Crossing Stars

by Nicole Williams

  Why had I learned all the things I had, grueled over homework that students years older than me were doing, and acted like education equated freedom? At the end of it all, I would be married off to some Lucifer with an Italian name who believed a woman fell five rungs below the family dog. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to escape. I had to run away, with Rylan preferably. But if he wouldn’t leave, I still had to. At least, I had to try.

  “No more books on the French Revolution.” Mrs. Bailey unzipped the suitcase, still out of breath from heaving it around. “Although I’m afraid what’s inside this might incite a different kind of revolution.”

  My eyebrows pulled together. Before she could throw open the suitcase, something burst out of it. I let out a surprised shout and clamped my hands over my mouth, worried about alerting the guard stationed outside. Thank goodness Luca wasn’t on duty. He was more in tune than the rest of them, and the smallest shout would have sent him breaking through the door, gun drawn.

  “Vive la revolution.” Rylan stepped out of the suitcase, a glimmer in his eyes that said he knew just how dangerous this was . . . and he didn’t care. Had I been popping out of a suitcase in Moran’s library, I would have felt the same.

  “What are you doing here?” I said in a hushed voice, scrambling out of my chair toward him.

  He stretched his arms and cracked his neck from side to side. “You’re here, aren’t you? That’s all the reason I need.”

  Truthfully, I didn’t care why he was here or how he’d gotten here. At least, not right now. All I cared about was him being with me one more time. I threw myself into his arms, pushing him back a few steps before he regained his balance.

  “See? What more reason could I need to be smuggled into the house of my sworn enemy in a suitcase?”

  My arms tightened around him. “Oh, I don’t know. The preservation of life, maybe?”

  “And why would I be concerned with preserving my life if you aren’t in it?”

  I laughed into his canvas jacket. “You have no survival instincts.”

  “I know.” His hand slipped through my hair, holding me as close as I held him.

  Another minute passed before Mrs. Bailey cleared her throat. “Not to be the reality check you two missed weeks ago, but time is limited, and from what I understand, the topics you have to work out aren’t. Better get a move on.”

  Lifting my head from Rylan’s chest, I glanced at where she was laying out what I assumed was the day’s lesson. “How did you do it? Why did you do it?”

  Mrs. Bailey paused as she opened up an old history book. Her usually peaceful expression faltered before it totally fell. “I’ll let Rylan explain that all to you. I’d better stay out here and pretend to be lecturing in case Antonio thinks to listen in every once in a while. You two can use the tea room for a little privacy if you like.”

  Rylan’s hand slipped into mine as he steered me toward the tea room adjoined to the library. Mrs. Bailey and I used it for lunch or when we wanted a little more daylight than the nearly windowless library offered.

  “Whatever the how and whatever the reasons, thank you,” I told her with a small smile.

  Her frown was just as small as Rylan and I disappeared inside the tea room. Compared to the library, the room was a mouse hole, although it would have been a nice-sized room in anyone else’s home. The ceiling and three sides of it were almost totally made of windows that let in so much light, a person might as well have been outside. A French Country theme ran throughout it, from the patterns in the upholstery to the off-white table and chairs in the center of the room, making it the most inviting place in the entire estate. As a child, I’d escaped to the tea room when I was scared of the monsters in my closet more often than I had to my parents’ arms.

  “What’s going on? Why does Mrs. Bailey look like she’s about to throw herself from a rooftop?” I asked the moment Rylan had closed the door. “And why didn’t you tell me who you were? And what are you doing even thinking about crossing The Line now that everyone wants to serve your head at their next dinner party? And did you know who I was, who I really was, all along? And where have you really been all of these years when everyone thought you were dead?” I pressed my fingers into my temples, feeling a headache coming on, and I hadn’t even gotten a single answer yet. I slumped into the chair Rylan pulled out for me. “And what are we going to do now?”

  “Is there one of those questions you want answered first, or do you just want me to answer them in the order you gave them to me?” He kneeled beside me, his expression serious.

  Of everything I wanted to ask, the one that slipped out first seemed less important than some of the others. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

  He gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

  He hadn’t repeated the words mockingly, but I heard them as such. “If you’re going to repeat back to me every question I ask, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

  His other hand moved to my cheek and pressed it until I looked at him again. “I didn’t repeat your question to antagonize you, but rather to suggest my reasons were very much the same as yours.”

  I felt my forehead crease.

  “I didn’t tell you at first because I wasn’t sure who you were,” he said. “I figured you were associated with the Costas, but if it was a distant kind of relationship, me being Patrick Moran’s son would mean nothing to you. But if you were higher up in the Costa hierarchy, me being Moran’s son would have been the only thing you saw. Instead of Rylan, I would have been Moran. I didn’t want you to see me as a person whose reputation preceded him, because I did nothing to earn that reputation. My father did.” He shifted, his gaze drifting toward the streams of rain winding down the windows. “I’m more Rylan than I am Moran.”

  After processing his answer, I tried it on myself and, other than changing the names, my reasons for not telling him did mirror his.

  A wicked smile pulled his lips up as he continued staring out the windows. “And if you might recall, I was ready to tell you at the White Party, but you were too busy keeping my mouth busy with something else.”

  “And if you might recall . . .” I wove my fingers through his hair and tugged until he looked at me. “I was ready to tell you as well. Thanks to a little or, a lot, of persuading on your end, but no, you wanted me to wait until the next time we were together.”

  “And we did.” He lifted his shoulder. “We found out who we were the next time we were together. It all went according to plan.”

  I blinked. “According to plan? If your idea of ‘according to plan’ is us finding out who the other was in front of thousands of people at the Armistice ceremony, than you need to have more than just your head examined.”

  He replied with a smile, nothing more.

  “Why are you smiling?” I wanted to wipe it off his face, but when I realized what I wanted to wipe it off with, I decided that would not be helpful. We needed to figure out more than just how little oxygen could sustain two people for an extended period.

  “What’s not to smile about?” he said. “I’m here. With you. Talking to you, touching you . . .”

  Arching an eyebrow, I waited.

  He chuckled and shrugged. “Plus, I might kind of love it when you get all fiery on me.”

  “What?” I nearly shouted until I realized holding myself back from shouting only further proved his fiery theory.

  “Just look at you, Jay.” He motioned at me as I contained my smile over him still calling me Jay. “On the surface, you’re this beautiful, sophisticated, educated woman who could have written the book on class, but beneath it all, you’re a passionate, opinionated fiend who keeps me reeling. You’re the very definition of a dream girl, and I’m the man who gets to be with you. That makes me the luckiest bastard in the world.”

  The way Rylan appraised me did something to my stomach that made it both flutter and fall. “Someone’s been teaching you really strange come-on lin
es while you’ve been dead.”

  He tucked a chunk of his hair behind his ear, his eyes glimmering. “Why’s that?” “Because lines like those make me question if you really have been a member of the twenty-first century.”

  All my words did was make him smile. “Before you keep on hurting my feelings as I pour out my soul for you, let me clarify that twenty-first century Ireland is a good deal different than twenty-first century America.”

  “So that’s really where you’ve been this whole time? In Ireland?” I asked as he popped up and headed over to the fridge and stove.

  “I told you that’s where I’d been. Did you think I was lying?” He looked over his shoulder, almost looking wounded.

  “I haven’t known what’s true and what isn’t since I found your face staring across from me at Armistice.”

  Rylan met my gaze. “I haven’t told you a single lie. Not one. I may have omitted things like who I was, but I’ve never once lied to you. Nor will I ever.”

  His words left me speechless. There was such conviction behind them, and even more truth, that I didn’t need to clarify anything else on the subject.

  “Why did your father send you away?” I asked, half-wishing my own had.

  “Someone tried to kill me.” His casual answer was accompanied by an equally casual shrug. “They almost succeeded. After losing my mom, my dad wasn’t about to lose his only son, the one he’d been grooming to take his spot from the day I could walk.”

  I raised an eyebrow in speculation.

  “Seriously. For my first birthday, my dad bought me a gun. Of course he wouldn’t let me fire it for another four years, but it was the thought that counted.” Rylan’s voice was tarnished with bitterness, tinged with contempt.

  “You were firing a gun by the time you were five?” I sat up, sure I’d done my math wrong.

  “Some kids’ dads teach them to throw a baseball—mine taught me to fire a gun.”

  “Please tell me it was a BB gun.”

  Rylan’s head shook once as he reached for something behind his back. His forehead creased when he found nothing there. “It’s the one I normally carry with me wherever I go. Unless I have to go through a metal detector. Zipped inside of a suitcase.” He was fully clothed, but without his gun, he looked like he thought he might as well have been naked.

  “You couldn’t have shot that thing when you were five. I couldn’t even shoot it now.”

  “I could put a hole through a bulls-eye from twenty yards before I turned six,” he stated, rifling through a cupboard. “My dad is the staunchest supporter of the whole ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ thing. That’s what makes me as persistent as I am today.” His eyes shifted my way. “That’s why I refuse to let the obstacles between us keep us apart.”

  Persistence was an admirable quality, but taken to extremes, it could be just as much a vice. I’d seen plenty of men laid to rest under early gravestones because of persistence. As with most virtues, persistence was like walking the edge of a sword’s blade—one slip and you could fall way off course. In Rylan’s and my case, slipping the wrong way meant death.

  “Who did you stay with in Ireland? He didn’t just ship you there when you were six, put you in your own house, and tell you to keep trying to make oatmeal until you figured it out or burned the place down, did he?”

  Rylan pulled a couple of cups and saucers from the cupboard. Compared to what he had just wanted in his hands, the dainty tea cups were especially amusing. “Between my mom and him, I’ve got so much extended family in Ireland, it’s a miracle they haven’t put a national cap on the number of children they can have.” He pulled open the fridge, inspecting its contents. “I stayed with one of my mom’s distant cousins who had kids about my age. It was a good childhood. They lived on a farm, so I had plenty of space to get into trouble, and the ocean wasn’t too far off either. Plus no one there tried pointing a gun at my head. That was a perk.”

  I shook my head, unable to process how he could be so nonchalant about the whole thing. “So what made you come back?”

  “My father.” Apparently finding nothing acceptable in the fridge, he closed the door and moved to a different cupboard. “He visited me every year for a few weeks. He’d use the time to continue prepping me for my future responsibilities—take me to target practice, gift some new gun to me, talk about the business and possibilities for expansion—but when I turned eighteen, he told me I had to come back. No more ‘playing hopscotch with a bunch of people who’d as soon as bury a bullet and hope it would sprout a potato.’”

  “But I thought you just came back?” Rylan was twenty-two. Where had he been for four years?

  “I did. But it wasn’t thanks to my father’s lack of trying.” When he finished searching the last cupboard, he groaned. “If a girl doesn’t drink tea or coffee, what does she need with a fancy tea room and teacups?”

  I smiled when I realized that he’d been searching for something for me to drink since he remembered that Mrs. Bailey’s Earl Gray wouldn’t fit the bill. “To drink hot chocolate, of course.” Reaching for the basket on top of the fridge, I pulled out a packet of hot chocolate mix and shook it.

  Rylan exhaled, grabbing the packet from me and ripping it open. “Such a contradiction,” he said as he poured the powder into a cup.

  “You say that like you’re surprised.”

  His face twisted in contemplation. “More like smitten.”

  When I wound my arm through his to grab the other cup and saucer and my chest pressed into his back, he tensed. Of course him tensing made me want to do the same, but I distracted myself by heading toward the espresso machine that made everything from first-rate cappuccinos to simple drip coffee.

  “Coffee for you, right?” I said, sliding the cup onto the machine.

  “Coffee or Guinness,” he answered. “So long as it’s brown, I’m good.”

  My nose curled as I pressed the drip coffee button. “Brown? Is that the only kind of liquid you drink? What about water?”

  Rylan smiled at the kettle he was filling. “There’s water in coffee and beer, isn’t there?”

  I let out a long sigh before getting back to the subject. I heard Mrs. Bailey droning on in the library about something historical, and I guessed we had less time than more time left. “How did your father finally get you back to Chicago then? Money? Women? Cars? Guns? Power? Bribes?”

  “A threat.” Rylan settled the kettle on the stove before facing me.

  “A threat?” I glanced at him, waiting for his coffee to finish.

  “He said if I didn’t want to take over, he’d select someone else.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a threat. More like a fact of life.” Once the coffee was done, I settled the cup back on the saucer and took it to him.

  “It was a threat because of the man he told me he’d select.” Rylan took the cup with the saucer when I handed it to him.

  I concentrated on not smiling at a guy with a sharp jaw and gun normally tucked into his back holding a feminine tea cup and saucer. “Who did he select?” I didn’t know many of Moran’s men, just the names of the bigger players.

  Rylan exhaled, staring into his coffee like he was seeing a series of events playing out before him. “The man who cornered you that night. The man who’d brand every Costa woman and kill every Costa man he could.”

  I stepped back. “How could your father choose him?” My father had always told me brutality was part of the game, but it wasn’t the highlight of it. Business had to stay at the center of it all, or else organized crime was nothing more than a bunch of thugs shooting at each other just because they were on the other side. But lately, it seemed like that was the direction things had been heading in Chicago.

  “A person like that isn’t fit to rule his own body, let alone the bodies of hundreds of others.” Rylan’s eyes narrowed as he took a drink of his coffee.

  Watching him drink from that tea cup was even more amusing. I had to bi
te my lip and look away to keep from smiling. “So you’re taking over for your dad?”

  “Well, I was thinking-slash-planning on taking over. But not anymore.”

  My eyebrows knit together. “But you just said . . . that man . . . you can’t let him . . .” Wasn’t that what he’d just said?

  “Whether it’s him, or me, or anyone else in my dad’s line up, people are going to die. Allies and enemies. Friends and opponents. I don’t want any part in it. Besides, I’d be a fool to believe I could run my father’s empire by letting things like morals and principles get in the way. My dad’s always said a man can die with principles or live a mobster, but it’s one or the other.”

  “So your dad’s okay with this?” I couldn’t imagine Patrick Moran giving his son a pat on the back when he turned down the offer to take over a sprawling underground empire.

  “He’ll have to be.”

  “He doesn’t know yet?” I felt my eyes widen.

  Rylan shook his head as he took another drink. “I wanted to tell you first.”

  “Why me? What do I have to do with your decision to snub the kind of power and money most men only dream of?”

  When the kettle screamed, Rylan reached for it and poured steaming water into my cup. “You have everything to do with it,” he stated like it should have been obvious. “I’d give it all up, a hundred times over, for you.”

  As he stirred the cocoa mix into the boiling water, I took another step back. “I couldn’t do that, Rylan. I could never be the one to ask or expect or be responsible for you giving up anything. Especially something like this.” I found few things redeeming about the world of organized crime, but we’d grown up in it; it had become our whole lives. Rylan was saying he would give that life up for me, and that was touching and grand, but I could never allow him to do it for me.

  He handed me the hot chocolate, his eyes soft. “I’m not walking away just for you. I’m walking away for me. Away from the life I don’t want and toward the life I do want. You”—his hand slipped into the curve of my waist—“just happen to be a prominent part of that life I do want.” As he studied my expression, his face fell a bit. “That is, of course, if you want to be a part of it.”