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

by LJ Evans

  “Kaida did not send the notes, Musume,” my father said, and he looked tired again, older than I’d ever seen. The lights in the office did even less to hide his age than the dim lights of the plane.

  “You’ve been wrong before,” I told him.

  He stared at me, jaw ticking, as I challenged him in front of the others. Yet another way I would never be the daughter he’d hoped for. In truth, he’d probably been disappointed to have a daughter at all. A son would have been better. Isamu’s position suddenly made more sense. If a daughter couldn’t take over the organization, a nephew certainly could.

  Kaida put a hand to her ear and then looked from me to my father with surprise that she quickly hid. “Armaud is here.”

  Even though I’d known he would follow, the reality of it made my heart soar and plunge all at the same time. He hadn’t cut and run. He hadn’t abandoned me to the wolves. But in doing so, he’d put himself in danger.

  My father rose from his desk, closing the distance between us. He grabbed my wrist and pulled off the bracelet. His suspicions about the jewelry from minutes before were confirmed.

  “If you intend to keep him from being harmed, you must get him to leave, Musume,” my father said. He stared at me for a long time, trying to impose his will as he had my entire life.

  It filled me with the same fury it had since I was fifteen, but I was more collected now than when they’d first taken me from Vanya’s. My emotions were hidden again.

  I nodded, knowing it was what he expected but silently making a plan. I had secrets my father didn’t know. Secrets only Dax would.

  My father turned to Kaida and inclined his head in silent agreement to let Dax in.

  He must have been held on the ground floor, because it took him longer to show up than I’d expected. The entire time, the pace of my heart increased, getting louder and faster in my head, growing until I thought it would consume me in a way that everyone in the room would be able to see and hear.

  Finally, the door opened, and there he was, looking wildly disheveled. Hair as askew as it had been when he’d run down the steps at Vanya’s with fear in his eyes. The only difference now was that he was dressed. His carefully tailored tan suit threaded with gold and burnt umber was even more impressive than either Isamu’s or my father’s. He looked like royalty much more so than the other two men in the room. He was taller than Isamu by at least a head and topped my father as well. He was built and muscled in a way that turned my knees weak.

  The relief in his eyes on seeing me was replaced with concern as he eyed me from top to bottom in the kimono.

  “Where’s Cillian?” I asked, breathless, hoping Dax hadn’t done something stupid and come here on his own.

  “At the elevator and pissed as hell. Let’s go,” he said, a command that normally would have angered me but today lit my heart with joy because I understood where it was coming from. Love. He wanted me safe. He wanted me away from the den of wolves.

  “I can’t go with you,” I said, and my heart tore as his eyes flickered with hurt and fear.

  “Unless they plan on shooting you, they can’t stop you,” he said, stepping closer with an unconscious limp in the knee that Kaida had kicked. It twisted at me. He was already hurt.

  Isamu drew nearer with a hand going to his back where I was sure he kept a gun.

  “If I wanted my daughter dead, Armaud, it would have been done a long time ago. Musume has some work to do today. It doesn’t concern you.” My father’s voice was sure. Smooth and unruffled.

  “Fuck you and your job. She’s made it clear she wants nothing to do with you. Why can’t you leave her alone?” Dax said, closing the distance between us, causing Isamu to put a hand out to stop him. Dax shoved it aside, and he and Isamu were soon in a shoving match.

  “Stop!” I cried, moving around Isamu to pull at Dax’s arm.

  Dax stared at Isamu for a long time before finally looking down into my face. His eyes were full of confusion, worry, and love. I reached up and touched his face.

  “I need to do this,” I told him.

  “Where you go, I go,” he said gruffly.

  Tears filled my eyes, and I closed my lids to push them back. When I opened them again, he was still staring at me as if he could read my mind, as if he could will me to acquiesce and go with him. In my father, it had angered me. In Dax, it made me ache to give in.

  “I can’t go. And you can’t stay,” I told him, and then, ever so slowly, I put my finger at the corner of my left eye. To anyone in the room, it might look like I was wiping at a tear. From there, I moved to tuck a loose strand behind my ear that had escaped the low, neat chignon I’d pulled my hair into.

  Dax’s eyes widened slightly.

  “I won’t leave you,” he said, but he acknowledged my sign by tugging at the cuff of his right sleeve.

  “I’ll be okay,” I promised him. “You’ll see me in a few hours.”

  I wanted to believe it was true. I wanted to believe that, by the end of the day, I’d be back in his arms, making plans for our future and telling him the thing I hadn’t been able to say before. That I loved him. That I loved him so much it tore at my insides and crawled at my skin to get out. I didn’t just love him…I needed him. Needed him more than water or air.

  Kaida stepped forward to join Isamu. “It’s time to go, Armaud,” she said, flashing her knife. She was a magician with the weapon. They’d come in handy in the past when I’d needed her to get rid of unwanted attention, but it had been over two years since she’d used it to try and defend me. This wasn’t defense. This was offense. Offense for my father.

  Dax stared into my eyes, emotions warring within him.

  I wanted nothing more than to tuck my arm in his and go, to leave my father, the battle for the Kyōdaina, and his world behind. But I also knew the truth. Whoever this was wouldn’t stop coming after me now that they had started. If it was tied with my father’s battle, then it had to become mine. I had to finish this.

  I grabbed Dax’s hand, turning it so that I kissed the palm of it in the way he had mine before he’d said he loved me. I hoped he understood. I hoped he understood that the motion was opposite of the words I was going to say, “It’s been fun, Armaud. But this is where the story ends. Go back to France and your boats.”

  He brought our joined hands up to his lips, turning them to kiss the back of mine.

  “This isn’t where the story ends. It may be the chapter close, but our story is infinite. We’re not Romeo and Juliet. We’re Shinji and Hatsue at the Yashiro Shrine with the gods watching over our fate.”

  Isamu cleared his throat as if the emotion was too much for him.

  “Sometimes, even the gods cannot prevent destiny,” I told him, but I followed it with another sign. I lay his hand flat on my chest, spreading it while I did the same on his chest. The beating of our hearts was another shared moment.

  We stood that way, letting everything around us disappear, until there was only Dax and Jada and promises we were making.

  After what felt like an entire lifetime, he let go of me with reluctance, stepping away slowly as if he was being dragged by an unseen hand. I moved so that my fingers were playing with the long sleeves of the kimono, drawing his eyes to the fact that I was no longer wearing the bracelet with the tracker.

  His face grew grim before he turned on his heel and walked out.

  The teenager in me screamed in pain because it felt like he was leaving me in the same way he had over and over in our lives. As if my world had grown to be too much. But the woman in me knew the truth. He’d returned my signals with his own. He wasn’t disappearing on me again. Suddenly, I felt very much like Shinji, praying to a god he’d believed in but that I never had. Praying that my selfishness wouldn’t cost Dax everything. Praying that he would make it through this day with nothing worse than his injured knee, regardless of what happened to me.

  Dax

  FINAL SONG

&nb
sp; “But when you're gone the music goes

  I lose my rhythm, lose my soul.”

  Performed by MØ

  Written by Emenike / Parmenius / Bao / Ørsted

  Leaving Jada in her father’s office was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. I’d left her many times before and hated myself for every one of them. Even knowing that I was leaving her only to follow behind didn’t make this time any easier. If anything, it made it worse because I knew she was in danger, knew there were things she hadn’t been able to tell me. She’d barely been able to risk the signals.

  Go but follow.

  I love you.

  You have my heart.

  Signals we’d somehow burnt into each other’s souls in a matter of days, locked away at Vanya’s cottage. Signals that we’d never dared to send to each other before.

  She’d needed me to keep my wits about me.

  She’d needed me to leave.

  She’d looked beautiful in the traditional dress of her family but so unJada-like that it was almost painful. She was tired. The dark circles under her eyes had returned in just a few hours since she’d been taken at knifepoint.

  Cillian’s eyes widened as he saw me approach the elevator where he was being guarded by six men in suits with guns. Odds that not even he would have been able to fight. Relief and remorse coated his face.

  Neither of us said anything in the elevator. My knee throbbed, screaming at me from my attempt at not showing weakness while in the snake’s nest.

  We didn’t say anything until we were well clear of the entrance of Mori Enterprises.

  “She signaled me. Wants us to follow her. She doesn’t have the bracelet anymore.”

  Cillian swore under his breath.

  “We’ve got to get coverage on every possible exit from the building,” I said, “but it’s obvious where she’s going.”

  Cillian looked expectant.

  “The tea ceremony.”

  He hesitated before nodding in agreement. “Do we know who will be there?”

  I shook my head. “No, but I don’t think the plan is to kill her in front of an audience. This has to have something to do with the power play going on with her father. I have no idea why he needs Jada there, but he said she had a job to do.”

  “Her price for freedom?”

  I shrugged, heart lodging itself in my throat. I hoped. I hoped that it would be that simple, but somehow, I doubted it. Her father’s words echoed in my head, If I wanted my daughter dead, Armaud, it would have been done a long time ago.

  “Where is the party?” Cillian asked.

  “The invitation is at Violette. I saw it on her desk before the bombing.”

  Cillian spoke into his mic for the team at Jada’s office to retrieve it. As we crossed the street to the waiting SUV, a body emerged next to ours. Cillian was shoving me behind him and yanking out a gun before I had fully registered it.

  It was Rana, looking more ragged than I’d ever seen the woman, as if she’d had no sleep and no shower for days, as if she’d been wearing the same clothes for a week.

  “Relax. I’m here to help,” she said.

  But Cillian didn’t ease up.

  “Can we get off the street?” she asked, head waving toward the Escalade.

  She climbed into the front passenger seat, dropping a backpack that she’d had on at her feet. Cillian and I exchanged a look and then climbed into the back. Once we were all seated, with Terrence’s gun trained on her from behind the wheel, she turned to look at us.

  “Our systems have been compromised. The ones at my office and yours at Reinard’s.”

  “Not possible,” Cillian said.

  “That’s what I would have thought as well, but I’ve just spent five days backtracking code that led me to Mori’s nephew. Did you know he just graduated from Harvard with a cybersecurity degree?”

  “Jada has a cousin?” I asked, shock traveling through me.

  Rana nodded. “Her mother’s sister’s son. Isamu Yano. You just met him inside.”

  My eyes widened, thinking of the younger man in glasses and a suit who’d stepped between me and Jada. He’d been muscled and strong underneath his wiry appearance. He’d be easy to underestimate. I knew because people often underestimated my lean frame.

  “How did you see who I was with?” I asked.

  “I piggybacked on their line in, linked into their security feeds. It’s as close as I dared go without raising alarms.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed her, and from the look on Cillian’s and Terrence’s faces, I wasn’t sure they did either.

  “You want to save, Jada, right?” she asked. When none of us said anything, she continued, “Then you need to listen. Mori’s world is crumbling around him. He has multiple factions warring against each other, vying to take his spot at the top of the dogpile. It may have been falling apart even before Jada turned on him. But his inability to defend himself from his own daughter definitely sped things up.”

  “How did you get this kind of intel?” Terrence asked, doubt dripping from every syllable.

  “I’m FBI,” she said.

  We all stared in disbelief.

  “What?” I finally croaked out.

  “I work for Cruz Malone.”

  I shook my head. “No way. Jada wants nothing to do with the FBI, and Dawson walked away.”

  Rana nodded. “That’s why I was placed undercover. Jada didn’t know. Dawson didn’t know. No one knew.”

  Jada was going to lose her shit. Dawson was going to bust heads. They’d purposefully separated themselves from the FBI to keep themselves safe, to distance themselves from anything that would cause the Kyōdaina to come after them again.

  Anger filled me. The FBI had put them all at risk…again.

  “Putain. You’re the reason they came after her,” I growled.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “Even though my security office was hacked, nothing there ties me to the FBI. Nothing. If I was taken or killed, no one would come looking for me until Malone got worried, and that would likely take months. Three people at the FBI know I work for them. Three. There’s no paper trail. Nothing in the computers. I don’t even have a badge. After the disaster in New London, they wanted to make sure there were no more leaks. I’m pretty sure it was Yano who hacked the FBI back then, too.”

  “You left her,” I said. “If you’re FBI, why the hell did you leave?”

  She looked out the window, swallowed hard, and then looked back to me with a lifted chin. “Jada wasn’t my job, Armaud. She was just my way of gathering intel.”

  I sucked in a breath. My fury was barely contained.

  “You used her and then just walked out, not caring whether she lived or died,” I snarled.

  Her eyes seemed to swim, and part of me wanted to believe it was from real emotions, as if she actually cared about Jada. But I also didn’t feel like I could trust her. For all we knew, she’d followed us down the coast and turned us in to Mori herself. Cillian had said no one had seen her for days.

  “I didn’t just walk out on her. I left her with Cillian,” Rana growled. “Because I believed he could protect her while I went underground to figure out how the hell they’d gotten in. To figure out if the leak came from the FBI, my team―who had no idea my company was a government front―or if it was someone in her personal life.”

  She sent me a pointed look.

  I scoffed, “Me?”

  She shrugged. “Eye for an eye, right?”

  I stared at her as rage I rarely let govern my life filled me. I was angry that she’d left Jada. Angry that the FBI was using her again. Angry that Rana was accusing my family of being as bad as the Kyōdaina itself.

  “You can’t mean my aunt?” I said, eyes narrowing. “How do you even know about that?”

  Cillian looked between us, brows furrowed.

  “It’s public record,” Rana continued. “She was kille
d at Mori’s testing grounds, right? Your father had to be furious about that. Even thirty years later, I bet he’s still pissed. Losing a twin to Mori had to have left a pretty deep scar.”

  Cillian grunted his disbelief.

  “Fuck you,” I snarled. “We aren’t the Kyōdaina. We don’t kill or steal or betray the people we love.”

  We glared at each other.

  Cillian’s eyes narrowed at Rana, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “Let me get this straight. You’re FBI, but you left your primary source to gather additional intel on your own, and you have no proof to offer us—for any of this.”

  Rana didn’t even bat an eye. She just lifted her chin higher in a move that reminded me of the woman I loved who I’d left in her father’s office unprotected. “Pretty much sums it up. I’m up shit creek once Malone surfaces. I’ll likely lose my job. But I do know that Yano hacked not only mine but Reinard’s systems. That’s how Mori found you today. You had a GPS tracker on her, right?”

  Cillian and I shared a look.

  “How do we know you didn’t just follow us?” Terrence asked, speaking my thoughts from before aloud.

  “You don’t.” She glared at him as if she wasn’t happy to have him speak at all. She reached for the backpack at her feet, and all the guns in the car clicked in her direction. She didn’t seem to care. “I’m just pulling out my laptop.”

  She opened it, typed in a long sequence of letters and numbers to log in, and then opened up an app. “Look for yourself.”

  She handed the laptop to Cillian.

  He scrolled through several pages, getting paler than I’d ever seen the man.

  “They had complete access?” he asked quietly. “To all of this?”

  Rana nodded.

  “Fuck,” my bodyguard said, sounding rattled when I’d rarely seen him that way before today.

  He handed the computer back.

  “What has any of this to do with the chakai at the Matsudas?” I asked.

  “We’ve suspected for a while now that Ichika Matsuda controls one of the factions fighting for power,” Rana said. “She’s harnessed a group of wives and daughters of the Kyōdaina, and they’ve been taking out male counterparts right and left. Mori thinks Hiroto has Alzheimer’s, but we think Ichika has been poisoning him.”