Page 39 of Crossed By the Stars
“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 aboutVioletteand 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 easier 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.
