Chapter 168 CHAPTER 168
Lila’s Camera Guy
When the television in the corner of Jude’s tiny studio flickered on that morning, it was supposed to be background noise, a familiar thrum that filled the spaces between his tasks. He had a job to do: three hours of footage to transcode, a client call in forty-five minutes, and a voicemail from Lila that had gone unanswered overnight. The kettle hissed. The apartment smelled faintly of burnt coffee and leftover pizza. Outside his window, the city began to rouse, a muffled collage of engines and shout and a gull’s lonely cry.
He hardly expected to sit down.
Then the bulletin interrupted the morning news: BREAKING — WOMAN SHOT DEAD ON MULBERRY STREET.
The anchor’s voice was flat, professional, insufficient for the gravity of the image that followed. A grainy clip from a traffic camera, shaky, almost useless as evidence, but good enough to show the broken body on the pavement, a yellow smear of cordoned tape, police lights painting the bricks blue and red.
The reporter gave the little that was known: no witnesses claimed to have seen the shooter; police were appealing for anyone with phone footage to come forward; motive, unkown. Ares was quoted outside his mansion, hands in his pockets, voice tight. A name scroll flashed on the screen: CHLOE AMONG THE DEAD — GUNSHOT WOUNDS — INVESTIGATION ONGOING.
Jude’s hands went numb around his coffee mug. The studio noise became a roar. He didn’t need the caption to tell him who it was. Chloe. The girl with the laugh that echoed too loudly on set, the one who’d been pushing harder than anyone lately, not for fame but for leverage. The one who’d stolen a glance at Lila’s footage and decided she knew too much.
He pressed his palms to his eyes until stars burst. He’d warned her, and not softly, never softly, when she first said she’d seen the footage. He’d told her to keep quiet. He’d deleted the copies, or so he thought, had wiped the drives and burned the temp files and taken the flash drive home with him the night of the masquerade.
He’d told himself it was done, that he’d done the right thing for money and for survival. Lila paid well. She had been angry, unmoored, dangerous. He should have expected blackmail to be the least of what circled back to him like vultures.
The phone buzzed on the table, jolting him. First his mother, then an unknown number. His hands trembled when he picked up.
“Jude?” It was Mikey, his sound assistant, voice a thread of panic. “Did you see? Chloe… they say she’s dead. On Mulberry. They…”
“Yeah,” Jude said, voice dry. “I saw. I saw.”
“You saw what?” Mikey pressed. “Any footage? Any—”
“No,” Jude lied. His mouth tasted like metal. He’d seen enough. He’d seen eight seconds of footage on Lila’s drive, the part where Ares unmasked, where a small figure stumbled into his arms, where the camera caught the unmasking. He had copied it like an idiot. He had backed it up. He had told himself he needed it as insurance. Insurance, now, felt like a noose.
Mikey’s voice dropped. “You okay? You sound…”
“Fine,” Jude said. He wasn’t fine. He thought of Chloe bracing at the pavement, of the way she’d smiled at him once when she’d told him she could buy silence with a story. He thought of Lila’s threats last night, of the money she’d demanded the camera guy meet her with if she wanted the footage kept private.
He had the flash drive in his drawer, its black plastic embryo of danger, and he had made plans to run, plans he hadn’t yet set in motion. Plans that now felt like childhood games compared to the reality on the street: a dead woman, a missing copy, a city that saw everything on loop.
Jude hung up on Mikey and stood up like the air had been stolen from the room. His movements were brisk now, automatic: laptop closed, charger unplugged, a bag thrown over his shoulder. He flicked through the files, heart pounding, eyes skimming over familiar names. The flash drive with LILA_MASQ_9Y — it sat there on his desk, innocuous, curled like a sleeping thing.
He hesitated before putting it into his pocket. That hesitation, he knew, would be the last thing anyone would ever read as cowardice or cunning. He moved to the window and looked down at the street two floors below. People moved like ants, unaware. A siren wailed in the distance, then passed.
Outside, the morning unrolled in a brittle, almost obscene normality. Jude stepped out and shut the door behind him without locking it, a small error, small enough already to be lethal and walked fast, feet slamming, breath ragged. He wasn’t running yet. He told himself to be sensible.
There was a bus in fifteen minutes to the station, a train at noon that could carry him out beyond the notifications of the local police, past the reach of the men who always knew where he lived. It had been a plan cooked in the fevered hours of the night, when sweat and fear had made the future look like a map he could traverse. Now, in the cold light of the morning, every inch of that plan felt like a lie.
He ducked into a phone booth, hands shaking as he dialed. No one answered. He bit his lip and tried again. Voices filtered through him, thin ribbons of sound. Finally, a number answered and he heard a voice he hadn’t expected, a ghost from the past who’d owed him favors and owed him silence.
“Yeah?” the voice rasped.
“Sam,” Jude said. “It’s Jude.”
“Jude? Where you calling from?” The voice was wary. Sam worked nights, knew how to keep a low profile. “You in trouble?”
“Yeah,” Jude admitted. “I need a place. Cash. A burner. Two-way only. I’ll pay double.”
Silence on the line. Then, the sound of someone inhaling. “Now?”
“Now.”
“Meet me at the dock. No lights. Twenty minutes.”
Jude’s heart hammered. He had no time to think. He promised Sam numbers to transfer, he promised silence like a prayer, and he promised himself he would leave the city and never, ever, touch a recorded memory again.
He folded his suitcase into the back of a taxi, the driver’s eyes flicking over him but asking no questions. Jude could feel the weight of the flash drive in his pocket as if it were an ember. He’d been a coward long enough; his panic had been his currency, but he had also been a fool to think money could buy immortality. Chloe’s blood on the pavement made that clea
r. Her death widened the circle that threatened to close over him.