you can run but you can't hide
breath on your skin, I've arrived
The way he breaks so abruptly, dust billowing around him in the haste of his forced halt, tells her that some inkling of the truth had finally seeped past the brute determination of the chase. What Lilli had tried to imitate comes with such unconscious ease to the costumed woman that trying to temper it in an effort to lure him away had been a trial in itself. But she makes no more pretense at the much more coy mask of the red woman, instead allowing the illusion to fall away in his eyes.
She becomes once again the refined woman of dusky pewter and laced white, slim and hardly imposing were it not for the sharp blue of her unmistakable gaze.
“And since when have you fallen victim to rumors of supposed death?” she retorts, her voice as composed as her features. She doesn’t wait for response though, instead continuing smoothly. “I had thought better of you, but it appears I was mistaken.”
Tilting her head slightly, she eyes him quite openly. Though nothing in the language of her body would indicate it, there is a challenge in the silence that she weaponizes. A dare, as it were.
But he already knows who has the faster draw.
Of course, she has no intentions of actually harming him. Not today at least. The point of this meeting was not to engage in some pointless power struggle. It had been designed merely to demonstrate what he had clearly forgotten: that he is far more vulnerable than he has fooled himself into believing.
When he declares that she has his attention with a hard grin, she returns it with a faint tilt of her own lips. Not the softer smile she might once have favored him with, but rather the one reserved for those who had tested her and proven themselves lacking. “Good,” she replies easily, a note of finality in her tone. “I have what I want for now. But unless you wish to change that, I advise you temper yourself. Because if you do not, I can assure you of two things: one, you are very easy to locate, and two, not all of my faces are so easily discerned as Lilliana’s.”
No doubt it would not take long for exhaustion to set in if he had to peer at every face he passed with suspicion.
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