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Cashmere wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, orienting herself belatedly to the fact that this was a Capitol hotel room, that she was with a Capitol client, and that it was well past midnight, probably nearly dawn. The client, Seneca Crane, had insisted they lay down to sleep together, plied as he was with morphling, and he had bought her company, so who was she to resist? But now he was turned away from her on the bed, hand resting on…. Oh. She sits up carefully, testing to see how cautiously she would have to extricate herself from the bed. She had forgotten Johanna Mason was there, too. The memory returns to her belatedly how Seneca Crane seemed to like Johanna, so when Cashmere declined doing the morphling with him, he'd called her over, and they'd injected it together while Cashmere drank wine.
Now, Cashmere sees Johanna lying on her back, snoring lightly, her breathing almost disconcertingly slow in the way that morphling users were, Seneca's hand on her hip. But she moves her gaze to Seneca and though he's a dark shadow in the unlit hotel room, he's too still, his form not even moving for a breath.
Without even thinking about it, she moves her hand around his head, a couple fingers before his nose, trying to feel the air of his exhale. There's nothing. She presses her fingers against his neck, trying to feel for a pulse, and even after trying a few spots, she feels absolutely no signs of life from him. He isn't cold, like she thinks a corpse ought to be, but he isn't warm, either. Instinct, more than fact, really, tells her that this man is dead, and this is what moves her to get out of the bed.
She's wearing his button-up shirt and her panties, and she feels awfully hungover, but in a span of seconds, she is fully alert. She pulls off his shirt and drapes it on the back of a chair, changing back into her own clothes. There would be no way to disguise the fact that she was here, probably. But she could definitely make it seem like she left before he overdosed and died. She makes sure she has all of her possessions, her purse and stockings among them, and finds her stilettos by the door. She just needed to go to the lobby, which never had any human attendants, call for a car, and get back to the Training Center. She could even be picked up in the underground garage, so no one but a single driver would see her.
She nods, trying to cement this plan in her head, and does a final sweep of the room. Her eyes fall on Johanna, still asleep with the dead man's hand on her.
It's not actual care or consideration that prompts her to wake Johanna, it's merely self-preservation. Johanna knew Cashmere was here, and Johanna actively disliked Cashmere, so if there was a way Johanna could spin this to save her own ass, or to get Cashmere in trouble just for the hell of it, she probably would. She wakes Johanna because she figures it's the only way to make sure neither of them are discovered at the scene of the Head Gamemaker's death, though she wonders the entire time if it's the right decision, as the darkness turns to dim light and dawn creeps closer.
"What?" Johanna mumbles, trying to push away Cashmere's shaking.
"You need to get up, right now," she says. She doesn't bother being gentle, or whispering. It's not like Seneca Crane will be disturbed. Cashmere glances over at his body. There's no blood, no pile of vomit. He almost looks content. Good for him.
Johanna seems to detect her urgency, her training from the Games latent somewhere and pushing through the lull of the morphling. "What is it?" She sits up and the hand slips off of her. Perhaps there is something in the way it moves that is different from someone sleeping, but Johanna seems to realize what is the matter at once. She looks up at Cashmere in horror. "Is he dead?"
Cashmere nods. "Get dressed, we need to get back to the Training Center."
Johanna does as she is told, far slower than Cashmere would have preferred. It gives Cashmere a minute to triple check the room, to ensure that it really looked like Seneca Crane had purchased company last night, but in the end, he took morphling and overdosed alone. "There are two needles," she says. "We need to bring your needle with us."
Johanna looks like she doesn't fully comprehend this, so Cashmere waves her off. Seneca Crane had brought a little kit with the morphling in little balls of powder that were melted and then injected. Imported, he kept saying, but she didn't do morphling so she wasn't sure how much of a brag this was. She took the needle out of the trash, hoping that the one left on the desk was his, and shoves it in her purse. "Ok, ready?" she asks Johanna, but there's no reply.
Johanna is once again dressed in the gaudy outfit from the night before, but she's staring at Seneca Crane's corpse. Vaguely, Cashmere knew that Seneca Crane favored Johanna, that he would buy her company fairly often, and she wonders if Johanna actually liked the man. She doesn't dare ask.
"Let's get the hell out of here."