CHAPTER 2

Lana Luthor stood hidden behind her bedroom curtain, spying her husband and daughter entering their black SUV. Mercy Graves, their Security Chief and occasional driver, was accompanying them.

Lana kept staring out of the window a long time after the car had driven away. She felt almost unable to stop clenching the curtain's soft texture between her fingers, but eventually she forced herself to move away.

It shamed her how much this tension between her and Lex was managing to exasperate her, but she didn't know how to heal the breach between them.
In the past, angry sex had always worked wonderfully to dissolve any residual hard feelings left by their arguments… it was their silent and proud way to remind each other that they fit together regardless of how ed up their life could get.

Too bad this time it wouldn't be so simple; Lex had used the bitterest part of the current week to master the art of barely looking at her unless it couldn't be avoided. At night, when they retired to their bedroom ,and he could no longer help it, there was such disgust in his pale eyes that she suspected only pride was preventing him from occupying one of their guest rooms.

Lana sat with a sigh before her vanity and brushed her dark hair back from her face.

She looked young for her age and a large part of the credit went to few products of a Luthor Pharmaceutical line of cosmetics aimed at slowing cellular aging. It was such a waste Lois Lane and Kara Kent had made their business to investigate how those products were being experimented… Lex had been terribly rattled for that breach in their security and Lana had shared his feelings completely. After all, that particular project had been her baby and it was she who had followed its development step by step. Now they wouldn't be able to reap its fruits, because if LuthorCorp hadn't managed to completely deny all the rumours published by the Daily Planet they would have risked compromising Lex' s political campaign with an untimely scandal.

But she couldn't bear thinking of the Justice League or anyone associated with it now. As far as she was concerned, Alex would have still been alive if Superman and his long line of arse-kissers had kept their moral issues to themselves. The mere memory of how she had once allowed Clark Kent to touch her body and heart sickened her…he and his friends had to pay for taking her son away.

Lana couldn't understand why her husband had stopped sharing her thirst for revenge. He had been just as enthusiastic as she was, at first.

"I won't allow you to do to Lucine what you once used to do to me – he had said to her during their latest fight- all you do is crying over what you have lost and being blind to what you still have. "

How had he dared to speak to her like that; as if he had needed protecting Lucine from her? As if she had suddenly turned into a neglectful parent only because she didn't feel truly happy now that another year was going by without her firstborn.

Christmas had always been special for this family. Lex would bring Alex to choose their tree and Lana would stay home preparing decorations with Lucine: they used to choose a new theme and matching colours each year.

Last year before tragedy struck them, they had chosen Winter as a theme, using blue ribbons, silver balls, synthetic snow, glass angels. They had tried to bake gingerbread, with horrid cinder-tasting results. Of course, Lex had tried to convince their daughter their cookies tasted good all the same, because he would have said anything to give to Lucine or Alex a perfect Christmas and he went out of his way to make sure his work never got in the way.

Whatever else could be said about him, Lex Luthor was a great dad and he was proud of it. Probably because it was the only area where he felt he had completely freed himself of Lionel's influence.

After they had decided giving their marriage a second go, they had soon agreed it wouldn't be been wise to introduce a child to the darkness which surrounded them. At least until Lex hadn't tried his hand at seducing Oliver Queen' s fiancée and using her to expose the Justice League.

Lana shuddered at the memory: the powerful emotion which had poisoned her senses when she had discovered that betrayal hadn´t been jealousy. Her anger towards her husband had been tampered by the conviction he had pursued the affair out of strategy, but nothing had prepared her for the streak of fierce territoriality which had almost made her demand that the other woman be destroyed and humiliated for merely desiring a man who didn't belong in her bed.

A few months later Lana had stopped taking the pill, eventually demanding a child when she was already pretty sure Lex would be quite late in denying her. Alex had been conceived because she wanted a more permanent claim than marriage on Lex, and Lucine had followed because both Luthors had suffered in their childhood as only children.

It seemed oddly fitting they build their family on secrets and lies, considering how her relationship with Lex had started, but it was truly baffling how something so beautiful could grow from rotten roots.

She had come to know from ample evidence that Lex couldn't live without trying to control his environment and the people around him, and it had nothing to do with not caring. If anything, Lex cared too much. Control was an often destructive but very concrete compulsion he couldn't separate himself from: as soon as he got what he wanted, he either became bored with it or consumed with the fear of losing it. Lana´s faked pregnancy was definite proof of this.

Being married to a Luthor and being considered his equal – a true partner, not an idol to be admired and sheltered- meant being able to take away from him the control he held onto so desperately, preventing his manipulations by weaving yours but without crossing the line between self-preservation and back-stabbing.

It was a tenuous balance, but it was no mystery you could only obtain respect from a con artist by swindling him and their arrangement had worked amazingly well to satisfy certain parts of him and to set free certain parts of her, so it had always felt as if their results were worth their effort.

On days like this one, Lana wondered why they couldn't be different- why Lex couldn't curb his controlling urges and why she couldn't refrain from sinking her teeth in his scars- but this was the way they were made.

Maybe they were meant to come together only to crash violently against each other time after time: their history had progressed from an unlikely friendship to an ill-timed romance born from the ashes of another love, from a first marriage begun with deceit and coercion to a reconciliation founded on mutual obsession.

But when it came down to it, their relationship was the most real and passionate she had ever been in. Lex was her husband and it hardly mattered if he was a meteor freak, a criminal, a liar or a cheater, because he was part of her now, and she couldn't hate him or love him more than she hated or loved herself.

Lex had a way to hold onto loss even when real love was gone -Clark and his father were certified examples of this. He loved so deeply than he was unable to ever leave his past behind, even when he was perfectly willing to act against such tender feelings because he felt threatened.

Lana regretted bitterly having brought up that weakness of his during their argument. She had lashed out accusing him of not doing enough to stop Clark and everything had started to fall apart after that: Lex had become very emotional about the whole the matter -a fact she knew he despised because he thought losing his cool before an attacker was beneath his IQ- and they had ended up saying horrible things to each other.

The distance between them now was palpable, an invisible hand which clenched around her heart and squeezed hard when she tried to breathe too deeply, or when she closed her eyes and longed to fall asleep. Being furious with him drained her, but it was still preferable to the cutting solitude she felt when they were apart.

Lex was wise enough not to leave her in a spur of irrational anger: she had moulded herself to be his ideal complement . He needed someone with the ability to deflect negative attention from the media; a companion who could challenge him without endangering him, understand him without tearing him apart.

Mercy couldn't be all those things to him, even if the younger woman hero-worshipped her boss even more than Clark Kent used to during the early tentative years of their friendship. Lana supposed she couldn't blame Mercy for it, since her husband had literally saved her from insanity.

The Graves had lived in Smallville when the first meteor shower had killed Lana's parents and Lex' s chances of a normal childhood; Mercy's mother was been pregnant with her … it seemed radiations had mutated fetal DNA enough to give Mercy supernaturally fine senses and a volatile empathy. Lana hadn't bothered to learn more about her childhood, but it couldn´t have been pleasant if Mercy had lived on the streets from the age of fifteen to nineteen, when she had been hospitalized at Belle Reve for a psychotic break and brought to the attention of a group of Luthorcorp scientists. Once 33.1 had given her lucidity back to Mercy, she had become the first and only case of an almost successful escape attempt from their facilities. Lex had been so impressed with her combination of street savvy, bravado and cunning that after meeting her, he had offered her an extensive training in weaponry and hand-to-hand combat to make her into his personal bodyguard.

Lex could enjoy Mercy's cool and sardonic wit – she was the only one in their staff who could get away with calling him by his first name- and probably identify with her on a certain level, but Lana had observed them together often enough to warrant there was no attraction between them.

Still, Lex considered Mercy his creature and he put in her loyalty the moderate amount of trust required to send her out as his 'executive arm' whenever a shady situation required it.

It was a despicable concept but Lana had to admit that, if her husband had not received from her the human contact he needed, their Security Staff would have been the most likely to suffer.

Realizing how paranoid she was being over a stupid spat, Lana covered her face with her palms, suppressing a groan. Lex wouldn't leave her or cheat on her and she was behaving like the needy, needlessly possessive society wife she had sworn never to become.

Just… fighting with Lex made her feel uneasy and immature. Right or wrong, she was tired of being angry with him and of having him be angry with her.

But he was been a class A bastard to accuse her of neglecting Lucine. Her relationship with their daughter was just fine without his over-bearing interference!

There was no possibility that Lucine ignore how much her mother loved her, and it wasn't true Lana spent more time licking her wounds than living.

Although… she supposed it was true she had made that mistake with Nell, stubbornly refusing to let her aunt fill the void her parents had left.

But it had felt wrong to accept someone else´s guidance unquestioningly as if Mom and Dad could be easily substituted; in the same way that it felt wrong now to go on as if Alex hadn't once laughed and breathed within the walls of their house. Alex had been clever and beautiful and special… someone who deserved to be missed.

Maybe the reason Lana had reacted so violently to Lex' s accusations was her guilt over keeping Nell at arms' length.

Perhaps, deep down, she feared someday her relationship with her beautiful, snarky, spirited Lucine would deteriorate the same way her relationship with Nell had.

And if she feared that… maybe Lex wasn't completely wrong.