"I'll stay as long as you want me." His voice is rough with exhaustion or emotion or both. "But Lana, I should let you know—once I'm in, I don't know how to maintain the kind of distance most relationships require. When I care about someone, I watch them. It's how I show that they matter."
"Then watch me." I tilt my head up to see his face. "Just make sure I get to watch you back."
CHAPTER 19: JAX
I wake to find Lana still asleep beside me, her breathing even and deep in a way that suggests actual rest rather than the fidgety half-consciousness I've been maintaining for the past three hours. The safe house bedroom is dark except for streetlight filtering through gaps in the curtains, casting stripes across the bed where we ended up after deciding to stop separating protection from attraction.
My phone sits on the nightstand glowing with missed notifications. Three texts from Lucien, each more insistent than the last. The most recent arrived fifteen minutes ago:My office. 8 AM. Not optional.
It's six-thirty now. I have ninety minutes to leave the safe house, drive to The Dominion, and face whatever professional consequences are waiting for me. Ninety minutes to figure out how to explain that I violated every boundary Elias set, that I slept with the woman I'm supposed to be protecting, that surveillance and intimacy are now entangled in ways I can't separate.
Lana shifts in her sleep, moves closer without waking, her hand finding my chest like even in an unconscious state, she's finding my presence. The gesture makes something in my chest feel full and compromised. This is what Elias warned me about—getting too close, losing objectivity, making decisions based on want rather than operational necessity.
I should extract myself. Should leave before she wakes so I don't have to navigate the awkward morning-after conversation while knowing I'm about to face Lucien's assessment of my professional judgment. But moving feels like abandonment, like proving that last night was just crisis management rather than actual choice.
So I stay and watch her sleep. I memorize the way dawn light is starting to change the quality of shadows in the room, the way her dark hair spreads across the pillow, the small crease between her eyebrows that suggests even in sleep she's processing something difficult. This is surveillance without cameras—direct observation that feels more intimate than any footage I've reviewed.
At seven, her eyes open. She blinks, orients herself, registers my presence with an expression that moves from confusion to memory to something that might be relief or maybe just acceptance that this actually happened.
"You're still here," she says, her voice rough with sleep.
"I'm still here. But I need to leave soon. Lucien wants to see me at eight."
She sits up and pulls the sheet around herself in a gesture that's more habitual modesty than actual self-consciousness. "To fire you?"
"Possibly. More likely to remind me about professional boundaries I've violated and assess whether I'm compromised beyond operational usefulness." I'm already getting out of bed, finding my clothes from last night scattered across the floor. "He knew I was coming here yesterday. Knew Trask had escalated. He's probably been tracking my location through Blackwood and knows exactly how long I stayed."
"That's surveillance."
"That's employment. Lucien monitors his security personnel. It's standard protocol." I pull on jeans, then my shirt, buttoning it with hands that are steadier than they were last night. "But showing up to protect you is one thing. Spending the night is different. That crosses from professional intervention into personal involvement."
She watches me dress with an expression I can't quite decode. "Do you regret it? Last night?"
The question deserves honesty. "No. But I'm also aware that not regretting it doesn't mean it was strategically sound. We complicated an already complex situation by adding physical intimacy to threat assessment and protection protocols."
"Is that what you're going to tell Lucien? That we complicated the situation?"
"I'm going to tell Lucien that I got personally involved with you and he can decide what that means for my assignment." I finish dressing, move to the bed, and crouch down so we're at eye level. "I don't know what he's going to say. Don't know if he'll pull me off your security or if he'll accept that protection and personal involvement can coexist. But I'm not going to lie to him about what happened."
"And us? What are we telling ourselves about what happened?"
The question deserves better than operational language or tactical deflection. "We're telling ourselves that we stopped circling around wanting each other and actually acted on it. That last night was real, not just crisis response. That we're going to figure out what this is without overthinking it into something it's not."
"That's a lot of certainty for someone who just violated professional boundaries."
"It's not certainty. It's commitment to figuring it out." I touch her face, my thumb tracing her cheekbone. "Lana, I don't regret last night. I might regret how it complicates things professionally, but I don't regret you. That has to count for something."
Her hand comes up to cover mine where it rests against her face. "It counts for everything. But I'm also terrified that this only works when there's danger. That once threats are resolved and I'm actually safe, we'll discover surveillance was all we had."
"Then we'll deal with that if it happens. But right now, I need to go face Lucien and find out if I still have a job." I stand and grab my phone from the nightstand. "Brandon will check in. I'll text you after I know what's happening."
"Jax—" She stops, like she's not sure what she wants to say. "Be careful."
"I'll be careful," I promise, then leave before I can find excuses to stay longer.
The ride to The Dominion takes twenty minutes through morning traffic. The building looks different in daylight—less imposing, more like standard luxury real estate than the shadowy space it becomes after dark. I pay the driver, head through the employee entrance, take the service elevator to the third floor, knock once on Lucien's office door before entering without waiting for a response.
He's at his desk, dressed in casual clothes, drinking coffee from a mug that says "World's Okay-est Boss" in a font suggesting an ironic gift from someone with a sense of humor. The juxtaposition is jarring—Lucien Armitage, master of The Dominion's operations, drinking from novelty merchandise.
