Page 35 of Crossed By the Stars
“What did you tell the police?” he asked. NoHow are you?,orYou scared me, orI’m glad you’re okay. But I knew better than to expect it. I knew better than to think he was in the room for me at all. Instead, he needed to know what risk there was to the kingdom he sat atop of.
I answered him truthfully, with the same thing I’d told the detectives who’d shown up the day before to ask about the bomb and the threats against me. “I told them I have no idea what happened or who it was.”
“Did you tell them about the other note?”
“The threat to bring holy retribution down on me? That’s hardly a note. But no, I didn’t tell them,” I said.
He stared, assessing my honesty. What I didn’t say was how I was expecting a call or a visit from Dawson’s former boss at the FBI at any moment. Cruz Malone was still a member of the international crime division, even if Dawson was not, and he knew more about my father and his organization than I ever had. I was pretty damn sure someone would’ve alerted him to a bomb going off in my apartment, which meant Violet and Dawson would know as well because Malone would call them. My stomach turned nastily, and if I’d had anything in it, I was sure it would have come back out.
I didn’t want Vi and Dawson coming home to this. I didn’t want them walking into the middle of an unseen battle between me and whoever at theKyodainawas out for revenge. I’d never forgive myself if they got hurt…like Bobby had. My chest burned from lack of air, but the pain felt justified. When I finally inhaled, the searing in my lungs was replaced with a stabbing in my rib cage.
“I can’t protect you this way,”Otosantold me. “If you come home, I can guarantee your safety.”
I snorted. “This is you,Otosan. All of this…” I waved at my body and the hospital room. “It’s all because of you, so forgive me if I don’t think you can keep me safe.”
He let his shield down, and I saw a flash of emotions. The anger was expected, but it was the glimpse of sadness that surprised me.
“I can, and I will, but it means coming in fully. No more contact with this…life. No more rebellion. No more carousing with the Armaud boy and working with the Langleys.”
“Dax isn’t a boy. He’s a man. And as for cutting Violet and Dawson from my life? Not ever going to happen,” I told him. Violet was the best and brightest person in my entire world. She was goodness personified. She was the exact opposite of me but loved me for who I was anyway. Dawson…well, he understood me and accepted me. Dax…I didn’t know what to think about Dax other than the back-and-forth between us had left me confused, frustrated, and raw for over a decade.
“Then your life, and theirs, will always be in danger,” he said quietly.
“Don’t threaten them,” I said with a slight growl to my voice.
“I am not threatening your friends,Musume. I am only stating the facts.”
I wasn’t sure how he could still stab me in the gut after all these years. I thought I’d removed all the knives from his reach, and yet he still easily accomplished it. And like I always did when wounded, I lashed back.
“They aren’t just my friends. They’re family,” I said.
He steepled his fingers together, a solitary sign that I was getting to him, and it tugged at something deep inside. A memory I couldn’t bring back to life.
“They do not share your blood. There is no lasting bond there.”
I struck back, using the stupid, untrue words Dax had uttered to the hospital staff. “I’m engaged to Dax, so I guess that’s as solid of a bond as there gets, right?”
His eyes widened, and then, to my surprise, he chuckled. It was cold and humorless. “He’ll never marry you,Musume.”
“Just because you cannot accept me for who I am, doesn’t mean everyone feels the same way.”
“He hasn’t told you about his aunt, then?”Otosan’seyes narrowed.
“That she died before he was born? What has that got to do with anything?” I asked, frowning. A heaviness in the air and a foreboding that I couldn’t shake crawled up my back.
He refused to answer me. Instead, he rose from his chair, looking down at me. “You know the price that must be paid for their safety. For yours. To be forgiven for your disloyalty.”
A bloody appendage being removed, even if it was a figurative one. Cut out the people in my life and come home. Fall on the sword of repentance, and they’d be safe. I’d be safe. He’d sworn he wasn’t the one coming after me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this was exactly what he’d wanted all along. A means to getting me back in his grasp, under his thumb. To control me when, for a decade, he’d only seen a wild child running around the globe, shaming his name with her sins.
He didn’t wait for a response. He slid out of the room just as Dax was coming in. Dax shoved a hand into Cillian’s shoulder. “You let him in?”
Cillian responded with something I couldn’t hear, something that took the anger from Dax’s frame and replaced it with worry. He turned on his heel and returned to the perch at my bedside.
“What did he say?” Dax asked.
My stomach was flipping from pain meds and dizziness and the words my father had uttered. It wasn’t the threats that stayed with me the longest—maybe because I was used to those coming fromOtosan. Instead, the words about Dax’s aunt were at the forefront. Did I want to know the truth? Or did I want to stay in oblivion for longer? I’d already had my eyes ripped open to my father’s life, and I couldn’t handle something similar happening with Dax and the Armauds.I needed to believe there was some good in the world that extended beyond Violet and her family, beyond the company we’d built for ourselves. I needed to believe there was more light than dark living amongst the human race.
“He offered me protection if I came back home and forgot about my life here,” I said and tried to shrug, but it sent pain through my rib cage and body. There wasn’t a single part of me that didn’t ache. My ribs weren’t broken, just bruised, like the rest of my body. Like my heart and soul.
