I had thought she was naïve. – Jase describing his surprise after spending time with Nessa

I was for a while troubled with the haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade…I did not know then that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem. – Charlotte Bronte

The shot rang out, and Jase realized with horror that once again, the gun lay in his hand. This time, however, its fleeing bullet raced toward Nessa's furrowed brow instead of plunging into his own. Yet a different conclusion to his recurrent dream, and one even more horrific than before.

When he had felt the constriction of his lungs, Jase once again considered the sensation the most terrifying in his experience. What a way to die! he lamented. Eventually, his lungs had escaped from their usual burial, and Jase had shrugged almost listlessly out of, for this incarnation, the black earth. Every dream, a new substance entombed him. Every dream, a new pair of eyes haunted him. Now, every dream threatened a new and more horrific conclusion. This time, the eyes that sped away from him looked like Nessa's or maybe Meg's, rich and espresso.

Maybe the disorientation of seeing her eyes obfuscated his thinking and mistakenly placed her in Belize. Why else would Nessa have joined him on his tropical hell? Even more disturbing, under what circumstances would he have chosen to shoot her? As he watched the ammunition speed away from him, he grasped futilely toward the retreating shell. He closed his eyes just before it reached its mark, and then he jerked awake, panting, in his bed.

As if he had just fought an intense battle, Jase's clothes dripped with sweat, and a dark outline surrounded his reclining figure where perspiration had drenched the sheet. Upon waking he realized how completely his dream had changed again, morphing from an irritating, suicidal jumble of thoughts into a terror-inspiring, homicidal nightmare.

Though it began as usual with the hasty advance across the bay followed by the darkened cabana and the smiling Felicity, the end had transformed yet again. How many times and how many ways could the conclusion of the dream reshape into a more horrific possibility? He couldn't imagine anything worse than watching Nessa die at his own hand.

Jase knew intuitively that his dream had reflected his own ambivalence, and not a tangible danger to Nessa, but he couldn't shake his terror for her. Mechanically, he scrounged on the nightstand for his phone. When he saw his clock, however, he set the phone back down: 5 a.m. No one in his right mind would wake at such an hour if he didn't have to, and Jase would not allow himself to act in so irrational a manner as to call Nessa because of a bad dream. Of course, he reasoned, Nessa slept soundly in her bed, not in any need of a rousing and panicked phone call.

Instead, Jase rolled off of his low mattress and forced himself to walk to the kitchen. Only coffee could solve the muddle in his brain.

As the coffee brewed, Jase leaned his hip against the kitchen counter and pondered his fickle immaturity. A little over a month before, he had seriously contemplated killing himself because the woman he loved had walked away from him. Eschewing that violent route, he had instead drunk himself into a stupor and quit his job - truly a pathetic display over a woman he couldn't have.

Now, his mind had begun a battering tempest over his friend's girlfriend, and Jase's conscience obviously couldn't deal with how things had turned in this case either. Otherwise, why would he feel like an asshole for kissing Nessa? Why else would he equate kissing her with killing her? Nessa was a big girl who could handle herself.

Platitudes, though, couldn't dissuade Jase from his uneasiness.

Jase tried to distract himself from the fear that the dream had dredged up by mulling over his other recent struggles, those not stemming from his obsession with Nessa. Even though he could still reason, Jase hated the idea that emotion and conscience had crept into his regular considerations. If he could only rein in his sentimentality, perhaps he could leave all of his frustrations behind: the Team, Bill Henry, and especially, Nessa. His intangible fear over the dream, though, continued to raise the hairs on the back of his neck despite his resolve for calm.

All at once, he saw them, and his dream seemed more prescient than he would have dared to imagine. Jase could as good as see the physical bullet bearing down on Nessa's face when he realized what sat on his kitchen counter.

Nessa's missing keys.

In his mind, he scrolled through possible scenarios that would have deposited those keys where they now sat, on his counter in plain sight. Though he tried to deliberate calmly, he could imagine no plausible reason for their presence. Nessa had not returned to Jase's apartment since they had come back from France, and Jase sure as hell hadn't carried the keys into his apartment himself.

The ephemeral fear that had teased him earlier now solidified into a well-defined anxiety, and Jase threw away his previous concerns about waking Nessa. Racing back to his room, he grabbed his phone and punched in her number. Mind-numbingly, the phone tolled its cacophonous tone for an immeasurable few minutes. No answer; no voice mail.

Compressing his panic into anger, Jase grabbed his and Nessa’s keys and sped out his front door, shunning the painfully slow elevator in favor of the stairs. He flew down the flights of steps and into his car, covering the ten-minute drive to Nessa's in less than five. By the time he reached her door, his heart thundered in his chest, not from exertion, but from the heightened anxiety that his mind had cultivated during those laborious five minutes.

Suppressing an impulse to bang madly on Nessa's door, Jase reverted into his cold, professional demeanor. He pressed his ear to the door, listening for any noises that might indicate the presence of human life on the other side. Though he heard a quiet rustling, the sound could just as easily have stemmed from a fan blowing on paper or a plastic bag as it did an intruder shuffling through the room.

Thankful that he knew the security system's schematic, Jase quickly and quietly disarmed Nessa's alarm and opened the door with her spare keys. A gentle creak announced his entrance, and Jase cursed to himself that he couldn't enter more stealthily. At least maybe that noise meant that no one else could sneak up on her either.

Pausing, Jase glanced pointedly around the room, taking in every corner in a search for unexpected human presence. Nothing. He crept silently across the open living room, peering behind any piece of furniture that might conceal an intruder. Whatever it said about his state of mind, he wanted to see Nessa safe and whole.

After he had spanned the main room, he entered a narrow hall with two rooms branching off of it, one on either side. He glanced into the one on the right and saw a small guest bathroom, tastefully decorated with antiques and not large enough to conceal anyone.

On the other side of the corridor, Jase turned into a small study replete with hundreds of books and an incongruously modern computer, slim and high dollar, perched on the antique desk. With the modest size of the office, his reconnaissance took only seconds as he glanced behind the door and then under the desk. Finally, he turned from the room to rush toward Nessa's, anxiety bubbling to the surface of his brain despite his forced calm.

As he spun around the doorframe, his motion came to a sudden stop as he felt the familiar, cold steel of a gun pressing into his forehead. Instantly, he raised both hands in a gesture of surrender, his eyes focusing solely on the long, black barrel at his head. Before his assailant could pull the trigger, Jase brought his hands together in an upward motion, percussively hitting the firearm and forcing it toward the ceiling.

“Jase!” came the exclamation before the expected gunshot could ring out.

“Nessa!” he recognized the voice at once, and his constricted lungs filled with a rush of air that had until then evaded him. Wrapping his arms around her, Jase pulled her to him, pressing her tightly against him to assure himself she was real. Nessa was safe.

“What in the hell were you doing?” Nessa cursed in an uncharacteristic fashion, squirming to extract herself from his grip.

Slightly ashamed, Jase laughed a nervous laugh. “I found your keys,” he explained weakly, reaching with one arm into his pocket while holding onto her with the other.

“My keys?” her voice twisted in confusion.

“I'm sorry, Nessa,” he confessed. “I was being an idiot, but something strange happened.”

Nessa pressed her hands against his chest so she could look up into his eyes. “What is it, Jase? You're lucky I didn't kill you.”

Again, Jase chuckled. “No doubt. You move like a cat. It's rare that someone sneaks up on me.”

“Well, you seemed kind of distracted,” Nessa smiled for the first time since Jase had seen her. “Plus, we all have talents. Let's not stand here in the hallway. I want to hear this.”

Stepping away from him, Nessa strode forward into the living room. She clicked on a small lamp which blanketed the room in a soft gold. After depositing herself onto her sofa, Nessa peered up expectantly into Jase's face. “Explain,” she commanded.

Jase moved to sit beside her and once again raised the keys that he still held. As he placed them into her open palm, he opened his mouth to explain, sighing heavily in reticence to reveal his paranoia. “I had a dream,” he began.

“Seriously? That's what brought you here?” Nessa interrupted, seemingly amused. “You don't seem the 'dreams and visions' type.”

“No, I'm not,” he answered, annoyed. “But when I woke up afterward, I couldn't sleep, so I wandered into my kitchen for some coffee. I found those sitting on my counter.”

At this, Nessa tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at him. “Your counter?”

“You see why I felt concerned,” Jase responded. “I could think of no logical explanation as to why your lost set of spare keys would end up in my apartment.”

Nessa screwed her face up in consternation. “But I had them....in my living room. How could they...?” she began.

“Someone had to have taken them from your apartment. Someone came into your apartment either with your permission or without, and while he was here, he took your keys.”

Nessa scratched her head, then settled her chin into her palm, her elbow resting on the arm of the couch. Any rational person would have mistrusted Jase, but he could sense no suspicion on her part. “I don't know what to think,” she lamented. “Why place the keys in your apartment? Obviously, someone wanted you to find them.”

“If someone had cameras in your apartment last night, they might know what happened with you and me.”

“But they don't?”

“Not likely, though I'll check to make sure. What disturbs me most, though, is, how did he get into either of our apartments? Yours, at least, has a simplistic security system. But mine? My complex is loaded with equipment to impede and detect any intruder, and I've added extra. Whoever did this went to a lot of trouble.”

Nessa's shoulders rose and fell once in a slightly exaggerated manner. As he watched her, Jase realized that she looked a little afraid.

“We'll upgrade your security today. It's early. There should be plenty of time.”

When she glanced up into his eyes, Jase's heart swelled in sympathy at the nervous expression on her face. He even suffered a twinge of guilt as he considered her situation. If he read the situation right, someone had targeted her because of her relationship with him.

“Do you think that Drew would...” Jase began.

“Impossible,” Nessa shook her head. “He was at a team meeting last night until late, and the day I lost my keys, he hadn't been in my apartment for a while.”

“So that makes it unlikely, but not impossible,” Jase corrected.

“Right,” Nessa nodded, then seemed to stare inside her own thoughts for a moment. “Thank you for your help in this. Thanks for coming at this ungodly hour.”

Wrapping his arm around her shoulders, Jase pulled Nessa to him and rested his head on top of her hair. “It's okay, Nessa. I'll figure this out.”

She breathed deeply then pulled away from him. “I'm fine,” she asserted with a cool air. “I'm a professional, too, remember. We will figure this out, and I really do appreciate your help.”

Jase recognized in her calm assertion a desire to reign in her fear and undertake rational thought. Though he wished on one level that she would melt into his arms in gratitude, he knew the self-discipline that such temerity signified. Thanks to her self-command, he began to calm as well. Other than her emotional well-being, he really feared little from this turn of events. Once Jase put his mind to something, he always accomplished it, and he had set his mind on protecting Nessa. Plus, all he knew for sure was that someone had gotten into his apartment. Nessa had mislaid her keys, and they could have ended up anywhere. If she could act rationally, so could he, and since she didn't seem in a hurry to see him gone, he settled in for a few hours to unwind the stress that had coiled itself around him since the moment he had pulled the trigger on Nessa.

A few hours later, Jase deposited Nessa at Briel's new temporary residence and then returned to his own apartment. When he entered, Amélie sat tensely on his couch, her crossed leg swinging and her chin in her hand. Her elbow rested on her knee, and Jase recognized the impatient irritation that this pose belied.

“Hi, Amélie,” he offered casually. She couldn't impel him to any remorse by her pouting, and her attempt to do so only amused him.

“Hi?” she spat at him, and her eyes narrowed as she lowered her hand and brought both feet to rest on his carpet. “I have sat here all morning waiting for you, and you don't have the decency to communicate in some way...”

“Just a second,” Jase interrupted her tirade. “Let me be clear on something in case I miscommunicated. I am giving you a place to stay. I in no way owe you an explanation of my whereabouts and am not responsible for any entertainment that you wish to engage in. You will have no visitors in my house, but you may come and go as you please as long as you follow proper security procedures.”

As Jase spoke, he could see the anger physically tightening the muscles of her face, twisting the corner of her mouth into a subtle sneer. He couldn't care less. If he had followed his logic instead of his stupid principles, he would have kicked her out and told her to find her own place to hide, but like in all other recent instances, his conscience overruled his logic in this matter as well.

“I see,” she said coldly, then rose from her seat and turned her back on him to reenter the guest room. “You need only let me stay here a week, then. I will find someone else to help me.”

Jase winced, feeling as if he had just committed the very ungentlemanly faux pas of having abandoned a woman in her time of need. In this one case, however, his rational mind overruled his compassion. Amélie Laurent was not a lady, and she needed no one to champion her. At the thought, the corner of his mouth curled. No, one could call Amélie many names, but lady did not rank among them.

For an instant, Jase pondered whether or not Amélie could have performed the stunt with the keys, but though she had access to his apartment, Amélie possessed little skill at breaking and entering. She might have been able to plant the keys, but she would have no method of procuring them in the first place. After staring at the simmering woman for a few more seconds, Jase turned and walked out the door, leaving her to whatever machinations she would concoct in his absence.

After setting up Nessa's new security system, Jase accompanied her, with Briel in tow, to her apartment and showed her the improved technology of the system. A more complicated code hindered the likelihood of its unraveling, and Nessa had to place her thumb on a scanner whenever she wanted the door to unlock.

“Not top-of-the-line,” Jase explained, “but a heck of a lot better than your last system.”

Nessa just nodded, typing in the numbers and then placing her thumb on the scanner so Jase could enter the print into the internal database. “I appreciate your help,” she offered a bit sullenly. “I don't need a babysitter, though. I'm sure you and Briel have things to do.”

From behind Jase, Briel huffed in disbelief. “What happened to 'You can't do this alone.' You're the one who preached that mantra to me before I ran to France, and you were right. Besides, Jase and Nick have been nagging me to let them assign me a babysitter. We kill two birds with one stone. I leave in a week, so I won't smother you for long.”

At the reminder, Nessa grimaced. Nessa had seemed a bit melancholy at the idea of Briel's departure, though Jase had explained why Briel had to leave. In truth, Jase would have sent Briel away earlier, but Briel insisted on tying up her loose ends.

“You wanna take first shift or me?” Jase returned to the subject of logistics.

At this question, Nessa raised her eyebrows. “Since Briel doesn’t have a place to sleep, she’d better take second shift.”

Smirking, Briel glanced at Nessa, then back to Jase. “Sounds like you two have some things to work out,” she grinned.

Jase returned the smirk. “Like what’s for lunch…” he deadpanned.

Laughing, Briel reached for the door. “I'll come back at eight. Nick and I have some things to finalize before the move. He's found me a place to live and wants to show me the info.” Briel let go of the door and strode over to Nessa. In a very uncharacteristic manner, Briel placed a kiss on her friend's cheek. “Be careful,” Briel commanded before passing through the door into the afternoon.

To Jase's surprise, the next five hours passed quickly. Jase had worried that Nessa might feel awkward after their previous encounter, but once Briel left and the door shut behind her, Nessa relaxed visibly. She and Jase spoke briefly about the new security, but the rest of their conversation stemmed from more intellectual or personal topics. Though Jase had always found her easy to talk to, he had not expected her engaging and vivid storytelling. He had also vastly underestimated her intelligence, and he wondered why she hid such acumen behind a ridiculously taciturn demeanor. Apparently, she had let some indiscernible evidence of her smarts leak through her simple facade, because Jase never found himself interested in simple women. He couldn't resist asking. “Why do you always do that?”

Squinting at him quizzically, Nessa took a second to respond. He could almost see her replaying the last few minutes of conversation to figure out which action of hers had elicited the question. “I'm sorry,” she apologized. “What exactly do I do?”

Jase smiled. “You hide how smart you are.”

Rolling her eyes in apparent embarrassment, Nessa scoffed at the query. “Where did that come from?” she avoided answering.

“I've watched you over the last few weeks. If you wanted to, you could easily pick up most of the computer tricks that I've learned over the years; you are much more adept at physical maneuvers than you let on; and you catch everything that occurs around you, though you rarely react.”

“I miss lots of things,” she corrected only one of his assertions. “I'm constantly lost in a kind of creative fog.”

“You're avoiding the question,” Jase smirked at her. “No matter where you are, you recede into the background unless someone calls you out. Of course, then you wow us all with your insight, but even so, you manage to muddle your contribution by drawing others to take the spotlight.”

“You know as well as I that someone in our profession needs to avoid attention,” she seemed to dismiss his admiration. “Maybe I'm just really good at diverting attention.”

He couldn't help but smile; of course, she was right on that count. Still, he had trouble thinking her guilty of enough conniving to purposely avoid attention this way. Instead, she seemed viscerally to shy away from it.

“You're not that intentional about it, Nessa. And your attempt to minimize my question is just another try at diverting the course of our conversation.”

Apparently irritated at his persistence, Nessa gritted her teeth. “Maybe,” she allowed. “I don't particularly like the limelight, though I can perform if necessary.”

“Why don't you like it?” Jase interrupted. “Have you tried it before?”

For the first time during their afternoon stint together, Nessa seemed reticent to discuss something. After huffing slightly and fidgeting, she turned to face him.

“Yes, I tried it,” she admitted. “My whole life until I was twenty-five.”

Finally sensing an insight into this guarded woman's character, Jase tried to control the intensity of his expression. If he looked too interested, she might retreat.

“So, were you forced to perform in a circus or something?” he asked jestingly, hoping to relax the suddenly restrained set of her jaw.

He succeeded; she laughed. “Actually, sort of,” she admitted. “My father was Domenico Andrico.”

Though he wanted to gape, Jase controlled his expression. “Like, Domenico Andrico the Latin Galanteador?”

At the title, Nessa laughed again. “So, you've heard of him? My mother always found that title very amusing. He was not a philanderer; no one could be more committed to a woman than my father was to my mother.”

“That's nice to know.” Jase offered her a genuine smile; no wonder Nessa was so naive.

“For most of my childhood, my father and I traveled for about four months out of the year and latched ourselves onto more well-known performing acts. He thought my presence would add a sweetness to his performance since he always despised any untoward attention from female fans. I acted as sort of a buffer against the raging hormones of his devotees.”

“I saw him pass through my hometown a few times, but I never saw a sign of your presence,” Jase queried.

“No, you wouldn't have. He was still small-time when I toured. His career never really took off until he left me behind.”

Though her words seemed to imply an unhappy occurrence, her expression and tone communicated only contentment with the turn of events.

“I'm sorry,” Jase offered, though he really didn't know how he should respond.

“No,” she spurted, shock flitting across her visage. “No. You misunderstand. He didn't leave me like that. He didn't let me perform any more because he wanted to protect me. See, when I turned thirteen, my father started to notice a change in the tenor of the fans' attentions toward me. I didn't look thirteen; I looked like a woman. And my dad had no intention of subjecting me to the ogling of the male population. Right about that time, his career had taken off, and instead of prancing around onstage, I shuffled around backstage. I found that I preferred it.”

Jase shook his head. Under no circumstances would he have pegged her as a performer; nothing about her seemed put on. “You said until you were twenty-five. What happened between thirteen and twenty-five?”

“Well, my mother schooled me, and I finished high school at sixteen. Occasionally during those three years, my father would let me sing with him at smaller venues, but mostly I just whizzed through school as quickly as I could. At sixteen, I started taking a few college courses and entered as a sophomore at eighteen. Of course, having performed my entire childhood, I missed the adrenaline, and as soon as I left my father's protective hand, I started performing in clubs near the campus. I knew my father would disapprove, so I limited my singing to smaller venues, never really planning to pursue a career in music. I just fiddled around with it throughout college and grad school. Then I grew up.”

So abrupt an ending to her story irritated Jase. She grew up? Did she mean figuratively? She just gave it up for a grown-up job? Or had something happened to mature her so rapidly? The question seemed too personal for her skittish tendencies to allow, so Jase fished in another direction.

“How did you get into this business?” This question had intrigued him equally as much as the new one ever since he had met her.

“My fiancé,” she smiled sentimentally, and Jase's heart clutched at the word. She had been engaged?

“I met a man in grad school,” she answered his unspoken question. “I was in the psychology department, and he had to take a few psych classes for his Comparative Politics degree.”

“What was his name?” Jase couldn't help asking.

“Aaron,” she smiled. “We were idiots. He had a sort of obsession with intrigue, and I let him drag me to a recruitment meeting for the FBI.”

“I didn't know you were in the FBI.”

“I wasn't officially,” she clarified. “I didn't end up joining after training, but he did.”

“So,” Jase encouraged her, “that still doesn't answer my question.”

“For two years,” she continued reluctantly, “we lived like crazy people. I had this apartment on the corner near the university, and even though I had graduated, I loved the area and stayed on. He would pick me up about three days a week, and the two of us would go to training. Since he felt superior to most of the 'uneducated schmucks' in the Bureau, as he called them, he used to hack into the lower-level systems to find out about missions. We would sneak out to the sites and observe.”

“That's risky,” Jase interrupted. “And here I always thought you were so rational.”

Smiling slightly, Nessa shook her head. “I had been before, but Aaron took risks, and I admired him for both that reason and because he was smarter than anyone I had ever met. I kind of abandoned rational thought when he was around because he had even more ability in that arena than I did. Plus,” she glanced down at the rug, smiling ruefully, “I found I liked the risks.”

“An adrenaline junkie,” Jase teased incredulously, but she ignored his jibe. “I never pegged you for the type.”

“One night, after Aaron had officially joined the Bureau but before he had any real assignments, he took me to watch a drug crackdown. Kind of a last hurrah before he had to start playing by the book, and I couldn't come anymore.” Her tone grew wistful, “Several of the good guys went down in a shootout. Aaron and I just sat there for several minutes, feeling sick over our own helplessness and the horror of what we had seen. We had just finished our training, and both of us wished we could do something. After several minutes without a gunshot, we grew aware of a noise about fifteen feet to our left. We shrank down under the bushes where we sat and gazed into the moonlight where we saw a bureau agent creeping into the woods beside us.”

Jase grew impatient, but he sat silently. He wanted to know what this had to do with her entering private security, but he knew she wanted to tell him the outcome of the story as well.

“Just as the agent drew parallel with us, we heard another noise directly in front of us. One of the drug runners had followed the agent, and Aaron and I watched as the drug runner shot and killed the agent then ran off into the woods himself.”

“Was that the first time you had seen a man die?” Jase couldn't help asking.

“At close range, yes,” she responded softly, as if she still experienced every nuance of anguish from that night. “And I'd never seen Aaron like that. I've since learned that expression from many chances to observe it on others. It was rage. He trudged over to the dead agent and grabbed the gun out of the man's holster. I started to scold him about crime scene integrity, but the look on his face stopped me. For one second, I thought he was just going to leave me and tear out after the escaped drug runner. He turned to run but then came back to me and gave me the most amazing kiss I had ever experienced.” She seemed to smile at the reminiscence, and though Jase wanted to feel jealousy, the wistfulness of her tone arrested any heat he otherwise would have indulged.

“He took off, and several minutes later, I heard gunshots. I just sat there,” her eyes gazed hauntingly at a blank spot on the wall before her. “I didn't feel competent to help, and I knew we had been idiots to follow all of these missions without proper experience. By the time I wrenched to my feet and ran to where the gunshots had sounded, I found Aaron dead, the gun runner lay shot a few yards away, and several living agents stood scattered around the small clearing where the shooting had occurred. Aaron had wounded the drug runner allowing the agents to apprehend him, but the drug runner had unloaded into Aaron before the other agents could intervene.”

For several seconds, she continued to stare at that blank spot, and Jase didn't reach out to take her hand until she sighed deeply and turned a sad smile to him. “At first, I hated the men who had taken Aaron away from me. Of course, then I realized that hate was too good for them. See, there are two kinds of hate: hate for those you hate, and hate for those you love. Either kind gives the hated person power over you, and though I have always been willing to relinquish some control to those I love, I did not ever want to give power to those who had forcefully taken Aaron’s life. I wanted power over them instead. I took two vows on that night: one, that I would try to maintain some control even with those I love; and two...” She paused, and a lambent flame stirred in her eyes, “I would never sit helplessly by while someone I loved faced danger. I would take the power away from the bad guys.”

“So, you became a private security agent.”

“Eventually. I had two years of training with the Bureau, so I left and sought out a few of the acquaintances I had made in the program. I underwent the specific training that went along with private security. After a couple of years with a firm, I joined the Team. I had decided that the most rational way to protect those I loved was to possess more skills and resources than my enemy.” She shrugged in closing, and looked up to Jase with an ironic expression.

The knock at the door forestalled any questions Jase might have asked, and both he and Nessa turned to her laptop to view the output from the security camera.

“Briel,” Nessa exclaimed pleasantly, rising to let her friend in. “I didn't realize it was so late,” Nessa admitted as she pulled open the front door.

“Neither did I,” Jase mumbled, a gentle disappointment gripping his gut. “Well, I need to take care of a few things tonight,” he said aloud, “so I'd better get going.”

He rose and crossed paths with Briel as she carried in an overnight bag and placed it on the floor. Still by her perch at the front door, Nessa's face wore an expression of discontent for the hint of a moment, but she wiped it away immediately. Jase smiled to himself, and Nessa reached up in her characteristic fashion to place a friendly kiss on his cheek. When he returned the favor, Jase wrapped his arm around her waist and held her there for several seconds until Briel cleared her throat.

“I'll see you both in the morning,” he shrugged with a sheepish smirk and walked out to his waiting car.