Meg had sworn to me that no one could hack it easily or quickly, even if they had gotten into our system because she’d prepared everything on a completely separate and secure computer. I supposed this would be a great test. Her systems were also supposed to fake our phones’ presence at the club. Just when I thought there weren’t any messages, a new one flashed on the screen. It was a text from Meg. All good.

“Go right,” I said to the driver. No one was tailing us for now, at least as far as Meg could tell, so I wanted to get out of the city as fast as possible.

“Ma’am, are you sure you don’t want us to call for backup? We didn’t know you’d be going outside our territory and it might not be safe to...” one of the guards started to say when we were about to leave the city behind.

“No, it’s fine. Everything’s under control. We don’t want to alert everyone about our whereabouts. I’m not planning to breach anyone’s territory, anyway.” I gave him a reassuring smile, but my palms were sweating enough that I had to wipe them on my pants. It took us a good while to reach the house that only very few knew about.

“Park over there.” I pointed toward the parking spot under one of the nearby trees, far away enough from the house so the guards in there wouldn’t assume we were a threat, since I was coming unannounced. And it was better if our car couldn’t be easily spotted.

The guards immediately got out of the car, and they seemed surprised, probably because they had no clue what we were doing here, but they knew better than to ask. As one of them opened the door for me, I turned toward them.

“Stay close behind me and be quick,” I said. They exchanged a few looks, but I didn’t give them time to question why I needed to go first or to suggest that it was dangerous to do that, because I simply got out and started toward the house. There were multiple cameras around, so I looked straight into them. The guards inside would recognize me and open the door.

I stopped not too far away from the door and waited. The whole neighborhood was quiet, and the houses were in the dark, but it was the middle of the night anyway, so that wasn’t surprising. My pulse sped up a little, because as I looked at the barred windows and the heavy door, I knew they were the only things separating me from James. I was going to see him again. In flesh, and not in some stupid video.