me. “We’re coming home. I don’t know if that means docking in Samoa and catching a flight or putting your parents’ yacht to the test and racing back, but we’re on our way.”

  I swallowed hard and then told him the truth, “We won’t be here.”

  “What the hell?”

  “It isn’t safe. For her or you. Who knows if they’ll be gunning for you as well as Jada? And I’ve got a friend’s place no one really knows about. We’re going to head there until we know more about who did this.”

  “You know who did this,” Dawson growled.

  I sighed. “According to her father, there are factions squabbling for retribution over Matsuda’s death.”

  Dawson was quiet for a moment before he asked, “You saw him? He’s not in charge anymore?”

  “He demanded she meet with him, and I went along. He hasn’t been ousted, but there’s got to be one hell of a power struggle going on if he’s willing to admit not everyone and everything is perfectly in his control.”

  “I’m calling Malone,” Dawson said.

  “That’s probably a good idea. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t show up at the hospital.”

  “He’s undercover. He surfaced long enough to attend our wedding and then went back in.”

  This was news to me, but then Dawson and I rarely talked about his FBI buddies and the work he’d done for them. It was a sore spot. Secrets he’d kept. I wasn’t much better. I had secrets I was keeping, too. From him and Jada. From the entire world. They weren’t mine. They were my family’s. I didn’t have a right to share them. Couldn’t. It might ruin the Armauds for good.

  “How will I get a hold of you?” Dawson asked when I didn’t reply.

  “We’ll definitely call when Jada’s awake, and we’ll have burner phones, but we might have to relay messages through others.”

  Dawson was quiet. “It’s that serious…”

  “Dawson, her apartment was blown up.”

  I could imagine him dragging his hand over his face in the normal way he did when frustrated. “I can’t… It hasn’t sunk in yet. What about Violette and the staff? Are they safe?”

  I hadn’t even considered it, and my stomach lurched at the oversight. Whoever had done this could easily have set up more than one bomb. Could have been waiting for Jada to show up at work. “I’ll take care of it. Reinard will search the place from head to toe, and we’ll beef up the security.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. You asked me to look in on her, and I left her to get blown up…” my voice cracked. “If she hadn’t been running late… If she hadn’t….” I couldn’t say it. When I’d gotten the rundown from Rana, she’d told me that Jada’s workout had gone longer than normal in the morning. If she’d been a few minutes earlier, it would likely have been her in the bedroom instead of Bobby.

  I didn’t wish the man dead. I felt an enormous amount of empathy for his family, but I was relieved to the very bottom of my soul that it wasn’t Jada who’d lost her life.

  “Fuck,” Dawson said on the other end, his voice threaded with a mix of emotion. “This is my fault.”

  I’d once felt the same way because it was ea
sier to blame the target I could see. But even if Dawson hadn’t brought Jada in as an informant, I had a feeling something like this might have happened. After what I’d heard from my father, after I’d seen Ken’Ichi’s evil and Tsuyoshi Mori’s coldness, and after I’d heard the distant ‘musume’ he’d used instead of her name, I thought maybe there would have been a reckoning no matter what. Jada had been throwing knives at her father for nearly a decade. Dawson had just sharpened the edges for her.

  “This is on her father,” I said gruffly.

  Silence surrounded us. I knew the guilt would eat at him. Just like it ate at me for leaving the house in New London two years ago in a tantrum. Just as it ate at me for not forcing her to come to my apartment the other night.

  “Call or text when we can talk to her,” Dawson said.

  I agreed, and we hung up, remorse weighing on both of us.

  I sent a text to Cillian and Reinard about the Force de la Violette offices, and they both came back with plans they’d already had in play. Yet another reason I trusted them with my life. They were usually five steps ahead of me.

  I’d just finished my whiskey when my phone rang. I was only half-surprised to see it was my father. He knew I was in San Francisco for the boat show, and I was sure the news of the bombing in Jada Mori’s San Francisco apartment had made it to France by now. It had been all over the local stations earlier.

  Even though I’d held Jada at a distance ever since Papa had told me the truth, he still knew how I felt. He also knew I was bound to her through my relationship with Dawson, through their friendship and the business they owned with Violet. The degrees of separation between us were much, much smaller than my father preferred.

  “Papa,” I greeted.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demanded in French. It took me by surprise. I’d expected worry or maybe some quiet probing, but not fury. My father had rarely lost his temper with me. He’d always used reason and explanations more than scolds.

  “You’ve seen the news?” I asked.

  “Yes. All of it. The explosion and the engagement.”

  I stilled. Engagement. Putain…the words I’d used to get inside her hospital room. The smiling nurse who’d thought we were a couple.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said, more out of habit than truth. I wasn’t her fiancé. But I’d also realized I couldn’t just walk away from her again, from the feelings that had chased me for more than a decade, or the emotions I’d had since first seeing her in a red tulle dress with heels too high for a thirteen-year-old and a look of pure defiance on her face. She’d sat alone at the table her father had bought for the charity event. Her parents were in Japan, her grandmother in Singapore, and she’d been sent to represent the family. She’d handed out the Good Samaritan awards with the poise and grace of someone three times her age.

  “Tell me which part was wrong,” he growled, shuffling a paper that I could hear over the phone. “Dax Armaud, son of Étienne Armaud of Éclair S.A., was overheard telling the hospital staff that he was engaged to Jada Mori, daughter of Tsuyoshi Mori of Mori Enterprises, as he stumbled, distraught, into her hospital room after a bomb went off in her San Francisco apartment. The bomb left one dead and Miss Mori critically injured.”

  My heart twisted because I knew it hurt him to see our names tangled together that way. Armaud and Mori. I also knew I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t undo it. Even worse, I knew that, if given the choice, I would make the words a reality. I would twine Jada’s and my lives and bodies together until there was no visible space between us.

  When I didn’t respond, he filled the silence with a question. “Is she? Critically injured?”

  Anger swelled through my chest because I could have sworn there was hope behind his words. Hope that she would disappear from our lives. “No,” I growled. “She’ll recover just fine.”

  It was his turn to be silent.

  “Dax, you know this is impossible.”

  “We can’t choose who we love, Papa. Wasn’t it you who told me that?”

  More silence greeted me before he grunted out, “There are other women.” But I could hear how little he believed it himself.

  “There is only one soul designed by the gods just for us. If I walk away now, there’ll be nothing left of me but a shell that was once your son. If Maman had been denied to you, would you have been able to leave her?” I demanded.

  “Mon Dieu, this is totally different,” he stormed. “What he did... What he took from us―”

  “It isn’t Jada’s fault Aunt Élodie died, Papa. She wasn’t even born. Neither was I. We cannot be expected to bear the sins of our fathers.”

  He inhaled sharply. “We did not sin. There was no sin on our part!” he stormed.

  I sighed. “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “The only sin was his,” Papa said as if he was suddenly tired. I felt the same way. Exhausted. Drained. And hating the rift this was causing between me and the man I admired most in the world. My father was a good man. Brilliant. Talented. Caring.

  A noise drew my eyes to the hallway. Jada stood there, holding onto the archway, looking pale and wobbly as if she was going to hit the floor at any second, and my pulse raced. How much had she heard?

  “I have to go. Jada is awake and needs help.”

  “What a fucking mess,” he said, and I could only agree. But one look at Jada and I knew I was making the right decision. She needed someone to go to battle for her. She had Dawson and Violet, but it wasn’t the same. She needed someone who loved her so much they were willing to be a shield keeping her from the world. From her father. From the wrath that was heading toward her.

  “I love you, Papa. Please do not force me to choose.” I stood up, taking the five steps needed to reach Jada. I wanted to wrap her in my arms but settled for placing a hand on her waist to steady her.

  “Je t'aime mon fils. All I want is your happiness, but this…it fills me with fear. Not just for Éclair but for you,” Papa responded, the pain in his voice clear.

  I was afraid for me as well. Afraid that I’d lose one of the halves of my heart no matter what I did. We said goodbye and hung up. For the first time in a long time, I felt worse after the call than before.

  I shoved my phone into my pocket, looking down into Jada’s tired eyes. She was trying to hide her emotions, but I could see how close she was to tears.

  “What did my father do to your aunt?” she demanded.

  My heart fell. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want the past to cloud the present or our future, but there was no escaping it. We were Armauds and Moris. But I had to believe the universe had brought Jada and me together for a reason. They’d carved us into existence and slid us together as if we belonged. Maybe it was to somehow right the wrong that had been done. To perhaps heal some of us, even if not all of us could be saved.

  Jada

  SOLACE

  “Are you the warm sun I can raise my face toward?

  And worship without fear of being scorched?”

  Performed by Imelda May

  Written by May / Sternberg / Vito

  I was hungry but nauseated and exhausted but wired when I came awake in Dax’s apartment. I hadn’t been asleep long—a handful of minutes. I was restless because of the pain digging through me and the smell of my own body. I needed to get up. Do something. I needed to make sure the staff at Force de la Violette was safe in case they came after me there.

  The door was cracked open, and I could hear Dax’s deep voice speaking in French. Even through my muffled hearing, I could tell he was upset. I dragged myself from the bed, each move its own kind of torture. When I finally was on my feet, I had to stop and steady myself. The shallow breaths I was forced to take because of the bruised ribs only added to the dizziness I felt.

  I slowly made my way out of his bedroom and into the short hall. I’d never been in Dax’s San Francisco apartment before. Whenever he was in town, we m
et on neutral ground with Dawson and Violet in attendance like chaperones. The apartment was everything I’d come to expect of him. Classically beautiful. Simple lines and soft colors. Soothing.

  Dax’s words about his aunt were a sucker punch to my already weak stomach and chest. God... What had my father done to Élodie Armaud? The years of our parents keeping us apart suddenly became clear. Otōsan’s words about Dax never agreeing to marry me made even more sense. He was responsible for her death.

  Dax heard my pained gasp and was on his feet and standing before me with sorrow radiating from him in a heartbeat. He hung up with his father and then stared at me with uncertainty in his eyes.

  When I asked him what my father had done, he didn’t answer.

  “I asked you to let me know if you got up,” he said instead.

  “I can walk, Armaud. My legs aren’t broken.”

  “You’ve had no food, are loaded up on pain meds, and have equilibrium issues. There’s no reason to push your luck and fall again.”

  As if joined in battle on Dax’s side instead of mine, my stomach growled. The thought of food was unpleasant, but my body was demanding some kind of sustenance.

  “Sit. I’ll make you some scrambled eggs and toast,” he said.

  I snorted. “You’re going to cook? Trying to poison me and finish off what the Kyōdaina started?”

  He held me by the arm and helped me to the couch with slow, arduous steps.

  Once I was settled there with a wince and shooting pain through my ribs, he headed for the kitchen.

  “You’re avoiding the conversation,” I growled.

  “We’ll talk, but food first,” he replied with a tone I couldn’t read—maybe despair or heartache or regret.

  I stared out the sliding glass door at the back of an enormous security guard blocking a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge.