How to Train Your Channeler

[Oriena]

Oriena didn’t move away when his fingers traced her jaw and slid to her neck, but something in her expression tightened. It wasn’t the touch itself that unsettled her; it was the absence of intent behind it. There was no claim or performance. No caution. No attempt to manage her reaction. Just warmth, thoughtless and sincere, in a place most people only touched when they meant something by it. Her pulse jumped under his thumb before she could stop it, and she resented that more than the contact.

But it was only his words she bit back at.

Nothing.

He said it like a conclusion, like a closed door, and that was what irritated her. As if the absence of safety, love, or ownership meant the absence of worth. She had dealt with men who had everything and were still hollow. Sasha made necessity sound like endpoints instead of baselines. Ori immediately saw the child in it – the one who must have learned early not to want too loudly, not to reach past the bare minimum because disappointment hurt worse than hunger – but she didn’t indulge it with comfort. That kind of mercy would have made him smaller, and she refused to do that. With anyone.

“You’re confusing having nothing with being nothing,” she said, voice flint hard. “Those aren’t the same thing.”

Her expression was fierce, perhaps all the more for the idle softness of his touch.

“You’ve got a body that keeps standing up after it’s been broken. You’ve got power people are afraid of. You’ve got options – even if you don’t like them.” Her gaze flicked briefly to his hand, then back to his eyes. She didn’t remove it. She let the tension sit there deliberately. “That isn’t nothing. That’s raw material.”

Power didn’t give meaning on its own. It certainly wouldn’t give him love, or safety, or absolution. She wouldn’t insult him by pretending otherwise. But it did give him something far more useful: the ability to say no. To refuse the hunt. To decide when to vanish and when to stand his ground. Choice was a luxury most people mistook for ambition.

“Necessities keep you alive,” she said. “They don’t keep you free. And power doesn’t buy anyone meaning – but it does buy you the right to choose what happens next. Even if you’re too fucking blind to see it.” Ori half scoffed at the idea of ruling – who wanted that kind of responsibility? And she was hardly one to try and tell him he ought to use it to do good. One Nox was enough. But Sasha didn’t get to pretend the world was going to leave him alone just because he tried to stay small. He could choose anonymity, of course, if his shitty little life was enough for him. But not by running. At least not without ending up dead.

The question trialled her nerves. Irritation simmered low. She wasn’t going to tell him what to do or what to want. But neither did she push away from the innocence of the way he asked. Ori had spent her life in Moscow, and her origins were not obscure in the right circles, just how exactly she’d come by her later wealth. But most people didn’t even know the club was hers anyway, and those who’d known her long enough to know about her mother also knew to keep their mouths shut about it. Everything Ori had was earned, though – not necessarily righteously, but because she had fought for it. Or taken it. No one else would do that for you. And Oriena refused to be a victim, even when life shit on her.

“I got tired of other people deciding what I deserved,” she said eventually. Her jaw clenched after, like maybe the truth had cost her something. Or the memories did.