Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
Cooper
TRUST
Eliza sees the blood—too much blood. Her face goes pale, but she doesn’t panic. Doesn’t start babbling about hospitals or antibiotics or any of the civilian responses that would get us killed.
Instead, she moves with purpose.
“Sit,” she says, voice steady and commanding in a way I’ve never heard from her before. “On the floor, back against the wall.”
“I’m fine—”
“Cooper.” The tone stops me cold. Authority I recognize, the kind that cuts through bullshit and demands obedience. “Sit. Down. Now.”
And I do.
Not because she ordered me to. Because the blood loss is making my legs shake, and the wall looks more appealing than trying to stay upright through pure stubbornness.
She kneels beside me, hands already reaching for the tactical vest’s straps.
“This has to come off,” she says. “I need to see what we’re dealing with.”
Her fingers work the buckles quickly. Academic doesn’t mean helpless, apparently. The vest lifts away, heavy with absorbed blood, and reveals the true extent of the damage.
My shirt is ruined. Red soaks through fabric from shoulder to waist. When she pulls the fabric away from the wound, fresh blood wells up, runs down my arm in rivulets.
“Jesus,” she breathes. “Cooper, this is bad. This is really bad.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“When? When have you had worse than this?”
Afghanistan. Syria. That clusterfuck in Somalia that doesn’t officially exist. But those stories belong to classified files and men who don’t come home the same way they left.
“Doesn’t matter.”
She strips off her outer shirt—one of the extras from the convenience store—and underneath, she wears a simple tank top that hugs her curves in ways that make my blood pressure spike despite the blood loss.
Focus. Tactical situation. Stay alert.
But watching her tear fabric into strips, watching her move with calm competence while her hands shake, watching her take charge when I can’t—it does something to me that has nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with the woman kneeling beside me.
The woman who cracked Phoenix’s financial code.
The woman I fucking fell for somewhere between that basement tunnel and the moment she admitted her deepest fantasy.
“This is going to hurt,” she says, folding the fabric into a pressure bandage.
“Do it.”
She presses the makeshift bandage against the entry wound, applies steady pressure. Pain explodes through my shoulder, white-hot and immediate. I clamp my teeth together to keep from making a sound, but a low growl escapes anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry, but I have to stop the bleeding.”
“Keep going.”
Her hands move to the exit wound, larger than the entry, muscle torn and ragged. This bandage takes more fabric, more pressure. When she ties it tight, the pain nearly blacks me out.
But the bleeding slows. Not stopped, but manageable.
“The ribs?” she asks.
“Just a graze.”
She examines the wound anyway, clinical and thorough. Her touch is gentle but sure, fingers probing for damaged bone, checking for signs of internal bleeding. When she’s satisfied it’s superficial, she moves to the head wound.
“This one’s already clotting,” she says, dabbing blood away with clean fabric. “Scalp wounds always look worse than they are.”
She continues her careful assessment, checking my pupils for signs of concussion, feeling for skull fractures. “You don’t have a head injury, just a cut. But these other wounds …”
She sits back on her heels, looking at me with a gaze that might be a professional assessment or personal concern. Hard to tell which.
“You need a hospital.”
“No.”
“Cooper, you’ve lost a lot of blood. You need IV fluids, antibiotics, proper suturing—”
“Hospital gets us killed.”
“Bleeding out gets us killed too.”
True. But Phoenix tracks medical records in real time. Walk into any ER in the D.C. Metro area, and tactical teams roll out before the triage nurse takes my vitals. Hospital means certain death. Blood loss means possible death.
I’ll take possible over certain every time.
“We wait,” I say. “Rest here until extraction.”
“Forty-eight hours?” Her voice climbs an octave. “You can’t lose blood for forty-eight hours. You’ll die.”
“Won’t lose blood if we get pressure on it.”
“That’s not—pressure bandages are temporary. This needs real medical attention.”
“Eliza.” Her name comes out rough, strained with pain and blood loss and the simple effort of staying conscious. “Phoenix finds us, we’re both dead. I lose a little blood, maybe I get weak. Maybe I pass out. But you’re still alive.”
“That’s not acceptable.”
“It’s the only option.”
“No.” She leans closer, green eyes blazing with the same fire I’ve seen when she decodes impossible puzzles or argues about linguistic theory. “It’s not the only option. We’re going to figure this out. Together.”
Together.
Not her following my orders, not me protecting her while she stays passive. Together, as partners, as equals.
As something more than operator and principal.
“How?” I ask.
“I don’t know yet.” She adjusts the pressure bandage, checking for fresh bleeding. “But you’re not dying on my watch. Not after everything we’ve been through. Not after what we discovered about Phoenix.”
The flash drive. Right. In all the blood and pain and tactical assessment, I almost forgot what she’s carrying. Phoenix’s entire financial infrastructure, hidden in the one place they never thought anyone would find.
“The data,” I say.
“Is safe.” She pats her chest, where the drive rests against her heart. “And it’s going to stay safe until we get it to your team. Both of us.”
Both of us. Not just her, extracted while I bleed out in some maintenance shed. Both of us, together, surviving whatever Phoenix throws at us next.
The idea shouldn’t comfort me as much as it does.
But blood loss makes everything softer around the edges, and the way she’s looking at me—determined, protective, fierce—makes me want to believe that together might actually be possible.
Even if the rational part of my brain knows better.
Even if tactical assessment suggests our survival odds are dropping with every minute we stay stationary, every minute Phoenix has to adapt its search protocols, every minute I lose blood I can’t afford to lose.
Even if everything logical says we’re fucked.
“Cooper.” Her voice brings me back from the edge of consciousness I didn’t realize I was approaching. “Stay with me. Don’t you dare check out on me now.”
“Not going anywhere.”
“Good.” She settles beside me, back against the concrete wall, close enough that her warmth cuts through the chill seeping into my bones. “Because we’re going to figure this out. And then we’re going to make Phoenix pay for what they did to Sarah, David, and Lisa.”
“And what they tried to do to you.”
“What they tried to do to us.”
Us. Another word that shouldn’t matter as much as it does.
But as I sit in this concrete box, bleeding slowly, watching Eliza tear her shirt into bandages while Phoenix hunts us through the streets of D.C., the word carries weight I wasn’t expecting.
Us against the world.
Us against an AI that kills anyone who threatens it.
Us against odds that get worse by the hour.
But us, together, might be enough.
“This isn’t going to work,” Eliza says, examining the makeshift bandages already soaking through with blood. “You need real medical supplies. Gauze, antiseptic, proper pressure bandages.”
“No stores.”
“I’m not talking about stores.” She stands, paces the small space like she’s working through a problem. “There’s a homeless camp two blocks from here. I saw it when we came in.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Cooper, listen—”
“No.” The word comes out sharper than intended, but the idea is tactically insane. “We don’t involve civilians. Ever.”
“We’re not involving them. We’re asking for help.” She stops pacing, looks at me with that stubborn tilt to her chin I’m starting to recognize. “I give someone fifty dollars and a list. They go to the nearest convenience store, buy what we need, bring it back.”
“They’ll take the money and run.”
“Maybe. But maybe they won’t.”
“Eliza—”
“I haven’t given up on humanity yet.” Her voice carries quiet conviction that cuts through my objections like a blade. “Not everyone is looking to screw over someone else. Some people help when they can.”
The bleeding has slowed but not stopped. Red seeps through the fabric bandages, and my vision blurs slightly at the edges. She’s right about needing real supplies, but involving random civilians violates every operational protocol I’ve ever learned.
But protocols assume backup. Extraction. Support systems that don’t exist right now.
Right now, there’s just us. And her idea might be the only option that doesn’t involve me bleeding out in this concrete box.
“Fifty dollars,” I say finally.
“Yes.”
“They don’t come back, we’re fucked.”
“They don’t come back, we try something else.”
I reach into my tactical vest, pull out a roll of cash. Peel off two twenties and a ten, hand them to her along with a pen from my gear.
“Gauze pads. Medical tape. Antiseptic. Ibuprofen.” I close my eyes, trying to think through the fog of blood loss. “Protein bars. Water bottles.”
She scribbles the list on a scrap of fabric. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes. Any longer, I come looking.”
“You’re not coming anywhere. You’re staying right here. Try not to bleed to death, please.” She moves toward the door, then pauses. Looks back at me with something that might be fear or determination or both. “Don’t you dare die while I’m gone.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
The lie comes easily. Truth is, the concrete wall feels more comfortable than it should, and keeping my eyes open requires too much effort. Blood loss has its own timeline, its own inevitable progression.
But I don’t tell her that.
The door closes behind her with a soft click, and silence fills the maintenance shed. I press the shoulder bandage, checking for fresh bleeding. The fabric comes away red, but not soaked. Maybe I have more time than I thought.
Maybe.
I lean my head back against the concrete, close my eyes for just a moment. Just to rest. Not to sleep. Not to lose consciousness.
Just to rest.
The last thing I hear is the distant sound of traffic, the urban rhythm of a city that doesn’t know Phoenix is hunting two people through its streets.
The last thing I think is that Eliza better be right about humanity.
Because if she’s wrong, we’re both dead.
The darkness creeps in from the edges, soft and warm and inevitable.
And I let it come.