27 — Colliding Pressures

**JASMINE POV**

"You have a security detail now," Luke said, peering out our apartment window at the unmarked black SUV that had been parked across the street for two days straight. "I feel like we should name him. He looks like a Gary."

"His name is Derek, and he's not 'ours,' he's mine, specifically, because apparently my life has become dangerous enough to require a personal Derek."

"Does Derek know he's being called Derek in his absence?"

"I didn't ask."

"Bold of you not to consult Derek on Derek matters." Luke dropped onto the couch beside me, stealing half my blanket without asking, which had been his specialty since college. "How are you holding up? Genuinely. Not the version you give Japheth so he doesn't worry more than he already does."

I considered the question honestly, which was harder than it should have been. "Overwhelmed. Guilty, even though everyone keeps telling me not to be. And tired of having a bodyguard watch me eat cereal in my own kitchen."

"Derek watched you eat cereal?"

"Derek watches me do everything, Luke, that's the whole job description."

"I feel like Derek needs better boundaries."

"Derek is doing exactly what he's being paid to do, which is apparently ruin the sanctity of my cereal-eating privacy."

My phone buzzed before Luke could respond with whatever joke was clearly forming behind his eyes. I checked it, and felt my stomach drop the second I saw the name.

**DAD:** Haven't heard from you in days. Heard there's some kind of trouble at Montgomery. What's going on? You better not be embarrassing this family right when things matter most.

I stared at the message, feeling something cold and familiar settle over the brief lightness Luke had managed to coax out of me.

"What's wrong?" Luke asked, reading my face immediately.

"My dad." I turned the phone so he could see. "Apparently word's gotten around that something's happening at Montgomery, and his first instinct is to ask if I'm the one embarrassing the family."

"Your dad has genuinely impeccable timing for being the worst possible person at the worst possible moment."

"It's a gift." I typed back something neutral, deleted it, typed again.

**JASMINE:** There's a security situation at work. It has nothing to do with me embarrassing anyone. I'm actually in some danger, for what it's worth, in case you were wondering about that part before the family's reputation.

I sent it before I could second-guess myself, something in me finally too exhausted to soften it the way I usually did.

The response took longer than usual.

**DAD:** Danger? What kind of danger? Are you safe?

I blinked at the screen, genuinely surprised by the shift in tone.

**JASMINE:** I have a security detail now. It's being handled. I just needed you to know that "family embarrassment" wasn't actually the headline here.

**DAD:** You should have led with that, Jasmine. I would have asked differently.

**JASMINE:** Would you have, though?

The dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again, like he was drafting several versions of a response he couldn't quite commit to.

**DAD:** I don't know. Probably not. I'm working on it.

It wasn't an apology, not really, but it was the closest thing I'd gotten from Richard Ray in nineteen years, and something in my chest loosened slightly despite myself.

"What was that face?" Luke asked, watching me closely.

"I think my dad just almost had a feeling."

"Should we alert the media?"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

****

Japheth showed up an hour later, Derek trailing him through the door with the particular silent efficiency of a man who took his job very seriously and found absolutely nothing about our apartment's décor worth commenting on.

"How was the Victor Kade deep dive?" I asked, pulling him down onto the couch beside me.

"Illuminating and deeply unsettling in equal measure." He accepted the mug of tea Luke handed him without being asked, which had become something of a running competition between Luke and Japheth over who could anticipate the other's needs more efficiently, a competition neither of them would admit to having. "Ranjiv found a dozen shell companies linked to Kade over the past decade. Real estate, a failed tech startup, two restaurants that closed within a year. He's been testing strategies, apparently, waiting for the right opening."

"And we were the right opening."

"We were, yeah." He rubbed his face, exhaustion evident in every line of him. "Dad's barely slept. I think finding out Kade's actually moved against us after eleven years of silence has shaken him more than he's letting on."

"Can you blame him? Finding out someone's been quietly circling for over a decade is genuinely terrifying."

"No, I can't blame him. I just wish he'd told me years ago. Would've been nice to know there was a guy out there with a grudge and apparently unlimited patience before said guy actually made his move."

"Would it have changed anything?"

"Probably not. But I like to think I'd have been less blindsided." He took a long sip of tea, then glanced at me, something gentler in his expression now. "How are you? Really?"

I told him about Richard's text, watching his jaw tighten the way it always did whenever my father came up in conversation.

"He asked if you were embarrassing the family."

"To be fair to him, in a strange way, he eventually asked if I was safe. Which is more than he usually manages."

"That's a pretty low bar, Peach."

"I'm aware. I'm trying to appreciate incremental progress where I find it, because the alternative is being perpetually furious at a man who's never going to fully change, and I don't have the emotional bandwidth for that on top of everything else happening right now."

He pulled me closer, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. "For what it's worth, you don't owe him incremental appreciation either. You're allowed to just be angry if that's what you actually feel."

"I know. I'm choosing this instead, for now. Ask me again next week, I might have a different answer."

"Fair enough."

Luke reappeared from the kitchen holding a plate of something that smelled suspiciously like an attempt at actual cooking, which was rare enough from him that both Japheth and I turned to look.

"Don't start," Luke said preemptively. "Ryker's been teaching me. I'm allowed to grow as a person."

"Is it edible?" I asked.

"Rude. Also, probably, yes, mostly."

"High praise," Japheth said, accepting a plate anyway with the kind of good humor that had become easier and easier to find in him since Korea, since the office standoff that felt like a lifetime ago now, since all of it.

We ate on the couch together, the three of us plus Derek stationed quietly by the door pretending not to listen, and for a little while, despite Victor Kade's shadow hanging somewhere over all of us, despite Richard's half-apology still sitting strange and unfamiliar in my chest, it felt almost normal the particular, hard-won normal of people who'd been through enough together that even danger couldn't fully steal the ordinary comfort of a bad homemade dinner shared among friends.

My phone buzzed once more before we finished eating. Richard again.

**DAD:** Your mother wants to know if you need anything. I do too, I suppose. Let us know if that changes.

I read it twice, then set the phone face-down on the coffee table, deciding, for tonight at least, to let that be enough not forgiveness, not yet, but something that might, eventually, with time and effort neither of us had managed before, grow into it.

"You okay?" Japheth asked, noticing the shift in my expression even though I'd tried to keep it subtle.

"Yeah. Just processing. My dad asking if I need anything is still new enough territory that I don't quite know what to do with it yet."

"You don't have to do anything with it tonight," Luke said, settling back onto the couch with his own plate. "Progress doesn't require an immediate response. You're allowed to just let it sit there and be strange for a while."

"When did you get so wise?"

"I've always been wise, Jasmine. You've just been too busy being dramatic about your own life to notice."

"That's deeply unfair."

"Is it, though?" He grinned, clearly enjoying himself, and some of the heaviness in the room eased further at his obvious delight in needling me.

Derek, still stationed by the door, made a small sound that might have been a laugh quickly suppressed into a cough, which was the most emotion I'd seen out of him in two full days of surveillance.

"Even Derek agrees," Luke said triumphantly. "Derek, back me up."

"I'm not paid to have opinions, sir," Derek said, perfectly deadpan, and the whole room actually laughed properly for the first time since the security detail had shown up, a small, real moment of levity sitting improbably alongside everything else Victor Kade's shadow, Richard's halting almost-apology, the general sense that our lives had become something neither Japheth nor I had fully signed up for and were now navigating together anyway, one strange, overwhelming day at a time.

"To incremental progress," Japheth said finally, raising his mug of tea like it was champagne.

"To incremental progress," I echoed, clinking my own mug against his, and for the length of that one quiet toast, surrounded by the people who'd chosen to stay close through all of it, it felt like maybe we actually stood a chance against everything still circling somewhere out there in the dark.