The voice on the other end was brief, coded in the careful language internal oversight always used — the kind of language designed to sound routine even when it was anything but. "Chief Aiden, this is a routine advisory. Recent activity suggests increased association with known outlaw elements in the western district. Please ensure all conduct remains within regulatory boundaries. This message will be logged as a formal advisory in your personnel file, effective immediately." The voice on the recording was flat, automated in tone even though he suspected a real person had authorized its sending, someone deliberately choosing the impersonal register to make the warning feel less like a threat and more like bureaucratic housekeeping.

Aiden ended the call, his stomach tightening in a way that had nothing to do with the food he'd just eaten. It wasn't a direct accusation — the Bank rarely dealt in anything so blunt, preferring instead the slow accumulation of formal advisories, each one seemingly minor on its own, until suddenly a case for termination, or worse, had been quietly built without the subject ever realizing the noose had tightened around them. But it was close enough to feel like the first thread of that noose settling into place. Someone, somewhere inside the Bank, had noticed his repeated proximity to Morgana, even if they didn't yet know the full extent of what that proximity had become.

He stood by the window for a long moment, running through the possibilities in his mind with the same methodical precision he brought to every problem — who could have flagged the activity, how much they actually knew, whether this was Valeria's doing directly or simply an automated system catching a pattern of his movements that he'd been careless enough to leave traceable. None of the answers offered him any comfort. Whoever had sent this advisory knew enough to be concerning, and not enough, yet, to be immediately dangerous — a narrow, precarious window that could close at any moment.

He thought back over the past several weeks, cataloging every instance where his movements might have overlapped visibly with Morgana's crew — the flying car parked too long near the slum district, the internal database queries he'd run late at night that might have triggered automated flags, the careful but not infallible cover story he'd built around his supposed investigation into ordinary gang activity. Any one of a dozen small missteps could have been the thread someone pulled to notice the pattern. He'd been careful, he told himself, but careful had never meant invisible, and eight years of institutional training had taught him that the Bank's surveillance apparatus was more thorough than most employees ever fully appreciated until it turned its attention toward them specifically. He thought, too, of Valeria's warning days earlier, wondering whether this advisory was her doing directly, or evidence that the concern had already traveled higher up the chain than even she controlled.

He returned to the table, his posture already stiffer than before, the easy warmth of the evening replaced entirely by the guarded, calculating version of himself he wore like armor within the Bank's walls. "I need to focus more carefully on procedure going forward." he said, avoiding her eyes, busying his hands with gathering the remnants of their meal as though the task required his full attention. His movements had gone suddenly precise, economical, every trace of the relaxed man who'd talked about rooftop light shows minutes earlier folded away somewhere she could no longer reach.

Morgana frowned, immediately sensing the shift, the change in him as unmistakable as a change in weather. "What happened?"

"Nothing important." he said, the same evasive phrase she'd used on him once, though he didn't seem to notice the irony, or perhaps he noticed it and simply didn't have the energy to acknowledge it. "Just Bank business."

"That's not an answer." she pressed, setting down the napkin she'd been using to sketch Dresthorne's contacts, all pretense of casual conversation abandoned now in favor of direct scrutiny.

"It doesn't need to be, right now." Aiden replied, his tone clipped, professional in a way that felt suddenly, deliberately distant, a wall going up brick by brick in real time before her eyes. "I think it's best if we keep our communication strictly limited to essential mission updates for a while. For both our safety."

Morgana studied him for a long moment, searching for something in his carefully composed expression, but finding only the same guarded wall he'd first worn the night they met at Copperline — the wall she'd thought, foolishly perhaps, that they'd already dismantled together over these past weeks. "What exactly does 'essential' mean, in your professional judgment?" she asked, unable to fully keep the edge out of her voice.

"Coordinates, timing, evidence." he said, listing them off like items on an inventory. "Nothing beyond what the investigation strictly requires."

"So no more dinners." she said flatly. "No more stories about rooftops."

Something flickered across his face at that — a brief crack in the composure, quickly smoothed over. "This isn't personal, Morgana."

"It sounds fairly personal to me." she replied, her voice sharper now, though she hated how much the sharpness cost her to maintain. "Ten minutes ago you were telling me about your mother. Now suddenly I'm a security risk you need to manage."

"You were always a security risk." Aiden said, and the moment the words left his mouth, he seemed to hear how they sounded, a flash of regret crossing his features. "That's not — I didn't mean it like that."

"No, I think you meant exactly that." Morgana said, standing now, gathering her jacket with movements that were slightly too quick, slightly too controlled, the particular precision of someone determined not to let anger show through in anything more revealing than efficiency. "Don't worry, Chief. I understand professional boundaries. I grew up surrounded by people who never let me forget where the lines were supposed to be drawn."

"That's not fair." Aiden said, though even as he said it, he recognized the futility of arguing the point when he'd just spent the last several minutes actively drawing exactly the kind of line she was accusing him of.

"Isn't it?" she shot back. "You get to decide, unilaterally, that our partnership needs new boundaries, based on a phone call I wasn't part of, for reasons you won't explain. And I'm just supposed to accept that because you've decided it's necessary for 'both our safety.'" She crossed her arms, the posture unmistakably defensive despite the effort she was clearly making to keep her voice level. "You know, in the palace, that's exactly the kind of decision powerful people make for everyone else without asking, and then call it protection."

"This isn't the palace, and I'm not making this decision to control you." Aiden said, though the comparison visibly landed harder than he expected, a flicker of something like hurt crossing his features before he masked it again.

"Isn't it the same instinct, though?" Morgana pressed. "Deciding what's best for someone else without giving them the full picture, because you've convinced yourself it's for their own good?"

"It is necessary." Aiden said, though his voice had lost some of its earlier certainty. "If Bank oversight starts actively investigating my movements, it doesn't just endanger me. It endangers you, your crew, everything we've built toward exposing this conspiracy. If they find out how deep this partnership actually goes, they'll shut it down before we ever get close enough to the truth."

Morgana paused at that, some of the anger in her posture easing slightly, recognizing the genuine strategic concern beneath his abruptness even as it did nothing to soften the sting of how he'd delivered it. "You could have said that from the start, instead of just shutting down and hiding behind procedure."

"You're right." Aiden admitted, the admission clearly costing him something. "I'm not — I don't have much practice explaining myself instead of just retreating into what's safe. It's easier to just follow protocol than to figure out how to say what I actually mean." He rubbed a hand over his face, exhaustion suddenly visible beneath the careful composure. "Eight years of training myself to give nothing away doesn't exactly prepare a person for this kind of conversation."

"I'd like to believe that too." Morgana said quietly, and for a moment, something in her expression suggested she meant it more than the sharpness of the past several minutes would have implied. "But belief isn't the same as proof."

"Then let me prove it." he said. "Don't just vanish for a week and call it an advisory. If something changes, if you need distance, tell me why. Actually tell me, not just hand me a policy."

"That would require you telling me things." Morgana pointed out. "Which, from what I've seen so far, doesn't come naturally to you."

"No," he admitted, a rare, self-deprecating half-smile crossing his face despite the tension still hanging over them. "It doesn't. But I'm apparently trying."

"Well, you'll need to get better at that." Morgana said, though some of the sharpness had drained from her voice, replaced by something closer to weary understanding. "Because 'essential updates only' isn't a strategy. It's just you deciding to disappear and calling it caution. I've spent four years learning the difference between people who communicate badly and people who use silence as a weapon. I'd like to believe you're the first kind."

Aiden had no immediate response to that, the truth of it landing harder than he wanted to admit. He nodded, gathering his things with quick, efficient movements, avoiding her gaze as he moved toward the door, the conversation clearly over even though neither of them felt it had actually been resolved.

"I'll contact you when there's news." he said finally, his hand on the doorframe, pausing as though there was more he wanted to say and couldn't quite find the words for.

"Fine." Morgana said, her voice flat now, all the earlier warmth of the evening entirely extinguished. "Essential updates only."

He left without another word, and Morgana sat alone at the small table, the warmth of the evening entirely gone, replaced by a hollow, unfamiliar ache she refused to name, telling herself firmly that it didn't matter, even as some quiet part of her insisted otherwise. She stared at the door long after it had closed, replaying the conversation, searching for the exact moment things had shifted from easy warmth to this cold, careful distance, and finding no satisfying answer beyond the simple, unwelcome truth that whatever they'd started building together was apparently far more fragile than she'd allowed herself to believe.

She gathered the remains of their dinner alone, wiping down the small table with more force than the task required, and told herself, as she'd told herself countless times before in her life, that this was exactly why she didn't let herself depend on anyone outside her own crew. People from the world Aiden belonged to always eventually remembered which side of the line they were supposed to stand on. She should have known better than to expect anything different from him, no matter how many rooftop stories he shared or how warmly his eyes had lingered on hers in the lamplight.

And yet, riding back to the garage through the cool night air, she found she couldn't quite make herself believe her own reassurances, the memory of his voice describing childhood light shows refusing to fade quite as easily as she wanted it to. She thought of his admission — the rare, unguarded acknowledgment that he didn't know how to explain himself instead of retreating — and found, despite her best efforts at anger, that it was harder to stay fully furious at someone who at least recognized his own failing, even if recognizing it hadn't been enough to prevent it.

By the time she reached the garage, the ache had settled into something quieter, more resigned than raw — not quite forgiveness, not quite the old, familiar armor of not caring at all, but some uncertain territory in between that she hadn't occupied with anyone in longer than she cared to remember. She parked the motorcycle and sat for a moment in the dark, unwilling yet to go inside and face Wren's inevitable questions, needing first to decide for herself what, exactly, she was going to do with whatever this feeling was that refused to simply disappear on command.

She sat in the dark a while longer, turning the whole exchange over in her mind, unable to decide whether she was angrier at Aiden for retreating so quickly behind procedure, or at herself for how much his sudden distance had actually stung. Neither answer sat comfortably. She had built her entire adult life around the principle of needing no one, of carrying every burden herself so that no one else's failure could ever leave her exposed — and yet here she was, sitting alone in the cooling remains of a shared meal, feeling the absence of one evening's warmth far more sharply than she wanted to admit.

Across the city, Aiden arrived back at his own apartment far later than he'd intended, the advisory still weighing heavily on him even hours after the call had ended. He found himself replaying his own words to Morgana with a growing sense of dissatisfaction — not at the substance of the caution itself, which he still believed necessary, but at the clumsy, wounding way he'd delivered it, retreating into policy language exactly when honesty would have served them both far better.

The next morning, Corin caught him staring blankly at a stack of unfiled reports for the better part of ten minutes without turning a single page.

"You've been somewhere else all morning, Chief." Corin observed, setting down a fresh cup of coffee at the edge of Aiden's desk with the casual familiarity of someone who'd worked under him long enough to notice such things without needing to ask directly.

"Just thinking through the Dresthorne case." Aiden replied, the lie coming easily enough, though something in his tone must have betrayed more than he intended, because Corin lingered a moment longer than necessary before returning to his own desk, clearly unconvinced but wise enough not to push further.

Aiden stared at his communicator for a long while after Corin left, composing and deleting several messages to Morgana before finally setting the device aside entirely, unsent words sitting heavy and unresolved between them, waiting for a courage he wasn't yet sure he possessed.

Whatever came next between them, Aiden knew, would depend on whether he could find a way to be honest without endangering everything they'd both risked to build — a balance he had never once, in eight years of careful self-protection, learned how to strike.

For now, all he could do was wait, and hope that whatever came next would give him a clearer sense of how much time he actually had left before the choice between the Bank and everything he'd built with Morgana was taken out of his hands entirely.