Really well, thank goodness.

All those precautions were for naught. We made it to the car with no difficulty. They were inside the building. We pealed out quickly and my phone started working almost instantly.

I was on the phone to 911 a moment later, telling them everything. Well, not everything, but about whatever the fuck was happening back there.

“Possible superhuman presence. One of them said the boss would ‘burn us alive with a flick of her hand.’ Might have been bullshit, but be careful.”

The dispatcher thanked me and asked us to divert to meet the police nearby, so they could get information on the building from Jasmine…to which I responded. “Fuck, no. We’ll head for the 7th Precinct,” which my stupid magic brain knew was the closest to our position, “but I’m not getting these folks anywhere near that fight.”

The dispatcher wasn’t thrilled by that, but didn’t have any leverage, given the girls’ wealth and my knowing the rules. They did get Jasmine’s pass-code to the building. The dispatcher gave me some shit, but I simply pointed out that SWAT was going to take time to deploy, and uniforms weren’t going in against a possible super and an unknown number of men with body armor and **** rifles. So they’d have time to get their questions answered.

The dispatcher agreed to that and I told her we were armed and four minutes from the precinct. And that we would definitely sue if the cops there shot us, so she got to work on that and I hung up.

“What are we telling them when they ask why we were in the building?” Diamond asked, still calm, having punched in our destination into her sat-nav, which had given me the four minute estimate. The command to remain calm was really working.

Jasmine was shaking, so much she didn’t seem to have even heard the question. I leaned over and kissed her firmly, making her focus on me. “We’re safe. It’s over, everyone can go back to normal,” I said, partly to her and partly to Diamond. In retrospect, I should have waited until she wasn’t driving, but she didn’t crash the car and kept us moving.

Jasmine managed to focus.

“We signed an NDA. What, besides this, do you use NDA’s for?”

Jasmine blinked a few times. “Donations, or potential projects which are still being negotiated.”

My brain was blank as the tension in my body realized how close I was to the very fuckable Jasmine, but Diamond’s was a businesswoman to her core. “We were discussing that re-development project. It’s even true, we were talking about it before he got there.”

Jasmine nodded.

“All we say is we signed an NDA and that’s standard for potential projects and leave it at that. If they connect those two things, that’s their business. They won’t care too much about us.” Diamond continued.

I nodded. Jasmine looked at Diamond, “After this, anything you need, I promise. Anything,” she glanced back at me, then away, embarrassed.

We were pulling up to the precinct. I slid back to an appropriate distance from Jasmine and put the gun on the floor, just in case. Two cops were standing out front, clearly waiting for us. I didn’t recognize them, but GCPD was big.

As I was considering that, something popped up,

Target Acquired: Zaawadi “Jinx” Deepak: -80 SP

I flicked over to her profile, but she was insufficiently aroused to get any details, beyond her physical appearance:

Not a name I knew, but based on the look, either a supervillain, or a hooker. And I had no fucking way to warn anyone. The cops took us inside and debriefed us quickly, and together, so we clearly weren’t suspects. Then we were put in a waiting room, where the news was showing the siege of Jackson Ltd headquarters.

SWAT was preparing to storm the place and suddenly two men burst out of a third story window and hung, **** from some sort of rope connected to something inside. Batman came flying out, evading a blast of ravening energy and swung around the building vanishing from view.

There was a long moment of hesitation as SWAT was clearly torn between intervening to get credit and leaving it to Batman to avoid danger. That was solved by gunfire on the ground floor, aiming at the barricades and sending the reporter and cops scattering for cover. Except SWAT, which reacted with an immediate counter-****, starting to storm the building.

The camera-man kept his focus, but it was hard to see anything at this distance, except flashes of gunfire and flashbangs as SWAT swept forward, then an explosion of dust. It wasn’t until much later that we learned that Jinx had smashed her way through three floors, the basement and into the sewers to escape, taking only two of her men with her. Another group of three managed to get there on their own in the confusion. And twelve were left behind.

Including the charred corpses of two men, zip-tied in the stairwell. Six more criminals died in the firefight and the rest were arrested in various states of injury. Besides them, there had been five other people in the building, three guards killed and two hostages rescued by Batman.

Then it was over and we were sent home. The senior Jacksons were on the scene to handle clean-up, Jasmine was clear to go home. To her empty home. Diamond wasn’t having that. She scooped up her sister-in-law and took her home, giving me a dark look and a sharp order. I picked up my car and went to Asa’s place. No one was being alone after that.

Asa took the news pretty well…and then decided she needed to do everything necessary to keep me there and lull me to sleep.

Which mostly worked…