Lana:Good. I don't want to be alone with this news. It doesn't feel real yet.
Me:It's real. Ezra chose his political career over fighting you. Smart move on his part.
Lana:We can worry about whether he's actually done tomorrow. Tonight I just want to celebrate not being dragged through legal proceedings.
Lana:And see you. In person. Without screens.
I watch her through the feed one more time before logging out—she's moved back to the window, looking out at the city like she's testing whether the world has actually shifted or if this is just temporary reprieve.
I finish the shift handoff with Marcus, the overnight monitor who doesn't ask why I'm leaving early but definitely notices. The drive to Lana's apartment takes less than eight minutes, which gives me just enough time to run through every reason this is still a terrible idea despite the legal victory.
Reason one: Lucien's right about power imbalances and gravitational pull. I'm still the person in charge of her surveillance. That dynamic doesn't disappear just because Ezra backed down.
Reason two: Lana just spent five months processing Gabriel's death, and there’s the part where she was being threatened by Ezra, also trying to maintain boundaries with me. She needs time to breathe, not additional complications.
Reason three: I'm driving to her apartment at nearly one in the morning because she asked me to, which suggests I'm already compromised past the point of objective decision-making.
But I'm also thinking about the way she looked at me after that first kiss, the way she saidI've been sure since you confessed, the way she was pacing through her apartment because waiting has become its own kind of torture.
Her building's exterior is lit with the warm amber of security lights designed to look aesthetic rather than functional. I park in the visitor spot I've been using for three weeks, walk the three flights to the third floor, and knock on her door at exactly twelve-twenty-eight.
She opens it before the second knock, like she's been waiting on the other side. She's wearing jeans and a sweater, has her hair pulled back, looking like she hasn't been sleeping well. But her expression when she sees me is complicated—relief and want and something that might be fear.
"You came," she says.
"You asked."
She steps back, letting me into the apartment. The door closes behind me with a soft click that feels louder than it should.
"So it's really over," Lana says, moving toward the kitchen like she needs something to do with her hands. "The legal threat. The will contest. All of it." She's pulling wine glasses from a cabinet, even though I can see from here that her hands are shaking slightly. "We should celebrate. Except I don't know how to celebrate something that feels like it should have been mine all along."
I move into the kitchen and take the glasses from her hands before she drops them. "You don't have to celebrate. You're allowed to just be relieved."
"I am relieved. I'm also terrified." She looks up at me, and her eyes are too bright. "Because now I have to figure out if what I'm feeling is real or just trauma response, and I don't know how to tell the difference."
"Lana—"
"No, let me finish." She takes a breath, steadies herself. "I've spent two days trying to be rational about this. About us. About whether this is sustainable once the threats go away. And every rational analysis says I should walk away from you until I can think clearly. Until I'm not just transferring my need for safety onto the man watching me."
"You should walk away," I say, because she's right and we both know it.
"I should. But I can't." Her hands come up to my chest, palm flat over my heart where it's beating too hard. "Because when I'm with you, I'm not pretending to be something I’m not. I'm not calculating what version of myself will keep me safest.I'm just... here. Present. Real. And I haven't felt that since before Gabriel."
The comparison lands like it always does—sharp, uncomfortable, a reminder that I'm being measured against a man who systematically destroyed her sense of self. That the bar I'm trying to clear is so low it's basically subterranean.
"That doesn't mean we should—"
But she cuts me off with a kiss, and every reason I walked through in the car dissolves into the sensation of her mouth against mine, her hands pulling me closer, the small sound she makes that I've been replaying for two days.
This is a terrible idea. We agreed to wait. We have very good reasons to maintain boundaries despite the legal victory.
I kiss her back anyway.
Her mouth tastes like the mint tea she drinks when she's trying to avoid caffeine this late at night. I know this because I've watched her make it through the apartment feeds, watched the ritual of heating water and steeping the leaves and adding honey she keeps in the cabinet beside the stove. But knowing something through surveillance is different from experiencing it directly—the heat of her, the way she angles her head to deepen the kiss, the grip of her fingers in my shirt like she's afraid I'll disappear if she lets go.
"Jax—" She breaks the kiss to breathe, to say my name in a way that sounds like a question she doesn't know how to finish.
"We should stop." I'm saying this while my hands are sliding under the hem of her sweater, finding skin that's warmer than I expected. "This is exactly what we said we wouldn't do."
