Chapter 6 – Blood and Confession

The shots kept coming like bad thunder. I felt them in my bones more than I heard them: sharp, random, terrifying. Lucien moved like he was made of practiced danger—taking positions, checking corners, barking one-word orders I couldn’t always follow. I wanted to argue, to scream, to ask why my life had turned into a war movie, but my mouth kept dry and small. So I listened.

He dragged me toward the back of the house where the kitchen opened into a narrow yard. “Through there,” he said, voice clipped. “Wall, then alley. Move.” His hand found my elbow and pushed. He was steady in a way that made me want to trust him stupidly, wholly.

We climbed over a low brick divider and I scraped my shin. “Ow!” I hissed. He didn’t look back. “Shut up and climb,” he ordered, but there was a laugh in it—more relief than cruelty. Maybe he was laughing at the absurdity of me actually doing it.

We hit the alley and ran until our lungs burned. The rain had turned everything into reflections, so every streetlight became twice as bright, every shadow twice as deep. I kept the envelope pressed to my chest like some talisman I didn’t understand. Lucien glanced at it once, quick, like checking if it was still real.

“Do you know what’s in there?” I asked between breaths.

He didn’t look at me. “Yes.”

“Tell me.”

He slowed, forcing me to slow too. He leaned against a service door, breathing hard, and for the first time since we’d met, he seemed fragile. The bandage on his side was soaked through where it had bled through his shirt. I wanted to clean it properly. Panic made me clumsy with compassion.

“It’s not just money,” he said finally. “It’s proof.”

“Proof of what?” The word felt huge. If this was proof of something monstrous, then I wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was a piece of evidence.

“Project Ashen,” he said, and the name tasted like ash when he said it. “Files, recordings, names. Everything.”

My head swam. “Project Ashen? What is that?”

He closed his eyes for a heartbeat. “A program. A black project. Assassinations, disappearances—state-level garbage masked as national security. It was supposed to be contained. It wasn’t.”

My stomach dropped. “And you were… involved?”

“I was in the Division that handled it.” He opened his eyes and looked at me like he was handing me the heaviest thing he’d ever carried. “I helped clean up what we called necessary collateral. Then I found out how deep it went. How wrong it was. I refused to be part of it.”

“And they turned on you?” I said, because it fit the picture like a grim puzzle piece.

“They did worse.” He swallowed. “They made me into the villain. They put me on trial without a courtroom. I had to disappear.”

I tried to process this. “So the files—this envelope—you stole them to expose them?”

He gave a humorless half-smile. “Stole isn’t the word. I copied. I hid the originals. I thought I could bring everything down from the inside. Then people died. The wrong people. Maybe the right ones sometimes. I don’t know anymore.”

We walked on in silence for a moment. I realized I was clenching my fingers around the envelope until it crinkled. “Why me then? Why was I holding this?”

He shook his head. “You weren’t supposed to be involved. I had someone else as cover. When that cover blew, I had a choice: burn the files or move them. The suitcase you grabbed was one of several ways I moved things. You got unlucky.”

“You make it sound like a crime of bad timing,” I muttered. “It’s murder.”

His jaw flexed. “I won’t argue. But it’s more complicated than you or I deserve to have in one breath.”

We ducked into a narrow doorway, leaning against the cool bricks. My skin prickled where he’d touched me—like static that refused to go away. He was bleeding, he’d lied, he’d dragged me into this, and my chest still felt oddly full when he was near. I hated that.

“Why risk yourself to keep me alive?” I asked again. His answer had been half sentence, half dare the night we ran. He hadn’t explained.

He looked at me then, eyes raw and blue and tired. “Because you’re not expendable. Because I won’t let them hurt anyone else.”

“You said you weren’t a hero.” The words came before I thought them.

“No.” He exhaled. “Not a hero. Just someone who can make wrongs right, even if it’s messy and ugly.”

“By putting me in more danger?” I said, incredulous. The rain had made me braver in stupid ways. Anger was easier than fear sometimes.

He didn’t flinch. “If they want the data, they’ll go for anyone connected. If they think you’re my wife, they’ll follow false leads. It buys time.”

“But I’m not your wife.”

“You will be,” he said, and there was no softness in the phrase. Only a statement of fact, like a plan already written.

“Will be?” I echoed. “So I just change my name and pretend to love you, and everything will fix itself?”

“It won’t fix itself,” he admitted. “But it’ll confuse them long enough for us to figure out who’s lying to whom.”

We moved again, circling back toward the river. Lucien scanned windows like they were pages he’d already read. I wanted to ask about Marcus—his brother, the man who was meant to be an antagonist in this already absurd life—but the sound of boots on wet pavement swallowed the thought. The city no longer hummed; it hunted.

“You’re still bleeding,” I said suddenly. I was sick of pretending calm.

He looked at me. “It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not.” I reached for his hand, wrong as it felt, and found it warm and trembling just enough to be human. I tore a strip from the hem of my soaked coat and pressed it to the wound. He let me.

“You should be a nurse,” he said, but he didn’t try to pull away.

“I’m not a nurse.” I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be the smart girl who took pictures and made ads and wrote clever copy. I wanted the life I’d had two days ago, where my biggest decisions were fonts and filters. Instead I was here, bandaging a stranger I’d met in the worst possible way.

“Clara.” His voice was low, and it pulled me up short from a hundred tiny catastrophes. “There’s something else.”

My heart hiccuped like a frightened animal. “What?”

He swallowed. The rain made his lashes glisten. “In the suitcase—under the lining—I put a flash drive. It has the most damning stuff. Names, dates, transfers. But there’s a file—one that ties me directly to an operation they want to pin on me. If they find it, they’ll bury me deeper than they already did.”

“You put evidence that incriminates you in the same place as evidence that clears you?” I asked, because logic in this life was a rare commodity.

“It was a choice in a moment where I had to decide who to protect first—my family, the people still breathing, or myself. I chose to hide everything and trust that I could untangle it later.” He exhaled. “I was wrong.”

My hands were shaking. For a foolish second I imagined a life where he had made the opposite choice—where he’d run, left me with nowhere to go, and the world had remained my small, predictable sphere. That life was gone. Even thinking it was a betrayal.

“So what now?” I asked.

He looked at me like he was considering every possible version of the future and choosing the least disastrous one. “We find a safe place to get the files online. We leak what we can. We make it impossible for them to sweep everything under the rug.”

“And you think the people who shot at us yesterday are going to let us wander into a cafe with a laptop and a cup of coffee?” I said. The absurdity of the plan made my laugh brittle.

He half-smiled. “No. I think we do it blind. We take risks. We trust people who owe us favors.” He hesitated. “There might be one person who can help.”

“And who is that?” I asked.

“Eve,” he said. “An old contact. A journalist who hates the Division. She can get things out anonymously.”

My pulse quickened. “My friend Eve? The one who knows way too much about conspiracy forums and cat videos?”

“The same.” He sounded almost amused. “Brilliant in a way that gets useful.”

We kept walking until the city opened into a small park. A fountain gurgled in the center, and for a second, the world felt like the normal kind—distant, almost possible. Kids splashed in memory in my head, not in this night.

Lucien stopped near a bench and dropped down like he’d finally given himself permission to be tired. I sat beside him. The hem of my jacket left a wet dark ring on the wood.

“Tell me about your father,” he said out of nowhere.

I blinked. The question came like a stone into still water. “What about him?” I asked, cautious.

“Why he mattered to them.” His voice was gentle but probing.

My throat closed. I hadn’t thought about Dad in a long time, not with the way adulthood crowded everything else. “He worked for a tech firm,” I said slowly. “He used to say he was building systems to keep people safe. Then he started getting secretive. He wouldn’t tell us what he did. He left one day and never came back. They called it an accident. We never got answers.”

Lucien’s face darkened. “He did a lot more than build systems.” He looked at me like he held a book with pages missing. “He knew things. Things that scared the wrong people.”

“You’re saying he was… involved in Ashen?” The idea was gross and unbelievable and somehow fit like a puzzle piece I’d ignored.

“He had access to a backbone. It’s a key. And someone decided they needed that key.” He reached out and touched my hand once—just a quick, burning press. “That’s why you were chosen, Clara. Because of him.”

My chest felt hollow. “Chosen for what?”

“To be a link.” He hesitated. “Or a bargaining chip.”

The park clock chimed midnight somewhere, small and polite. My hands tightened around the envelope until the paper creased under my nails.

“Lucien—” I started.

He cut me off with a glance, eyes suddenly hard. “We’re not safe here any longer. Move.”

Before I could protest, headlights swept across the park. A car slowed down, then stopped where the path met the road. It wasn’t one of those black SUVs—this one was a nondescript sedan. But something about it felt wrong: the way the driver didn’t move, the way the light stayed on, the way the air held itself like a held breath.

A man stepped out. Tall, broad-shouldered, a trench coat soaked into his skin. He held a single umbrella over his head like it was a prop. He didn’t look at us when he walked up the path. He walked straight to the bench and sat down a few feet away, as if we were expected.

Lucien’s whole body went rigid.

“You know him?” I whispered.

He didn’t answer. He just lowered his voice to a tone I’d never heard before—cold and brittle and certain.

“He’s a cleaner,” he said. “Holt’s right hand.”

The man lifted his head slightly, and even in the dim light I could see his face: hard, reserved, someone who had practiced the absence of expression until it became a weapon. He smiled the kind of smile that was meant to mean nothing.

“Good evening,” he said. “Lovely night for confessions, isn’t it?”

Lucien’s jaw clenched. He reached for me, and I felt the old, familiar pull of protection—dangerous and necessary and very, very real.

Behind Holt, where the streetlights threw long shadows, another car idled. Its windows were tinted but I thought I saw movement inside—shapes, packing something large.

Holt leaned forward. “You should have killed me when you had the chance, Vale.”

Lucien’s fingers closed around mine until I felt the small bones press. “You tried,” he said.

Holt’s smile widened like a blade. “Then you failed twice.”

I swallowed hard. The envelope suddenly felt unbearably heavy against my ribs, like it had become a bomb with a very specific target.

Holt’s voice dropped, slow as ice. “Give us the drive, Lucien. Give us the girl.”

Lucien didn’t answer. He stood.

“Run,” he said to me—the single word a clap of thunder.

I looked at him. At Holt. At the dark car behind him.

And for the first time since I’d taken a wrong suitcase, every choice in my life felt like walking off a cliff.

Then Lucien moved as if deciding which fall would kill us both.