The night air of Crown City was a heavy tapestry of humid heat and the distant, electric hum of a metropolis that refused to sleep. After finally leaving the pulsating neon corridors of The Banquet Club behind, Ace Kane accompanied Xena Harrison back to her private residence. It was a modest apartment compared to the fortified glass monoliths of the Safest Town district, but within its walls, the remaining layers of corporate artifice and the high-stakes game of masks were finally stripped away.
Under the cover of that lingering, sultry night, the two remained entangled in a flurry of shared breath and shifting shadows. For Xena Harrison, that night became a psychological landmark, an anchor of visceral physical and emotional sensation that she realized, with a startling and permanent cla
