What Now?

[Oriena]

Her cheekbone smarted in the icy Mosocw air, the white of one eye blushed red in the corner where the vessels burst – new injuries layered atop those sustained during her spar with Mia, from fights picked in less safe locations than that shithole of a gym. The bag of drugs was still slipped deep inside a pocket, but she’d not touched them – mostly because of how much she wanted it. In stone cold sobriety she was brittle and frustrated, and the anger had nowhere to go but her fists. Between that recklessness she was waiting for the next nosebleed, the next swell of pressure inside her skull, but it hadn’t happened yet. The whispers of the ijiraq were like half-heard conversations in the back of her mind. The lingering promise of a storm.

She’d stopped going to the club, not even to assess the new dancers, which she normally did whenever Carmen suggested new hires. Instead she’d just told the other woman to handle it. Kallisti was more or less in Nox’s hands now, whether he realised it or not. Slowly, she was cutting her ties.

The motel was familiar, and not the kind of place anyone asked questions. Not that Ori was the sort of woman people stopped to interrogate anyway. She shouldered in the door, eyed where Nox sat on the bed with a look that quickly flickered into disdain. It wasn’t the ravenously impatient posture it should have been, which perhaps meant he’d found someone else to scratch the violent itch with. She didn’t internalise whether or not that meant anything to her. But she did consider that it might mean he intended to talk. Which was precisely why she didn’t yet close the door behind her.