CHAPTER THIRTEEN JAX #2
I'm still watching her on the feed when it appears her phone rings at eleven fifty-three.
She pauses, and checks the screen, and her whole-body language shifts—tension followed by cautious hope.
She answers, and I can see her listening intently, one hand coming up to her mouth.
I can't hear the conversation through the cameras, but I can read her body language well enough.
Whatever she's hearing, it's significant.
The call lasts four minutes. When she hangs up, she stands frozen for a moment, the phone still pressed to her chest, expression cycling through disbelief, relief, something that might be joy. Then she's reaching for her phone again, typing fast.
My phone vibrates. Text from Lana: Mira just called. Ezra's withdrawing the will contest. Malcolm told him to choose his political career over Gabriel's money. It's over. The legal threat is actually over.
I stare at her message, processing the information that changes everything. The relief is physical, loosening tension I didn't realize I'd been holding in my shoulders, my jaw, and the base of my spine.
Me: When?
Lana: Papers filed tomorrow morning. Malcolm called Mira an hour ago, she's been reviewing the documentation. It's official. He's done.
Me: How do you feel?
The dots appear and disappear several times before her response comes: Like I can finally breathe. And also terrified because now the excuse for waiting is gone.
I watch her through the feed—she's moving again, but this time it's not anxious pacing. She's walking to her window, looking out at the city, touching the glass like she's testing whether the world is real.
Me: We don't need excuses. We have reasons.
Lana: Do we? Because the main reason was Ezra's legal threat creating external pressure. That pressure just evaporated.
Me: The reason was making sure we're choosing this for the right reasons, not because circumstances are forcing decisions. That hasn't changed.
Lana: Are you still coming over?
Me: Already finishing the handoff. Be there by 12:30.
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 said I'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."
"I know." Her fingers are working at the buttons of my shirt now, getting the first one open, then the second.
"But I'm tired of being the person who always does what she should.
Five years of that with Gabriel. Five years of calculating every move to keep myself safe.
" She gets the third button open, her palm flat against my chest where my heart is doing something arrhythmic.
"I want to do something because I want it, not because it's strategic. "
The logic is flawed—wanting something doesn't make it right, doesn't erase power imbalances or trauma responses or the very real possibility that we're both making decisions we'll regret when the adrenaline wears off.
But her hands are on my skin now, tracing the muscles of my chest and stomach with a kind of focused attention that makes rational thought increasingly difficult.
I should be the responsible one. Should maintain the boundaries we set two days ago.
But Ezra's threat is gone. The legal pressure has evaporated.
The excuse we used to justify waiting no longer applies, and now we're left with just the raw reality of attraction without the scaffolding of external necessity.
My hands move higher under her sweater, finding the band of her bra, the curve of her ribs, the place where her breathing shifts from controlled to something more desperate.
She makes that sound again—small, involuntary, the kind of noise you can't fake.
I catalog it the way I catalog everything about her, storing it in whatever part of my brain has been systematically compromised since the night I first saw her on my screen.
"We agreed to wait," I tell her, even as my mouth moves to her neck, finding the pulse point that's beating too fast. "Until we could think clearly."
"When will that be?" Her head falls back against the refrigerator, giving me better access. "A week from now? A month? When will the timing ever be right?"
She's got a point. There's always going to be some external factor—Ezra's investigators still operating, the foundation's expansion requiring her attention, my work at The Dominion pulling me into situations that make clear thinking impossible.
We could wait forever for the perfect moment and never find it.