Jax pulls me out through his door, keeping me low, using the vehicle as cover between us and where the shots are coming from. Derek is slumped over the steering wheel, his wounded arm bleeding badly but he's conscious, trying to exit the driver's side.
I can hear footsteps now. Running. Multiple people approaching from different directions. This isn't just Reese conducting surveillance—this is coordinated assault with backup, with planning, with intention to neutralize everyone in this vehicle.
"Brandon, three o'clock!" Andre shouts, and I hear gunfire again—Brandon and Andre are returning fire at targets I can't see from my position crouched beside the vehicle.
"Two hostiles, east side!" Brandon shouts to Andre.
"I've got them!" Andre's returning fire, the sharp cracks echoing through the garage.
“Stay down.” Jax says to me as he moves to join Brandon and Andre.
That's when Victor Reese appears around the front of our car, moving fast while Andre and Brandon are occupied with his backup. He's not aiming at Jax or the security team. He's aiming directly at me.
Everything crystallizes into terrible clarity—this isn't about eliminating the security team. This is about me specifically. The settlement was fake. The Glasshouse decided I'm too dangerous to leave alive. Reese is here to finish what they started.
Jax moves an instant before Reese fires, closing the distance and slamming his forearm into Reese's gun hand. The shot goes wild, the bullet ricocheting off concrete somewhere behind me. Then Jax is on him with terrifying efficiency, the tactical knife already in his other hand. He buries it in Reese's shoulder, rips it free, drives it into his side below the ribs—fast, brutal, and precise.
They go down together in a tangle of limbs and lethal intent. Reese tries to bring his gun around, but Jax has his wrist, slamming it against the concrete until the weapon skitters away. Then it's just knife and hands and a desperate struggle between two men who both know only one of them leaves this garage alive.
I'm frozen, watching this happen three feet away from me, unable to move or scream or do anything except witness Jax fighting for my life with efficiency that's beautiful and terrible simultaneously.
Reese gets a hand around Jax's throat, trying to crush his windpipe, and I can see Jax's face going red, see him struggling to breathe. For one horrible moment I think Reese is going to win, is going to kill Jax and then turn on me.
Then Jax drives the knife up under Reese's ribs with force that makes a sound I'll never forget—wet, final, the particular noise of steel penetrating vital organs. Reese's eyes go wide, his grip on Jax's throat loosening, and Jax twists the blade before pulling it out and driving it in again, higher this time, making sure.
Reese goes still beneath Jax, blood spreading across the concrete in a pool that grows too fast. His body slackens, but his eyes—his eyes stay open, staring upward. Wide. Terrified. The same look I saw on Gabriel's face as he fell.
And as I watch him die, watch life leave his eyes, something inside me breaks open. The garage disappears.
Time fractures.
The terrace. Rain hammering down. Wind tearing at my nightgown.
The memory comes flooding back with violence that steals my breath, makes everything else fade except that night, that storm, that moment I've been blocking for months.
Gabriel's hands on my shoulders, shaking me, spinning us both in his fury. "You will apologize! You will show me the respect I deserve!"
His foot slips on wet stone. I feel it happen—the moment his weight shifts backward, momentum carrying him toward the drop. His eyes widen, exactly like Reese's just did. My hands are on his chest, have been on his chest this whole time trying to push him away, but now they're all that's keeping him from falling.
I try to hold him. I do try. But he's too heavy and the momentum is too strong and my hands are wet with rain. He's sliding through my grip, his eyes going wide with terror as he realizes what's happening.
"Lana—" My name, half accusation, half plea.
Then he's gone. Falling backward over the railing, three hundred feet to the rocks below. And I'm standing there with my hands still outstretched, wet with rain and his cologne, watching him disappear into darkness.
I didn't push him. But I also didn't save him. And underneath the horror and the guilt is something else—relief. Terrible, damning relief that he's gone, that I'm free, that I survived him.
I'm gasping, can't get enough oxygen, the parking garage swimming back into focus around Reese's dead body, his dead eyes still fixed on nothing, that same terrified expression frozen on his face. The same look Gabriel had. The look of someone who knows they're about to die and can't stop it.
Jax is beside me now, his hands on my face, saying something I can't hear over the roaring in my ears.
"Lana. Lana, look at me." His voice finally penetrates. "Are you hurt? Did he hit you?"
I shake my head, can't form words, can't explain that I'm not hurt physically but something inside me just shattered. The memory I've been blocking for months came flooding back and now I have to live with it—with the knowledge that I tried to save Gabriel but couldn't, with the relief I felt when he fell, with the complexity of guilt and freedom tangled together in ways I'll never fully separate.
More gunfire. Brandon and Andre engaging with whoever else is part of this assault. Jax pulls me behind thevehicle again, shielding me with his body while checking for additional threats.
"Brandon, status!" he shouts.
