[i]What cruel game is this creature playing at?[/i]

Rachel smiled. And it was not a pleasant smile. It was nervous, teetering on the edge of true anxiety. Her cellphone was not simply a mental crutch, or the extension of a hyperactive mind. She couldn't imagine the millions Perez Hilton or TMZ would pay for her cellphone; to say nothing of what a Camarilla agent would pay for it. She managed a true empire from that mobile telephonic device; two of them, if you were playing the home version of their little game of blood and stars. Anyone in the Free State could [i]claim[/i] that no one person had true dominion over the Free State--but that was simple ignorance as Rachel saw it; anyone who made such a claim was ignorant as to who, and what, Eva was to the Free State. 

It wasn't simply a big deal the female Toreador went public. It was a sea change. The history of supernatural in Southern California would never be the same, a demarcation of supernatural history, and frankly, nothing less. She had help designed Los Angeles; consider it. The second largest city in the United States was a direct result of this woman's mind and energies. She might as well be the Wizard, and L.A. her personal Oz. If that wasn't a true empire, than Rachel would be happy to see what was. 

The second? Even those who claimed the Free State was fractured could never, ever, not once, question the following: Eva owned Hollywood. Not just the district of Los Angeles, but the entire film industry as it was known on this side of the Atlantic and Pacific. And if you were still playing the home game, she had ties that ran so deep in the Hong Kong, Delhi, and London film industries you'd have to "dig" down until it got hot to find them. Hidden under covers and over time to the extent that she had a hundred names in these foreign markets. Welles, Hitchcock, Fellini, Kurosawa; all Bishops to the Queen of Motion Pictures. 

Circle back, and re-evaluate the ramifications of what it meant to have access to the cellphone of that Queen's personal Consigliere. The wolf would literally need to beat her to death just to get their paws on it. Rachel wouldn't blink to give her unlife to protect Eva, her personal savior. It was a devotion that went both ways, as Eva had once told her: [i]"I took you from exile, Rachel, and I can never imagine giving you back."[/i] Surely their had to be another way. Surely their had to be something else, anything else. Surely...

Pretty eyes danced from the wolf to the back of the bar. If she was any less composed, she would've gasped, finding the serene gaze of her savior. From a smile on razor's edge, to sudden laughter, in all but a few prolonged moments of time. She could read Eva's every look, like being able to translate every hint of a smile, every soft look, every hand placement of the Mona Lisa. And right now, what was her savior telling her?

[i]Give over the damn phone, woman.[/i] 

Wild. Never in a millennia would Rachel have expected that.

With the kind of incredulous laugh and roll of her shoulders typically reserved for the "fuck it" crowd, of which Rachel Rothkopf had NEVER been a member, she adopted that exact sentiment: fuck it. After a quick motion to kill the power on the phone, ensuring it'd need her eye scan and fingerprint to unlock, Rachel slid the phone over the glossy surface of the bar over to the wolf. 

That small smile still on her lips not just a little pained. 

"Happy?"