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"This is worse than I thought…" Lucia muttered, eyeing the man across from her with half-lidded amusement.
"Yeah, I'm in deep shit right now…" Ashen mumbled, idly stirring his coffee until it sloshed dangerously close to the rim.
After finding him in that little spectacle back in the alley, Lucia hadn't wasted a second dragging him out of there.
A shower and a change of clothes later, he was seated across from her, explaining, in painful detail, how things had spiraled to this point.
She'd insisted she had a right to know. partner's privilege, she called it. Easier to protect my investments if I know where the problems are.
And Ashen… tired, cornered, and desperate to get the weight off his chest, gave in.
He hadn't planned to tell her much. She clearly hadn't dug too deep into his past when she first recruited him, and he intended to keep it that way.
But one explanation led to another, then another, until he found himself spilling everything.
Lucia set down her cup with a soft clink. "What can I say… your life is certainly full of ups and downs."
"That's one way to put it…" Ashen nodded absently.
'What the hell is wrong with me…' Inwardly, he was grimacing, though, realizing just how much he'd given away.
Logically, there was no harm done. He hadn't shared anything classified like Weaver's eyes, but still… sitting across from a woman he once considered an enemy and laying his entire life bare? That stung his pride more than he wanted to admit.
Especially with the look she was giving him.
He glanced up to find her still watching him over the rim of her espresso like a cat toying with a cornered mouse.
Still, he had to admit… the weight on his chest felt lighter than it had in months.
Ironically, he couldn't imagine being this honest with the people he truly cared about. That would have been unbearable.
But Lucia sat in that strange space between stranger and friend, frenemy and confidant.
She was safe to confess to, the contract they signed guaranteed she couldn't harm him, after all. She was also just distant enough that her judgment didn't matter.
A perfect outlet.
Ashen leaned back, nodded to himself, and tried to ignore the nagging part of his brain that whispered he'd just bared his soul to a woman who was probably filing everything away for later.
"Well, thankfully, I didn't know any of this when I first looked into you. I'd probably have ignored such a lazy, unmotivated wreck and missed out on this… new and improved version of you."
Lucia's tone tried to sound consoling, but relief colored her words more than sympathy.
Ashen didn't flinch at the jab; he'd been called far worse than lazy and unmotivated, but he still raised a brow.
"Wasn't Seravelle's whole gimmick about recruiting lowlifes or whatever?"
"Even among scum, we have standards." Her sideways glance had a playful edge.
"Hey! I wasn't that bad, right? I'd say I ranked middle-tier among bottom-feeders. I've seen way worse, trust me, I know the league tables."
"This isn't a competition to see who's the trashiest, Ashen. It's about usefulness."
Her voice cooled as she listed them out.
"A thug who knows how to throw a punch... A fixer who can charm everyone from street rats to high society... A con artist who can sniff out weakness and walk away with nothing but lies…"
She let the last one hang in the air a moment too long.
When she finally looked at him again, her expression had shifted to something unreadable for a moment before settling into a faintly lecturing gaze.
"These are the types of scum we want in Seravelle. Not a deadbeat gambler with a chronic sloth issue."
"…Point taken." Ashen wasn't about to argue, not when she'd just slipped in that last example, practically calling herself out.
He suspected she'd shared the "con artist" remark as a kind of payment for his honesty, not charity or kindness, just keeping the scales balanced.
'So uncompromising, even with this.'
He couldn't help but respect her for it, if only grudgingly.
The thought pulled him back to the day she'd dropped her mask first, revealing her own vulnerabilities before asking him to renew the contract.
She hadn't done that out of sentiment. She'd done it because she'd misjudged him before, handled him like disposable trash, and now she was setting the record straight.
Ashen let out a slow breath, shaking his head.
Some "con artist who can walk out of any situation with nothing but lies…"
But that was just it, wasn't it? After watching her closely these past weeks, he'd realized something: for all her games, all her contracts and cons, Lucia had rules.
Not the kind of rules anyone would recognize as morals, but rules all the same.
One of them, he was starting to see, was this idea of equivalent exchange.
Like tonight, he'd handed her his past, and she'd handed him a piece of herself in return, whether she meant to or not.
She treated her recruits the same way. She measured their worth first. Then she conned them. If they survived long enough to prove her judgment right, she let them keep what they earned.
And if they surpassed her expectations… she bore the weight of that, too, without flinching.
Ashen's lips twitched faintly at that.
For someone who claimed to hate anything that couldn't be bought or traded… she sure seemed obsessed with keeping the scales even.
'Now that I think about it… Something was weird that day.'
He decided to ask her and not keep the thought bothering him.
"By the way, on that contract resigning day back in Seravelle, I've noticed that you were the only one with only me as a recruit… something is up with that, right?"
Lucia's expression hardened the moment she heard him mention that.
"Something did indeed go wrong, but you don't have to worry about it. You have your own problems, and it's not like you can change anything as you are now."
"Hey, don't dismiss me with that kind of lame excuse, you said it yourself, we're partners, remember?"
Lucia gave him a flat look at his petty act of throwing her earlier words right back at her.
"Go on, spill~. I'd hate to lose my dear partner while I'm not looking. I probably wouldn't even sleep soundly at night.~"
Her composure cracked slightly at his teasing tone.
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