Crossing Stars

by Nicole Williams

  Vito barked out a laugh. “What makes you think you’re qualified to identify a good man? Because you’ve spent so much time around them?” His sarcasm was thick, laced with just as much accusation.

  I arched an eyebrow, remembering what Rylan had said to me not so long ago. “Because I’ve spent so much time with bad ones. It makes it that much easier to identify the good ones.”

  I’d answered Vito, but it was Rylan who I was glad had heard me. He might not have said anything, but he didn’t need to—his eyes told the whole story. Our story of how two people born into a world of darkness could come together to find the light.

  Vito sighed, giving me a look I was used to seeing from my father. One that used to make me believe I was a child in need of a spanking or a time-out. “Whatever you say, Miss Costa.” His gaze shifted from me to Rylan. “Say good-bye.”

  I shifted closer, the movement reminding me of the steely weapon I had tucked into my back. Vito was bracing himself for the shot, and Rylan was doing nothing other than looking at me. I pulled the gun from my pants, aimed it in Vito’s general direction, and slid my index finger around the trigger.

  “Good-bye,” I whispered.

  I pulled the trigger as Vito realized what was happening. He staggered back, clutching at his chest with one hand and staring at me like a little girl had just morphed into the grim reaper. Tears fell from my eyes and my arms quivered—along with my legs—but I didn’t lower the gun. I kept it on Vito, following his every stagger backward, until he collapsed. His gun slid away from him as he took his last breath.

  The words I just killed a man played on repeat through my mind. Instead of cold, the gun started to flame in my hands. I’d just killed a man. One of my father’s men. A La Famiglia member who’d probably known me since I was a child. And I’d just killed him. The second bullet I’d ever fired had killed a man. Nothing seemed real in that moment.

  I felt like I was watching another movie in the safety of my bedroom, gaping at the screen as a young woman fired a weapon through a man’s chest to save the man she cared for. This wasn’t real. Reality didn’t feel like this.

  Rylan staggered up beside me, winding one arm around my waist as the other reached for the gun still clutched in my hands. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m okay. Let me have the gun.”

  His words were soothing, and I wanted to obey, but it seemed as if the gun had become a part of me. I couldn’t let it go without ripping off my hands.

  “You did it, Jay. You saved me. You don’t have to hold it anymore. Let me carry it for you.”

  When Rylan’s fingers wrapped around mine, my connection with the gun finally broke. It nearly tumbled from my hands, but he caught it and managed to keep me upright at the same time.

  “We’re okay. We’re going to be okay,” he whispered, kissing the temple Declan had just had a barrel pressed into.

  Rylan kept the gun in one hand and me in the other as we passed Vito. He kicked Vito’s gun farther away, keeping his gun aimed at him just in case he decided to rise from the dead. I supposed with everything we’d seen, it wouldn’t have been that far-fetched. We’d no more than made it another step before two of Vito’s men nearly ran into us. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to escape or capture us, but either way, they both went wide-eyed and red-faced when they saw Vito. With Rylan holding a gun at him . . .

  Both of their guns shifted toward Rylan. Guns were everywhere, gunfire was everywhere. We were surrounded by violence and death. All we’d been trying to do was escape both.

  “Drop the gun and get on your knees,” one of them ordered as the other turned to cover them. Probably because the gunfire behind us wasn’t diminishing.

  Very slowly, Rylan’s arm went in front of me, guiding me back behind him. The gun stayed planted in his hand, still lowered at Vito’s fallen body.

  “Did you hear me? Drop the gun and get on your knees,” the man repeated, stepping closer.

  “Oh, I heard you,” Rylan answered, his body going rigid. “I’m just choosing not to listen.” The arm holding the gun whipped up, striking the Italian across the face.

  The Italian’s gun fired, but Rylan’s hard strike had changed his aim. Instead of hitting Rylan in the chest, the bullet shot past him. Or so I thought . . .

  The briefest of cries preceded Rylan collapsing to the floor.

  I could only describe what I felt next as instinct in its truest form. Instead of crawling to him to see where he’d been hit or trying to pull him to shelter or run, I dropped to my knees, grabbed Vito’s gun, lifted it, and started firing. I didn’t know what I was firing at or who or how many times I pressed the trigger. All I knew was that weapon meant life on one side of it and death on the other side. The more bullets I fired at them, the less they could fire at us.

  The very weapon I’d barely been able to touch without breaking out into a cold sweat had become the device of my salvation. Long after I ran out of bullets, my finger kept pulling the trigger. The room had grown quiet with no other noise than the click of my trigger and the sound of my breath. It seemed like I was the only one in the room still breathing.

  Pressing the trigger one last time, the gun fell from my hands right before my body fell to the ground.

  WHERE WAS I?

  That was perhaps the single most frightening question a woman could wake up asking herself. My head was pounding, my body seemed to be wound into a thousand knots—each of them pulsing like a bruise—and my ears were ringing. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was a blurry haze. Searching for my last memory, I found nothing. When I tried again, my mind produced the same result. Where was I?

  “Jay?” a voice said beside me, breaking through the haze and ringing. “Please, Jay. Come on, wake up for me. Please just wake up.”

  Home. That’s where I was. The location didn’t matter because so long as he was with me, I was home. That knowledge pushed the rest of the fog away. Leaning over me, Rylan’s face was creased with worry and streaked with blood. When my hand moved to his face to wipe the blood away, something hard and cool raised with it. I dropped the gun as soon as I saw it.

  “Oh my god,” I said as everything came back to me in a massive flood. The bullets, the blood, the bodies . . . the fear, the worry, the anger. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out, but the half hour leading up to my passing out had been the most tumultuous, terrifying minutes of my life. “Are you okay? The bullet—where did it hit you?”

  When I attempted to sit up, Rylan put two firm hands over my shoulders and kept me horizontal. “I’m fine. It’s barely worth even calling a flesh wound.” He rolled the cuff of his shirt sleeve up just high enough to show me the wound.

  My throat ran dry. “You’re right. That’s not a flesh wound. That’s a near-fatal wound if we don’t get you to a hospital.” Blood had already soaked the sleeve of his shirt and was spreading down his side.

  “A hospital can’t do anything different than I can.” He rolled the sleeve back down, not even grimacing. “Clean it out good, bandage it up tight, and repeat daily. This isn’t my first rodeo, you know?” He smiled then, stroking my cheek with his thumb.

  “I’m afraid this was my first rodeo. And I hope my last.” The words came out as a whisper as images replayed in my mind. Images and faces and sounds that I knew would haunt my nightmares for years. The surprise and pain that had paralyzed Vito’s face after I’d shot him most of all.

  “I know it was. I’m so sorry it happened, but I’m so relieved you’re all right.” Rylan’s hands braced around my face as he looked at me like I’d come back from the grave. “There’ll be time to talk about what happened here and get me bandaged up after we get out of here. We might be all alone now, but it won’t be long before this place is swimming with trigger-happy Morans and Costas. Let’s be a county away before that happens, okay?” Rylan leaned back, helping me sit up. “I don’t think I can take any more kicks or hits or bullets today. What about you?”

  I sighed when I felt like cr
ying. Too many emotions were charging through me. I couldn’t decide what I felt most: relieved, overwhelmed, guilty, vengeful, or something else. “I don’t think I could take another night like this ever.”

  I pushed the gun that had been in my hand away with the toe of my boot. I was nauseated just looking at it. In an attempt to look away from the gun at my feet, I saw what was all around me. The warehouse looked like the set of a horror movie. In fact, I almost convinced myself that was what it was, but a rivulet of blood trailed from one of the fallen bodies close by, and no fake blood could look or smell so much like the real stuff.

  “What happened?” My voice quaked. From what I could see, there were four dead bodies around us. Two Morans and two Costas.

  How had everything gone so wrong? How had a private meeting between two people turned into a massacre that had taken the lives of a handful of people?

  “They died,” Rylan said, a bit too matter-of-factly. He seemed unable to look me in the eyes. “One of yours got away.”

  My nausea increased exponentially. My gaze swept from Vito to the other three fallen men. “Oh my god . . . Did I do this?”

  “No,” Rylan answered immediately, holding up his large silver pistol. “I did.”

  The last thing I remembered was Rylan being shot and falling to the ground. A gun had wound up in my hands, and I let it loose on everything and anything standing between me and Rylan. I remembered pulling a dead trigger, and then I must have passed out. If I’d been out the entire time Rylan had managed to right himself, get to his gun, and drop three men, I must have been out longer than a couple of minutes.

  I did a quick body count in my head. A Costa had escaped, a Moran had taken out a Costa back at The Line, and I’d taken down Vito. That meant Rylan had killed one Costa . . . and two of his own. He had Costa blood on his hands. And Moran blood.

  My heart stopped. “We’ve got to get him. Whoever it was that escaped. He’ll tell everyone about us, about you killing all these men.”

  I leapt up, frantic at the idea of knowing that somewhere out there, a man was about to tell my father that Rylan Moran had killed one of his men. And sometime tonight, Patrick Moran would find out that his son had killed two of his own men. In addition to being tagged an enemy by the Costas, he’d be a traitor to the Morans.

  My head pounded again, my heart even harder. “We can’t be anywhere in the state when our fathers find out what happened here tonight. We can’t be anywhere on this planet when they find out. What are we going to do?”

  Rylan stood up with me, sighing as he slid his hair back from his face. “Do you trust me?”

  I wasn’t sure where he was going with that question, but I said, “Yes.”

  “Do you love me?” he asked next, his fingers tangling with mine.

  I nodded. “Yes.” I could have asked him the same question if it wasn’t obvious. Some things were cheapened by words—Rylan’s love for me was one of them.

  He didn’t hide his smile. It didn’t dim as he moved onto his next question. “Do you want to be with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ready to run away right now?”

  I’d been ready to run away from the moment I’d said it last week. “Yes”—I ripped my T-shirt up to make a jimmy-rigged bandage—“but if you keep asking me these rhetorical questions, I’m going to be tempted to answer no just to mix things up.”

  When I stepped up to his wounded arm, I smirked at him as I rolled up his cuff. He nodded, quiet for a few seconds while I wrapped the strip from my shirt around his arm. No, his wound hadn’t been properly cleaned and my tee was a far cry from a hermetically sealed bandage, but it was better than him leaving puddles of blood everywhere.

  “No matter who they think killed these men, they’re going to know about us. There’s no way to keep it a secret after this.” Rylan chewed on his lower lip, lost in his thoughts. “Even if they don’t kill us, they’ll never let us see each other again . . . and I’m not going to be shipped away again.”

  “I’m not willing to be locked away again either.”

  “I won’t be kept from you,” he vowed, reaching for my hand.

  He steered me through the maze of bodies once I was done with his arm. I tried to keep my eyes on the back of his head, focusing on the way some strands were golden and some bronze, some chunks wanted to curl to the left and others the right. I tried to focus on him . . . but I kept catching glimpses of the fallen bodies we passed. The emptiness in their eyes would stick with me. More than the blood, more than the holes in their heads or chests, more than the unnatural ways their bodies were contorted . . . the dead eyes were the most frightening.

  “I won’t be kept away from you either,” I whispered, clinging to him like he was the only one who could get me through this sea of bodies.

  “Then we have to leave tonight. There’s no other option, Jay. I’m sorry you didn’t have a chance to pack a few things or say your own kind of good-byes, but if we’re going to run away, now has to be the time.” He glanced back, apologies written all over his face.

  “I’m ready. Let’s go. Even if none of this had happened, I would have preferred to leave tonight rather than wait. Let’s just get out of here.”

  When we passed the first body—the one that had been taken down by Declan—Rylan pulled me faster until we were jogging down the wide aisle. Suddenly, Rylan whipped us both to a halt. His arms were around me and his lips on me before I realized we’d stopped running. My mouth and hands were just catching up when he pulled back, lightness back in his eyes.

  “What was that for?” I asked, still able to feel his lips on mine.

  “Because there were at least five times tonight I worried I might never get to do that again. But we made it. I got to kiss you again and, god willing, I’ll get to kiss you until we’re old and gray.”

  I clasped my hands around his neck, part of this terrible night already behind me. “Those are some fancy words for a guy who kicked ass and got his ass kicked tonight.”

  He laughed a few low notes. “Hey, what can I say? I’m a lover by nature, a fighter by nurture.” When I tried to pull him closer, he smiled and held me at a distance. “Let’s get out of here first. You have my word that once you’re safe, we’ll get right back to that.”

  He didn’t wait for me to agree or disagree. He grabbed my hand and led us to the end of the warehouse. By the time we’d reached the exit, he was already talking to someone on his phone.

  “Plans have changed. I need it ready tonight,” he said, motioning for me to wait as he moved through the door. After scanning the area, he waved me out. “As soon as possible. An hour at most, but I’ll owe you double if you can have it done in a half hour.” Rylan paused then nodded. “Good. We’ll meet you there in thirty.”

  He’d no more than ended that call before he made another. All the while, he led us the long way around the warehouse toward the busier streets where I assumed we would catch a cab. His pistol was in its normal resting place, but every time I heard a sound or saw a shadow move, I found myself flinching toward his pistol, leaving me even more conflicted. After tonight, I couldn’t decide if a gun was my ally or nemesis.

  “It’s time. Tonight’s the night,” Rylan said on his second call. “Are you sure you still want to do this? I wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t.” He was cut short by the caller, who was either giving him an earful or a lecture. “You know what will happen to you if either side finds out you helped us, right?” He was cut off again, but not as long this time. He nodded. “Just making sure. Okay, good. See you in a half hour at the place I told you.”

  After he’d hung up for the second time and seemed about ready to make another call, I stopped him. “Since everyone else seems to know what the plan is, mind filling me in? You know, since I’m the one going with you?” I wasn’t upset or irritated—if anything, I was impressed he had such a secure plan in place and was able to make it happen on such short notice—but I was curious about
how we were leaving and where we were going.

  Rylan flung his arm out as a cab approached. He turned to me. “I will tell you everything as soon as we’re alone, but right now, I don’t trust anyone in this city.” His gaze shifted to the cab. “Cab drivers included.”

  “I’m in this city,” I grumbled while crawling into the backseat.

  “Not for long.” Rylan slung his arm around my shoulders after getting situated and giving an address to the driver.

  “Those two people live in this city. I’m guessing.”

  “And they’re two of the only ones I trust in it,” he replied, checking the time on his phone. It was nearly midnight. Almost a new day. Hopefully, we would be far away from our families and Chicago when that new day dawned.

  “Why?” I wondered how he could determine two trustworthy people from an ocean of scandalous ones.

  He lifted a shoulder. “They earned it.” He slid my hood back over my hair. “Just in case.”

  After that, the Bali music the driver had playing was the only sound in the cab. From the length of the drive, I thought we were traveling to the edge of the city. I tried to empty my head of everything that had just happened and everything that was about to, but that was like telling myself to stop breathing.

  When I shifted and clamped my eyes closed for the dozenth time, Rylan sighed. “What are you thinking about?” His voice was quiet but strong, and his arm tightened around me.

  “Besides everything?” I asked, not sure where to begin.

  “Besides the thing we can talk about later.” Rylan’s gaze shifted to the front seat. “When we’re alone. When you’re safe. When we’ve had some rest and perspective’s had a chance to settle in.”

  I couldn’t imagine any amount of distance or perspective being up to the task of tackling the things troubling me, but I wanted to believe him. I just wasn’t sure it was possible to ever forget the look in Vito’s eyes when I pulled the trigger. Or imagine the revenge my father would plan the moment he found out about Rylan and me. Or what would happen to Mrs. Bailey if he ever found out she’d rolled his enemy straight through his front door. Too many nightmares were knocking on my door. I’d never be able to keep them all out.