Zara's POV.
Gunfire peeled like thunder. Sparks splintered the night. When the shot hit, the world narrowed to strobe-lit chaos: the hiss of a bullet, the smell of seared meat, the metallic tang of blood.
I rolled right. My palm slapped cold metal—an overturned crate. A shard of something glassed my calf; white-hot pain lanced my leg but I bit it down. Adrenaline did the rest. There was no time for wounds that didn't keep you standing.
"Move!" Leo screamed. His voice was raw in a way it almost never was. He'd been carved by the desert and the lies; now it hummed with something animal. He shoved me toward a low service door and then—because he had to be the unkillable idiot he'd always been—he pivoted back into the hell.
A flash from the balcony above lit someone's face in the dark: Aria. Calm, beautiful, infuriating. She'd been a shadow in silk all night—now she was the center of the storm. Her men had folded the area into a killing field. Whoever had fired from above had cleared the room; now they tried to box us in.
Leo clipped a man on the flank with two rounds, dragged him behind a crate, and hissed, "Smoke—now!"
I hit the ground, pulled the smoke grenade from my boot and threw. White fog poured out like a lying foghorn; it smelled of chemicals and desperation. The world turned into a moving watercolor of shapes and blurred lights. Good. Confusion was our friend.
Something slammed into me from the left. A merc tried to take advantage of the smoke. My fist found his nose. He went down with a curse, and I delivered a kick that emptied his lungs. Then I saw the movement—someone sliding, not running. Graceful, preternatural: Aria, exploiting the gaps like she'd choreographed the whole mess.
A flare laced the sky; heat stung my face. Bullets found the crate above Leo. The splinters rained. He shouted—something that sounded like my name and like a warning. I scrambled up and found him half turned, chest heaving. Blood soaked through the shoulder of his shirt.
"No—" I reached, fingers already fumbling for the wound, an idiot's panic and a medic's training colliding. Tourniquet. Pressure. Keep him upright.
Leo saw my hands on him and barked, softly, "Not here. Not me." He tried to push me away; the movement was violent and involuntary and I hated him for being human and alive. I jammed the strip of torn fabric into the gap in his jacket, wrapped, tightened, knotted.
"You're bleeding," I said, stupidly factual. My voice shook.
"Perfect," he rasped. "Adds character."
We were a bad rom-com and a worse war movie rolled into one breath.
A donkey-cough of laughter answered—Aria's voice from some bright place where she wasn't getting shot at. "Such theatrics. Such devotion," she called. "You two are very nearly touching. How poetic."
Leo's face went hard. "Cut the monologue."
She hummed a tune I'd heard before—the lullaby of a wolf showing teeth. "You both make me nostalgic, you know. For what was. For what I couldn't keep."
A man on the far ridge took aim. I saw the rifle glint. I saw the muzzle flash. I saw the arc. Time slowed. There was a neat, cold calculation in how my life sliced into possibility.
Then Leo moved.
He threw himself—no dramatic flank, no cinematic slow-motion—he simply put his body between the bullet and me. The shot tore through his side with a sound that knocked the air from my lungs. He hit the sand like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"No—" I swear I heard the syllable like a bell.
I didn't think. I scrambled to him. Blood pooled like dusk. The world contracted to Leo's face, the way sweat threaded through his hair, the way his jaw clenched against pain he would never let anyone see.
"Don't you die," I breathed.
He attempted a smile that cracked like dry plaster. "For you? I'm not dead yet."
We sat like that for a heartbeat—two people who knew too much and yet who hadn't said the one thing that mattered.
"Zara!" A voice—our contact—was yelling. Someone was moving, covering us. Boots pounded. The smoke shifted like a slow tide. In the fog, I could make out shapes: built men, quick hands, someone with a crowbar hitting a container lock.
"Move!" Leo rasped. He pushed at me with a strength born of focus. We slid into the narrow seam between two stacked containers. I slithered in, half dragging him. The container's shadow swallowed us; it smelled like oil and rust and possibility.
We were not safe. Not by any stretch. But we were not dead. Not yet.
<<<<<
Leo's POV.
Pain was electricity, then a distant drum. I remember thinking it had been a stupid, senseless way to die—because of loyalty, because of a woman who never asked for a picket fence, because of a war that kept adding up.
Zara's hands were cool on my wound. Her fingers moved like a surgeon, or like the desperate practice of someone who refused to surrender. She turned the cloth in the knot, compressed. I could feel the wet heat at my side and it terrorized me in a way bullets hadn't. The body knows what the mind refuses to accept.
"You idiot," she said. That was her language—scolding to keep fear at bay. I loved her for it in a collapsed, irrational way. "You could have died."
"Nearly," I managed. My voice came out cracked and small. "Plenty of times."
We were a cliché that would have made us vomit if we'd had the luxury. But that cliché was also the only truth in a world of masks and lies: when everything else burned away, we had been left with each other.
I tried to focus. The container creaked around us. I could hear men yelling distant coordinates. Radio static scratched the night like a pirate. I tried to remember the names of people I'd loved, places I'd been—anything to keep my thoughts from sliding into the dark.
The arrival of more boots was a problem. Whoever Aria was working for knew how to finish things. Snipers on the ridges, men in fast trucks that could swamp us—this wasn't a small operation anymore. It was orchestration.
"Leo?" Zara's whisper broke into my head. "Tell me I'm alive."
"You are." I laughed, which nearly made both of us cry. "You always are."
She shoved a bleeding strip into my palm and I wrapped it around my knuckles, an anchor. I wanted to tell her the truth—about the files I'd hidden, the men I'd walked away from, the promise I'd made in a back room to protect her at any cost. I wanted to tell her everything and have that be the end of the hidden things.
But confession was a blade and tonight we needed both hands for the gun.
"Listen," I said, forcing breath into steel. "Can you get to the truck? There's a med kit under the driver's seat. I can't move till—"
She looked at me like I'd suggested we tango with an RPG. "I can run for the med kit or I can shoot the—"
"Run," I said. "Now."
She grinned at me like a lunatic and then she was gone: moving fast, lethal, a red streak in the night.
<<<<<
Zara's POV.
The truck was a horizon of metal that taunted me from the end of the pier. The night had teeth and it kept biting. I vaulted over a coil of rope, rolled under the shadow of a ladder, and took two down with a flick of my pistol. The training slid through me like muscle memory—old, comforting, necessary.
The med kit was heavier than it looked. Inside lay small miracles: morphine vial, pressure dressings, a compact surgical kit, benign-looking tabs that were probably not as benign in the field. I grabbed what I could carry and charged back through smoke that smelled like burning hair.
When I slid into the container again the world stilled. Leo was blood and bone and scowl. He had this ridiculous, infuriating look, like a man who'd been stabbed and still said the wrong joke at a funeral.
"You brought hors d'oeuvres," he rasped.
"I brought a whole feast," I snapped, and then I knelt because if I didn't kneel I might punch the sky.
I poured morphine into the vial—my hands steady though my heart hammered—because being steady for him was the only useful thing I could do right now. The needle went in and his face smoothed for a second, like someone putting a kids' blanket over a noisy night.
He took my hand. "Zar—" he said, voice thin.
"Leo," I corrected. "And don't you dare die on me."
He looked at me like I was the sun. I hated that. I kissed him because there was no sense pretending we could collect confessions later. Not when we might not have a later.
Short electric. A stupid, clumsy kiss, in the shadow of a burning desert. It tasted like sand and gun smoke and all the horrible things that were worth it if it kept you awake.
Then outside, another explosion sent the container clanging. We had two choices: stay cornered and wait for the final sweep, or run. Neither was pretty.
"Ready?" I asked.
He didn't answer with words. He answered with a nod. We grinned like we were insane and slid out into the suffocating night.
<<<<<
Leo's POV.
We fought our way to a service tunnel, one of those ugly, necessary things that smelled of rot and oil and rescue. Aria's men swept over the dock like a viper; the rest of the city hummed oblivious above.
As we moved, I felt the world tilt. A bad song. The crackle of a radio with someone low-voicing orders. Someone with an accent I didn't like. Bratva chatter. That meant this was bigger than Aria alone. This was organized muscle, and someone was financing it.
"Where to?" Zara panted, ducking through a grated door.
"To the water, then west," I said. "We can ditch into the harbor channels, lose the lights. I've got a contact—a fishing captain who owes me a favor. Not pretty, but he moves. Quiet."
She huffed a laugh that was almost a sob. "Of course. You have a fishing captain."
"You'd be amazed what people owe me." I tried to make a joke out of it. Humor had always been the bandage we used.
We stumbled to the boat. The captain, a lean man with a face like a map of wrong decisions, shoved us life jackets and muttered under his breath. "You two look like you smelled of trouble," he said.
"Trouble is our perfume," Zara said, and I nearly choked on a laugh.
<<<<<
Zara's POV.
The boat cut across the black water like a blade. The city lights fell away. For the first time since the rooftop, I could breathe like a person who forgot they'd been underwater.
Leo sat opposite me, shirt open, blood drying into tracks that looked—terrible. He was quiet, watching the wake like it was a consolation prize. I touched the scar on his shoulder then the place where the bullet had torn him. His fingers found mine again, callused and warm.
"Why her?" I asked. Not just about Aria; the question had been a live wire in my chest for days: why did Leo's past keep dragging its claws through our lives?
He turned to me slowly. "Because she was everything I thought I deserved," he said. "And because I was stupid enough to believe I could keep both worlds separate." His voice was low, raw. "I made deals. I lied. I buried people I loved. For years I thought I could choose… until I met you, and then choosing stopped feeling like survival and started feeling like betrayal."
"You should have told me," I said, the accusation soft but real.
"I should have," he agreed. "But when a man has ghosts that can pull strings—" he gestured vaguely, "—he learns to keep secrets like currency."
We were quiet then because the water wanted our silence. I had a hundred questions—about files, about Viper, about whether the Agency had been compromised—but all of them could wait. Right now the only thing that mattered was that his hand was under mine.
"Promise me something," I said.
He looked at me as if I'd asked him to promise to move a planet. "Anything."
"Don't ever be stupid enough to sacrifice yourself when there's a plan," I said. "Work with me. Not for your ghosts. For us."
He studied my face like he'd never seen it. "I'll try."
That was all I had. Try.
<<<<<
THE ENDING BLAZE.
We were not heroes. We were not saints. We were two burned things trying to put each other together with tape and stubbornness.
The fishing captain peeled us away into the harbor, and the city slid past like a dream—gilded towers, empty yachts, the glitter of a life that pretended nothing that we'd gone through mattered.
On the boat's dashboard, a small black phone trembled to life. A new message pulsed: an image and a single line. The image: a file folder, stamped. A logo he'd seen before El-Khalid Enterprises—and beneath that, the words: PROJECT ORIGIN.
The line: We can end this. Meet: 00:00, Old Gold Pier. Come alone. No sender. No signature. Leo read it, then looked up at me. There was something like relief in his eyes and something like dread.
"Someone wants to bargain," he said quietly.
"Or someone wants to bait us," I countered.
He gave me that crooked grin that made a mess of all my plans. "Which means…we go."
I should have said no. I shouldn't have trusted a random text. But that was not our story. We never said no when the night asked for more risk.
We set our course. The desert had been fire. The inferno was waiting. And we, exhausted and bleeding and absurdly alive, were walking—again—into the flames.