As I took in the sights and sounds and smells of the party, I wondered why I’d taken so long to join it. Life was more often a chore than a party, so when one came along, I’d better not waste it lamenting the chores of the past and future. Milling into the crowd, I was greeted by dozens of people I recognized and dozens more I didn’t have the first idea who they were. Everyone had a smile, a drink, and stars in their eyes. It was the kind of night that made a person almost believe in magic.
I couldn’t decide where I wanted to go first, so I started with what was closest. A little boy in a white suit shrieked when his ring fell around a glass bowl with a goldfish swimming inside. His mother beside him groaned. The men at the dagger-throwing booth were comparing knives more than they were throwing them. As we milled past the balloon-dart game, Luca jolted, reaching for his gun, when a trio of balloons popped in close succession.
“Someone’s a little trigger-happy tonight,” I said as he thrust his gun back into his shoulder holster.
“Me being trigger-happy keeps you alive.” He adjusted his jacket and cracked his neck.
“Yeah, those balloons are deadly little things.” When I winked, he sighed.
After a couple more steps, he was back in character, his eyes everywhere and his body ready. After perusing the game booths, I headed for the carousel. Every horse was white, accented with touches of gold. Some were so life-like, I found myself checking closer. Their eyes gave them away though. A living thing could never possess dead eyes.
I pointed at the carousel, already heading for the line. “You up for a ride?”
“Not really, no,” Luca replied, almost wincing.
“Good. Then go take a break.” When I found him trailing me to the end of the line, I groaned. He might not have wanted to, but he would go wherever I went.
As I weaved up to the end of the line, I noticed a couple of young men looking at me in a way that wasn’t quite unscrupulous, but it wasn’t innocent either. I wanted to look away or steer clear, but instead I kept my head up and acted collected. When the one with the derby hat winked, I didn’t know whether to blush or laugh. They could flirt all they wanted, so long as my father wasn’t watching. Their eyes widened at the same time, this time in a fearful way. Assuming Luca was flashing his scowl or his gun, I glanced back . . . to find my father approaching. The two men who had been oozing with confidence a moment ago scampered away.
“Nice of you to grace us with your presence,” were my father’s greeting words. The first words he’d said to me in a week.
I think it was safe to assume the Father of the Year award was skipping our family.
“Nice of you to be graced by it,” I replied with a small curtsy that didn’t exactly come from a place of respect.
“Constantine is coming. Despite your unseemliness last week, he seems . . . intrigued by you.” My father might have donned white for the night, but it couldn’t hide his black eyes. Or heart. “Greet him when he arrives, dance with him when he asks, smile when he talks.”
“What? Like this?” Putting on a smile that hurt my face, I waited.
My father treated disrespect with a swift doze of retribution, also known as krait venom. He was flanked by two of his high-ranking men, and by letting them witness his daughter throw slight after slight in his face, I knew I was walking a paper-fine line. I could almost feel the sting of the needle pricking my skin. Grabbing my wrist, he yanked me toward him. Luca flinched, yet again torn between two duties.
“Need I remind you what is at stake here?” my father hissed in my ear.
His definition and my definition of what was at stake were two different things. For him, expanding his empire of drugs, prostitution, and crime for hire was at stake. For me, my life and happiness were. He would give my life for his business . . . but my life wasn’t his to give. I saw that now. It had taken years, but I saw it.
Pulling my wrist free from his grasp, I stood straight. My father wasn’t a tall man, but I hadn’t realized that we were the exact same height. I looked him in the eye, rubbing the string from my wrist. “I know exactly what’s at stake.”
“Remember it,” he said, all warning. “Don’t make me remind you again.” Popping a cigar into his mouth, he lit it and walked away—after leaving me with one last sneer.
“Doesn’t it seem mandatory that fathers should love their daughters?” I whispered to myself.
Luca shouldered up beside me, watching my father walk away. “Love being mandatory kind of defeats the whole point of it, don’t you think?”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “But if it isn’t mandatory, and if I can’t earn it, I don’t think he’ll ever love me.” Despite the way I made it seem, my father’s words and emotional absence hurt. He was my father, the man who was supposed to love me first, longest, and hardest. And as hard as he made it, I loved him. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t, even though I wished I could.
“Maybe it’s time to stop hoping for things that will never be and accept the way they really are,” Luca said as we passed through the carousel gate.
I was surrounded by wise people, ones who seemed to have life and its intricacies all figured out. Meanwhile, I fumbled through it like I was blind and deaf. The magic of the night had dimmed but wasn’t gone entirely. Doing my best to erase the last five minutes of my life, I hopped onto the carousel and searched for just the right horse. Most everyone else was already seated and buckled when I settled on a giant white horse on the outside, suspended like it was flying instead of galloping. Its neck and head were thrown back like it was crying up at the sky.
Since a girl was situated on the horse next to mine, Luca had to take the miniature one on the very inside. He was planning on just standing beside it, but when the carousel employee walked by, he told Luca he either had to ride the horse or wait on the grass. Luca grumbled his way onto the pint-sized horse, and more than one laugh escaped me as he gingerly situated himself on it. The buckle wouldn’t fit him, so he threw it to aside with a few irritated words.
When the ride started, I’d successfully managed to empty my mind of my father and Constantine and my so-called lot in life. I let go of the ghosts of the past and the demons of the future, and I lived in the present, rounded off to the nearest millisecond. I felt the wind cutting across my face, licking at my hair, and sending the layers of my dress billowing behind me. I felt my smile spreading, my heart thumping, my body coming to life. Eighteen years of ice began to melt, running down my body to leave a wet trail behind me.
I felt alive. Alive in the way I was only just beginning to understand. Alive in a way that was as addictive as anything I’d ever experienced. However I’d been living before, I knew I wasn’t going back to it. I wasn’t sure there even was a way to go back.
Just as the ride started to slow, I felt something that made my eyes flash open. It wasn’t quite like I’d been shocked, but as if fate had poked me in the back. My gaze shifted past the carousel into the crowd. My breath, for some reason, came in uneven pulls . . . and then I saw him.
Where the others all seemed to blend together as one, he stood out all on his own. The carousel didn’t have time to make another revolution before I had my belt undone, and when I saw his face again, I was already leaping from my horse. Thankfully, the grass made the impact less severe, but the carousel employee yelled at me, almost immediately followed by Luca. I ignored them both. All of my attention was focused on a green pair of eyes wading through the crowd in my direction.
His smile vanished as his eyes drifted over my shoulder. I was a few strides in front of Rylan when I saw him reach for something . . . tucked behind his back. With the first flash of silver pulled from his jacket, I came close to turning and running in the other direction. My father’s warnings rattled in my mind. Warnings that everywhere I went, men would hunt me. That the enemy would be hidden amongst our friends. That my life was worth more to the Morans than half of Ireland. Why was Rylan about to pull a gun on me?
That
question was quickly superseded by the dread of what would happen to him if he was caught drawing a weapon at this kind of an event. He was from the Irish side of this war and had crashed my father’s most revered party. No good could come from any of that.
“No,” I mouthed, glancing around to see if anyone else had noticed him draw a gun.
When I was in front of him, he immediately put himself in front of me, shielding me from whatever threat he was certain was coming for me. It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined our next meeting taking place, but pieces of his body were bumping pieces of mine, so any fantasies I’d imagined about how this second meeting would go were soon forgotten.
“Someone’s chasing you,” he said, backing me away from the carousel. His gun was in his hand, although it was hidden by the front of his jacket.
Luca! In my ecstasy over seeing Rylan, I’d forgotten about the men who feinted after my every step. If Luca found me with Rylan—a man whose light hair and eyes instantly made him suspect—with a gun in his hand, there wouldn’t be a peaceful resolution. Our roles reversed, and suddenly I was the one worried about keeping him from harm.
Grabbing Rylan’s hand, I tugged him into the crowd. “He’s my guard! He won’t hurt me, but I can’t say the same for you if he catches us.” When I glanced back, I saw an amused look on Rylan’s face. “What?” I pulled him faster through the crowd.
He followed me, but there was no urgency in his steps or on his face. “He couldn’t hurt me if he had a thousand lifetimes to try.”
“Great empires have fallen with less misplaced ego,” I teased, keeping my eyes forward. Running and weaving were hazardous when I focused on him.
“And great empires have been risen with the same amount,” he said, taking a quick look over his shoulder. “How much longer are you planning on running? Not that I mind running, so long as it’s with you, but it makes talking . . . and other things . . . difficult to do.” Something gleamed in his eyes, which only served to make my face heat.
“What other things?” I asked. Mrs. Bailey’s words ran through my mind—that young men claiming an all-powerful pull toward a woman they’d just meant had ulterior motives.
Rylan’s head tilted as he studied me like he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Like sitting down with a cup of coffee and getting to know a bit more about each other. Or having one of those corn dogs while I confess the only thing I’ve been able to think about since I saw you is you. Or wandering over to that dance floor and letting me show you how us Irish have the claim when it comes to dancing. Or—”
We were at the opposite end of the grounds now, and I couldn’t see Luca chasing us, so I pulled him up the metal stairs behind the haunted house. At least it would be dark in there.
“Or tell me what you’re doing here, as deep into the Italian side of the city as you can get.” I tried to sound reproachful, but it didn’t come out right. Probably because I felt nothing but elation that he was here in the first place.
The back door screeched open with a cool burst of air and a trail of fog, which meant there must be fog machines inside. A haunted house wasn’t ideal for a romantic rendezvous, but it was dark and hopefully filled with thick fog, which made it an ideal place to hide from a guard who wouldn’t rest until he’d found me.
I turned to face Rylan once he’d followed me inside of the haunted house. When the door closed, the room around us went black. The thick, choking kind of black where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face . . . or the face of the person in front of you. But I felt his breath against my cheek, and I could feel his fingers curling through mine. I felt his eyes on me, even though both of us were blinded. Somehow, the absence of light didn’t distance us—it drew us closer together.
“So? Why are you here?” I asked again, my voice like a shout in the sudden silence.
His thumb brushed across my knuckles. “Well it isn’t for the folk music or bangers and mash.”
“Then why?”
“You know why.”
From his tone, I knew there was a half smile on his face.
“How did you know I’d be here?” I didn’t know if he knew I was a Costa yet, but if he’d found out, it suddenly wasn’t the end of the world. Instead, it was just another hurdle in the seemingly endless line of them.
“I didn’t. Not for sure. I went with a hunch, and it paid off.”
“A hunch, eh?” I stepped back. I couldn’t see the intensity of his stare, but it was powerful enough to move me.
“Maybe hunch isn’t the right word. Maybe it was more of a feeling.”
“Are you saying you can feel me?” I teased him.
“I’m saying I have feelings for you. Strong enough ones to wander into this party like a sheep to the slaughter if it meant getting to see you.”
I took another step back, his invisible stare impacting me that much. “I don’t think that means you have feelings—I think it means you’re foolish.”
“I am foolish. In overwhelming quantity but in only one regard.”
When I took one more step back, my back pressed up against a wall. “In what regard?”
Rylan spoke again, right in front of me. “I’m foolish when it comes to you.”
We were so close, I felt his chest against mine every time I inhaled. With every breath, the air got thinner and harder to fill my lungs with. Impossible to feel like I knew up from down.
“But how did you get inside?” My father guarded his parties almost as well as he had me guarded.
“The way anyone who isn’t on the guest list does.” He lifted our hands until I felt his breath breaking across my hand. “I snuck in.”
“How?”
“The same way I’ll sneak out. Very stealth-like. You’d be impressed.” He must have thought my ragged exhale was caused by something other than his lips just barely grazing the valley between my knuckles, because he went on to explain. “Actually, it was far too easy to get into this party without an invite. The Snakes are so well-known for their unparalleled security, but all it took was leaping between a couple trees and dodging behind a few others, and then I was inside. The Krait might as well have posted monkeys with squirt guns around the perimeter.”
“Why risk it? Why not wait another week or two?”
“Because waiting is for cowards.”
“Well no one can accuse you of being that.” My free hand was splayed across the wall behind me as Rylan kept my other hand close to his mouth. “How long had you been watching me before I saw you?”
“From the moment you climbed up on that horse. I don’t think I blinked the whole time. You looked . . .” He drew my hand into his warm cheek. The faintest scratch of stubble covered it. “You looked . . . like . . .”
“Don’t tell me the man of many words is speechless?”
“Not speechless. Just unable to find any word that’s been created for the way you looked tonight.”
I bit my lip to keep my grin from stretching too wide. “Surely in the millions of words out there, there must be one you can use.”
He was quiet for a few moments. If his hand wasn’t still attached to mine, I might have wondered if he was still here. Then I felt his head shake. “No, there’s none. Things that are too pure for this world can’t be defined by the relics of it. There is no word or words for what you are or how I feel about you, so let’s stop trying to define it and start enjoying it.”
My heart didn’t skip just one measly beat at his words. It skipped three. “How long have you been working on that speech? Because it was a good one.” I was so desperate to kiss him, I felt like I would implode if I didn’t.
“I’ve been working on that speech my whole life,” he said, his voice light, happy even.
“But you only met me two weeks ago.”
“I’ve always known I would meet you. I wanted to be prepared when I did.”
The air was even thinner now, and so lacking of oxygen I felt faint. “I don’t know what’s more dangerous—your gun
or your words.”
His words alone were responsible for my entire body betraying everything it had been trained to do. My steady heart was beating erratically. My healthy lungs were gasping for air. My strong bones and healthy muscles were barely up to the task of keeping me standing. My rational brain was contemplating nothing sensibly.
“My words,” he answered. “Words are always more dangerous than weapons.”
Despite being at the epicenter of a storm of bullets and crowbars and deadly venom, I knew he was right. Words had the power to make both war and peace, damage and heal . . . but if words were the most dangerous thing out there, why did my father hand out guns to his men instead of library cards?
“So? Now that I’ve given you one of my best speeches and laid my heart on a chopping block for you to filet to pieces if you choose. . .” His hand slid mine down to his chest, which beat at almost the same rushed pace as mine. “Are you going to tell me your real name?”
“I don’t know, what’s your real name?” I asked as another burst of fog leaked into the room. I couldn’t see it, but I felt its cool stickiness. In the background, a recorded shriek echoed through the haunted house.
“Rylan,” he stated. “That’s my real name.”
“Rylan what?”
“Rylan I’ll-tell-you once you tell me your first name,” he replied. “Come on, that’s a good deal. You’d know my whole name in exchange only for your first.”
Josette wasn’t exactly Jane or Jennifer. I didn’t know a single other Josette in my father’s inner or outer circle, and it would take him all of twenty-four hours to figure me out. But why was I so concerned with hiding who I was from him? Surely the way we felt about each other would overshadow whatever secrets or pedigrees we held.
“What do you think it is?” I asked as I spread my fingers across his chest. I traced the ridge at the top of his ribs and skimmed the muscle stretched above it.
“Well I know it isn’t Jay like the woman you sent to meet me last week tried to convince me of,” he said with a huff.