POISON & WINE (Preview)

1; Aliferous Blade

Abuja.

LIFE is full of surprises but she certainly wasn't ready for what was in store for her that day...she doesn't know about it just yet. It started eight years ago. Well, eight years three months and five days to be exact, a day she'll never forget.

Mariam Abdou Balde walked out of her room freshly dressed in metal black shirt featuring a notch collar and cuff sleeves. Her lower curvaceous body is enshrouded in navy blue high-waist jeggings and ebony Yves Saint Laurent pumps. Her natural wave hair was velour-black and it offset her oxblood-red lips. She needed no makeup, naturally perfected that's up to her advantage.

She had been brought up in a world vastly different from this. A world where food is not always available on the table or good clothes to wear. Where the food they ate was either brought from faraway neighbors or something she would have to close her nose to eat it or regurgitate.

It is a life she had loathed since she was little and now it is not happening, she's taken the reins. Neither is it going to ever happen again.

Also one of the many reasons why she's never been on good terms with her mother for a very long time. Eight years to be precise.

Mariam believes that everyone has their own linear perspective on life whether to live in the slums or decide to get a name for yourself somewhere. Because she's chosen a good life for herself in a wrong way, her mother is all over her but that won't change anything in her life or her view of the world. It doesn't matter what her mother wants or thinks. It is her life and she'd govern it the way she's always wool gathered.

She is done living in the slums, her mother wont be able to take her back even with countless emotional blackmails and physical ones the first time she's taken this route for herself. If she wont come and enjoy opulence with her, then she shouldn't stop her from enjoying it herself. That's a selfish move her mother is desperately trying to work with but failing miserably time and time again.

They are both extremely recalcitrant.

She opened her brand new iPhone using face ID. The phone is yet to be in Nigeria but like it was aforementioned, she's gotten influential beyond what anyone had thought. Even she couldn't believe the eminence she's got sometimes. Had she knows wealth comes very easily when you stir away from the right path, she would've done that long long time ago. Without remorse.

Checking her call logs, she met many missed calls as the phone was on 'Do Not Disturb' mode as usual. Of course, Madina had called her billion times already.

They were supposed to see a Doctor twenty minutes earlier but she's never been one to be on time, at the bottom of her list for there is nothing wealth cannot do. And her mother wanted to take all that from her while she sits there and watch? Never! She's gotten so used to this life that nothing could end her subscription. The most important person in her life couldn't get her out of it too.

She dialed Madina's number who picked up after the first ring.

"Where on earth have you been?" Madina shrieked from the other end sounding thoroughly annoyed.

In her cool acerbic tone, she answered like the ice queen she is considered to be. "Madina... you know I can hear you perfectly without you shrieking like that right?"

The sound of Madina taking deep breaths reached her ears making roll her eyes at the girl's annoying tactics. "You overuse this DND. Where on earth are you right now? I've been waiting for you for ages."

"I called to tell you about my change of plans."

"Which change of plans, Mariam? We are already late for the appointment. And you know this doctor is very busy and important." Madina is clearly irritated at her friend's attitude which keeps augmenting by the day.