Sévérine

Copper burst fresh across her tongue in reminder, echoing the dull throb of her body with every step across that grand, gorgeous lobby. How long ago had she learned to never believed the sweet lies fed to her by men who wore death as easily as they shaped their lips to charming words? One would think she would have known better than to have thought that one more promise might free her, where a promise long ago had chained her to a man and a world that sickened her.

He had told her. ‘Someone usually dies,’ he had said, and she had hoped, had allowed the hope of freedom to flare within her that the one who would die would be her keeper. Perhaps he had died as well, although which he she thought of as she considered that possibility, Sévérine could not have even said. She had died, that much seemed certain. She had left Bond with an apology on her lips and been brought to a room to have her mistake explained to her in great detail and the curl of a man’s fingers into a fist before it had struck her.

It made no matter that she then walked on knee kept from shaking only through sheer force of will and slipped between people filtering this way and that, the fingers of one hand lifting to her mouth in expectation of finding a trail of blood there, only to find nothing. She held her head high in winding her way through the strange world, disconnected from every sense she possessed and clinging only to the image, to the desire for the familiarity of a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

She slid smoothly onto a seat at the bar despite the way the action made her want to flinch, burying the tension in her shoulders with a breath and a smile as she called the bartender over, “Martini, perfect with two olives, please.”

As the bartender turned away, Sévérine looked around herself, murmuring softly "This is not how I imagined death to be."