Page 123 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“You slept with her?” Nalissa asks through Ambra’s voice, and Gurlien blanches before getting himself under control. “That’s…astoundingly stupid.”

Nalissa steps Ambra forward again, and Gurlien takes another step back, towards the edge of the circle.

“This demon can’t even form a bond, so any security you’d get from such a trade is gone,” Nalissa says, leaving Ambra standing, mute, struggling for words and struggling to move. “She won’t protect you if she succeeds in killing the rest of us.”

Nalissa stares at her, though, her eyes pitying, and Ambra hates it.

“Oh Ambra,” Nalissa says, soft as a lover, “you really should be dead. There was no reason for you to survive.”

Gurlien opens his mouth, then closes it, taking another step back. He’s planning something, he’s planning something and she doesn’t know what.

As if sensing his fear, Nalissa pours her control through Ambra, twisting the magic inside the circle around her, crackling through the air. It’s a pretty trick, relatively harmless and useless, but visual chaos, making her seem far more powerful than she actually is inside the demon circle.

It succeeds, and Gurlien flinches back, his feet crossing the line of the demon trap, leaving her alone.

She can’t reach him now. She can’t lift her hand to touch him, not unless Nalissa compels her past the trap, and her ears pop with the fission of magic closing again around her.

“I could always have her torture you,” Nalissa murmurs, but her eyes are deceptively sharp. “It’d probably distress her, too, she doesn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. We had her do that with Misia.” Nalissa pauses, as if for dramatic effect. “Did she tell you about Misia?”

Rage, so strong it almost knocks her off her feet, floods through Ambra, and she twitches towards Nalissa, her hands coming up, before Nalissa smoothes the motion away.

Holding her still, holding her looking away from Gurlien.

Nalissa stares at her, hard, her warm brown eyes flinty in the overhead light, as the music up above thumps.

“Yeah, I heard about Misia,” Gurlien says, and there’s anger in his voice too, anger that she can barely pick up, even knowing him like she does, and Nalissa almost certainly misses it.

“Impressive,” Nalissa says, still locked eyes with Ambra. “I thought she made herself forget that name.”

Nalissa raises an eyebrow at Ambra, evaluating, and Ambra hates it. Doesn’t want to give any sort of information to her, any sort of ammunition, nothing.

“Did you?” Nalissa murmurs.

“I tried,” the words pour from her. “I tried.”

There’s a hot pit of anger inside her stomach, of shame and terror at the memories. Of when Nalissa made Ambra twist her own power against the body they were both in, of the agony they both felt.

And that Nalissa might make her do something like that again. To Gurlien, none the less. Gurlien who held her when they tried to take her back. Gurlien, who called his enemies who didn’t like him for help, to help her.

Gurlien who kissed her, who held her against him in bed, who took her out to wine and food. And now Nalissa’s facing Ambra in the other direction, she can’t even look at him, can’t even see his eyes or his hair or the flush of his skin.

“Twenty feet?” Nalissa muses. “Ambra, is that correct?”

Ambra digs her feet in, physically anchors herself away from answering, but the words are dragged out of her. “No.”

And Nalissa smiles, showing all of her teeth. “Good girl.”

Behind her, there’s a whisper of fabric, a subtle motion, before the telltale click of a gun safety flipping off, a creak of metal, a hiss of breath.

The bang shatters all concentration, the bullet crashing into the wall behind Nalissa, sending plaster and bone dust into the air.

Nalissa flinches back, eyes wide, winding both hands around Ambra’s leash, and between one breath and thenext, with the same creak of metal and scrape of springs internally in the barrel—

Nalissa pulls, jerking Ambra to her up, past the demon circle, past the protections, close, too close, so close she can see the lines in her eyes and each gray hair in her curls and —

Another bang before Ambra can breathe, and pain sears through her, brighter than any lights.

She staggers, black blood spraying all over Nalissa, and there’s red blood in a hole in Nalissa’s shoulder, brilliant against the white lab coat.

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