Chapter 378: Red Water

Lucas glanced at Rechelle.

She was turned toward the window, eyes soft, a small smile on her mouth that did not look meant for the road. Whatever she was thinking had taken her somewhere else entirely. He checked the asphalt, then looked at her again. Still gone. Still smiling at something private.

He left it alone for a few seconds.

Then he cleared his throat.

Rechelle blinked, let out a short laugh, and turned. The second their eyes met, color climbed into her cheeks. She tried to hold the look and failed, glancing away almost at once.

Lucas had no idea what that was about.

The shyness made the car feel tighter than it was. He did not dig.

"We’ll stop at your place first," he said. "I need to clean up there. After that, I’ll take you into the city and show you around."

Her face went redder.

She stared hard at the window and kept her eyes there, like looking at him would make it worse. Lucas figured he had successfully pulled her out of the daydream.

He had not.

He had only given it more to work with.

The rest of the drive stayed quiet. Rechelle kept herself composed, but the color never fully left her face. Lucas stayed on the road, still half confused by how fast the mood had shifted under a few ordinary words.

When they reached the mansion, he parked and used the key.

The house had that heavy quiet places get after too much has happened inside them. Lucas only paused long enough to speak.

"Wait here. I need to do this myself."

Rechelle nodded.

He went in alone and shut the door behind him.

The first thing that hit him was the smell. Old blood. Disturbed dust. The stale air of rooms that had been left wrong. He stood in the entrance for a moment and took it in properly this time, without adrenaline and without anyone else in the way.

Then he started.

The mop water ran red on the first pass. Not faintly. Deep enough that the bucket looked wrong under the hallway light. He wrung the cloth out, dumped it, filled it again, and went back over the same stretch of floor until the color thinned. The work was slow at the beginning because the mess had settled into corners and seams. Blood had dried in thin lines along the baseboards. A side table sat crooked where it had been knocked during the struggle. One curtain hung half torn from its rod.

He could have called people in.

Money would have brought cleaners fast enough. It would not have bought silence. Too many eyes in a house like this meant too many mouths later. Some jobs were safer when only one person knew how bad they had been.

So he did it himself.

He worked the entrance hall first, then the sitting room, then the corridor that led deeper in. Wherever something could be set right, he set it right. Chairs back on their feet. Cushions reshaped. A knocked frame straightened on the wall. Wherever something was past saving, he moved it aside for replacement and kept going. Broken glass went into a bag. Stained cloth went into another. The mansion slowly stopped looking attacked and started looking empty in a cleaner way.

Time stretched.

Sweat built across his back and shoulders. His hands stayed steady. Every so often he stopped only long enough to change water or open a window and push stale air out. The red in the bucket faded from dark to weak pink, then to almost nothing. By the third hour the main floors no longer held the worst of it. By the fourth, the smell had thinned enough that the house felt less like a crime scene and more like a place that had simply been left closed too long.

He kept going anyway.

In one of the side rooms he found a thin spray of dried spots high on the wall, easy to miss if someone was rushing. He cleaned that too. In the kitchen doorway a scuff mark cut across the tile where someone had been dragged or had lost their footing. He worked it until it was only a faint ghost under the light. Little things. The kind that would have jumped out at Rechelle the moment she stepped inside if he left them.

Five hours in total.

When the last of the visible damage was handled, Lucas finally stopped.

He went upstairs, stripped out of the clothes he had worked in, and took a long shower. He washed until the smell of cleaner and old blood was gone from his skin and hair. Then he changed into a fresh set and checked himself once in the mirror, not for vanity, just to make sure nothing from the work still showed.

Only then did he open the entrance door.

"You can come in."

Rechelle stepped through and halted.

For a second she did not say anything. Her eyes moved across the hall, the open rooms, the floors, the quiet order of a house that should not have looked this put together. Whatever version of the place she had been bracing for was not the one in front of her. The shock landed plain on her face.

Then she crossed the space and hugged him hard.

There was nothing polished about it. Her arms locked around him with real force, face pressed into his chest, holding on like the clean rooms were proof of everything he had carried without making a show of it. Lucas stood still under the weight of it and rested a hand against her back once.

"Get ready," he said. "We’ll leave for Silvermont soon."

She shook her head against him, then pulled back just enough to speak. Her eyes were still wet around the edges, but her voice came steady.

"Wait. Let me cook something for us first."

He almost answered.

The system cut in before he could.

[Ding!]

[Rechelle Favorability 100]

[System rewards: Hidden complete — raise a character’s Favorability to max to unlock]

Lucas read the notification once.

Maxed.

Another hidden reward waiting underneath it.

Rechelle was already turning toward the kitchen, wiping at her face with the back of her hand and moving like she needed something ordinary to do with her hands. He watched her go, then headed upstairs to see what the system had unlocked.

He had just pushed the door open when his phone lit up.

Group video call.

Daisy.

Debbie.

Mia.