One For The Money [REWORKED]

TWENTYONE {The Night Of The Gala [Part Two]}

"♛♛♛"

[Third Person]

Something new had shivered into the waters and Shay knew it. She felt it. After only seconds after Tom finished, she calmly walked out, steaming behind her mask.

She needed to collect her thoughts, as they weren't in the same steady formation they usually were. She walked out of the ballroom and out into a distant hallway, breathing heavily without knowing it.

She scurried off to the same hallway she and Blake were in earlier in the night. It was quiet there, and quiet is what she needed.

But quiet didn't last long. Only moments after she started to process everything she heard:

"You alright?" Blake, who had followed her out the second she left, asked from behind her.

She turned around, started slightly at his presence, but grateful for it at the same time. "I'm fine" She lied.

"Then why'd you walk out like that?"

She swallowed, her composure was slipping through her fingers like sand "I just...needed to collect my thoughts"

Blake knew all too well what was rushing through her head, both by the panic in her voice and the fine line between her eyebrows. She almost looked human the way she paced back and forth down the hallway in front of him.

Blake was there, just like everyone else. He heard what Tom said, and it surprised him to hear him make such grand statements with his promise to Shay.

"He probably said that for the sake of his speech, that doesn't mean it had anything to do with you and the team's ownership," Blake said in attempts to calm whatever was brewing up, down.

She stopped pacing and looked at him "But it does" She told him. Over the past months that she waited and negotiated with Tom, she knew his words now and then didn't match up as they should've. Shay was good at reading people, and she knew that this wasn't right.