The Price ࿊f Peace

☮️:011

Somewhere in Oakland

Syara was alone.

In a car.

In Camarro's car.

In the middle of the night.

In fucking Oakland.

She wasn't mad about it. It was by choice.

She honestly rathered just stay in the car than to go inside and deal with the back and forth.

She'd had enough confrontation for today and she was likely to start swinging.

Unfortunately, they took her food in with them. They were all in the same bags, mixed up, so they'd taken hers inside accidentally. And she had no clue when they were coming back out.

Her stomach was grumbling a little after 10 minutes.

Syara sat curled up in the backseat of Camarro's car, leaning the top half of her body on the car door and clutching her Glock in her lap while she scrolled on TikTok.

Unfortunately, Kisses was napping and slept like the dead, so Syara had to thug it out by herself.

Curse her for being so stubborn, she grumbled internally as she scooted around in her seat to calm the rumbling of her stomach. She had practically forced them to leave her in the car.

The overwhelming fatigue began to sink into her bones. She'd been on her feet all day.

The orthodontist office that she worked at had her in meetings all day and she was hungry and she had to stand outside and wait for Kisses, due to the traffic, in the most uncomfortable pair of heels that she owned, and then the people were playing on her phone, and then she comes to find out there's a connection to her archniggasis, and now she's hungry, tired, and sore in the back of Camarro's car for who knows how long while she waits for them to come back.

Syara was... frustrated to say the least. She could feel her eyes burning, but she refused to relieve herself of the pain by letting out her frustration in the form of tears.

Instead, she clutched her gun closer to her body, and closed her eyes.

_____________

Abir opened his eyes to the blank canvas of his forearm. He had closed them to gain some semblance of calm before he started tattooing.

He had finished the stencil for his piece and had decided on a leafless willow tree with rootlike branches and a twisted trunk.

Elijah didn't know what compelled him to draw what he was drawing, but it flowed freely from his pen to the paper as he drew. Once he completed the stencil, printed and all, he began to ink his skin, starting at his wrist.

Usually, his tattoos didn't hurt. He had a pretty high tolerance for pain. He knew that the wrist was one of the most painful spots to tattoo on the skin, but he couldn't lie. He was kind of disappointed.

It was kind of anticlimactic.

When he tattooed people's wrists, even some grown men cried.

He expected more in all honesty, and he was kind of anticipating it as someone who rarely ever felt pain when tattooing.

His brother and friends were still babbling about in his kitchen, eating their food straight from the bags, sipping their fountain drinks from the straws, and chatting.