And his eyes had not left Avriana's face.
The red on his cheek.
He looked at her, the dark, level, attending quality of eyes that had received the information of being slapped and were sitting with it with the flat, specific quality of a man deciding what the information meant.
Then his eyes moved.
Down.
Not to Avriana's chest. Lower. Her right leg.
Avriana followed his gaze.
The prosthetic was on the mattress beside her.
She had not noticed it fall. She had not felt it detach in the scramble—or she had felt something, but the something had been indistinguishable from everything else her body was receiving, and she had not flagged it. It lay beside her on the expensive hotel sheet—the titanium composite, the custom-fitted, the excellent, technically correct, objectively functional—lying there with the flat, inert quality of an object that was no longer in use.
Because it was no longer necessary.
Her right leg.
She looked at it.
