I came out the other side standing in my own kitchen on Earth, and the contrast hit me like a wall. The lawn beyond the windows was silver-blue in the moonlight. There was no rebar grille on any window. No Black Snake search party. No laminate counters with handprints in them.

It was still night here, and I was honestly exhausted after infiltrating a gang’s building. So I didn’t hesitate to do what had been my favorite thing for the last twenty-four years.

I went upstairs, fell onto my new bed in my new clothes, and was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

...

I woke up to my phone vibrating on the nightstand. Good thing I always kept it that way.

The light through the windows was the gray-yellow of early morning. I groped for the phone.

MIRA.

I cleared my throat, swiped, and put the phone to my ear with a voice that was not even slightly ready to be a voice. "Aunt."

"Sweetheart. Did I wake you?"

"...Define wake."

She laughed softly, that particular Mira laugh that was one part affection and one part I knew exactly when you went to bed and exactly when you would be embarrassed about being woken up.

"It’s ten thirty, Lukas."

I checked the clock. It was, in fact, ten thirty. What the hell! I slept that much?

"...Cool. Yes. I’m awake. Hi." I sat up, rubbing my eyes.

"Hi yourself. Listen. I want to talk."

That woke me up better than coffee. Something in her tone had a specific gravity I hadn’t heard from her before.

"...About yesterday," I guessed.

"About yesterday. About us. About a few things. I don’t want to do it over the phone, though. Are you home?"

"Yes," I agreed immediately.

"Can I come over?"

There were a hundred polite responses I could have given. I went with the honest one.

"Yes. Please. I’ll make breakfast."

"Good boy. An hour."

She hung up. Why does every milf like to call me good boy? Not that I minded it.

I lay there for about ten seconds, processing.

’My aunt, who I made out with in a swimming pool yesterday, wants to come over to my house and have a conversation. She used the specific gravity voice. She has decided what this is. I have one hour to figure out what this is, on her timeline, before she walks through the door.’

I sat up.

’Functional adult. Functional adult. You are a functional adult who happens to be in a borderline relationship with a thirty-six-year-old mafia matriarch, and a girlfriend in another world, and now, somehow, the legal owner of a hacker. You can handle one breakfast.’

I freshened up quickly and went to make breakfast.

...

I made shakshuka, because it looked impressive and the cleanup was easy. I cubed potatoes for a side. I pressed coffee in the actual coffee press that had appeared at some point during the Mira sends my stuff over delivery yesterday and that I had not yet figured out the origin of.

The smell of caramelizing onions and roasting tomatoes filled the kitchen and made the whole house smell like a place where people lived.

The doorbell rang at eleven thirty exactly.

I wiped my hands and went to the door, and I opened it, and—

"...Aunt."

She was standing on my front step in a body-fitted cream blouse with the top three buttons undone, showing me more than enough of her well-endowed cleavage, and a charcoal skirt that ended above her knees and showed off a pair of legs that I was absolutely not prepared to deal with at eleven thirty in the morning.

Her hair was loose, the kind of loose that took an hour to do, falling around her shoulders in a way that looked casual but was definitely a strategic decision. Her lipstick was the same shade as the day before. Her perfume hit me from three feet away, and that was also strategic.

She looked, in plain words, hot and dangerous.

She also looked at my face, observed exactly what was happening on it, and smiled in a way that meant she had picked the outfit specifically for that reaction and was now confirming the experiment had succeeded.

"Sweetheart." Her voice was warm. "You are staring."

"...Yes," I admitted.

She smiled at my words. "Bad of you."

I wasn’t about to give in, though. "You picked the blouse, Aunt. This is a self-inflicted situation."

"Mm." She stepped past me into the foyer, brushing my arm as she went, and her perfume followed her in and stayed. "Cute house. Smells amazing in here. Did you cook?"

"Shakshuka. Coffee. Some potatoes." I nodded.

"Showing off?"

"Setting the scene."

She turned around in the foyer to face me, and the morning light coming through the front window caught her at an angle that should have been illegal, and she smiled at me like she knew exactly what she’d done.

"Well then, baby boy. Feed me first."

"I can feed you in many ways," I muttered under my breath.

...

We ate at the kitchen island. Mira took the stool across from mine and pulled it close enough that her knee brushed mine when she sat down, which I knew was not an accident because everything Mira did with her body was on purpose.

She was confident in her sexy milf body and knew what it did to me. I guess she needed the time to prepare herself to seduce me.

The shakshuka came out genuinely good, the coffee came out better than that, and she made a small approving sound at the first bite that did approximately the same thing to me that Zero’s noise had done last night. I was, I noted, having a week.

We didn’t talk about anything serious during the meal. The kitchen, the appliances the previous owner had left, a piece of art she was thinking about getting me as a housewarming gift. Light. Easy. The way she was setting the air before whatever conversation she’d come over to have.

She finished her plate, set the fork down, wrapped both hands around her second cup of coffee, and looked at me across the island.

"Alright, sweetheart."

"Alright, Aunt."

"We need to talk about what we’re doing."

I took a slow breath.

"...Yeah. We do."