Page 71 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

She has no way of knowing, no way of predicting, but the leash is slack against her stinging neck.

“I don’t think so,” she manages out, her voice wrecked, and he releases her shoulder, a sudden lack.

Sitting up, suddenly terribly far away, he swings his feet over the other side of the bed and pads to the bathroom, emerging with a wet washcloth.

“Sit up,” he orders, and even though there’s no compulsion, she shakily pushes herself up.

Blood, hot and sticky, trickles down her shoulders, and some is smudged on the pillowcase.

He sits next to her, his knees touching hers, and carefully wipes under the leash. “So this is just abraded, I think,” he murmurs at her, as if the injury is just as mundane as a skinned knee in a child. “This should be easy to heal.”

It will be, but her fingertips tremble as she reaches up to slide her hand under the leash.

The very skin is hot to the touch, slick with sweat, and it mixes with the blood.

“Oh,” he murmurs, at something he sees in her face, at the trembling of her hands, at the shivering of her shoulders. “That took a lot out of you.”

Her breath hitches, and he’s not wrong.

She’s weak. She’s so weak the body fights her in staying upright, wanting to just slump over and for her eyes to close. Her stomach roils, simultaneously empty and full of bile, and she doesn’t know if she could even hold the glass ofwater still enough to take a sip, to wash out the taste of her own blood in her mouth.

All because the College wanted her again. Wanted to claim her, to shove her in a stasis chamber and never let her out. Wanted to take her from this small, carved out pocket of comfort and place her in the unending brightness and volume of the jail cell.

All because they couldn’t let her just live.

“Here,” he murmurs, and gently, as if she would break from something so small as a touch, wipes the blood streaked down her cheeks.

Her eyes blur, and to her horror, she’s crying.

She’s actually crying, her lungs hiccuping with the effort, her throat closing up until a sob wrenches its way out. She’s crying, sitting there on the blankets from the condo, on the too large bed, and no matter how much she wrestles to get the body under control, no matter how much she tries to stop these somehow automatic functions, the tears spill down her face, almost as hot as the blood.

Not saying a word, Gurlien shifts closer, then wraps his arms around her shoulders, pulling her into a tight embrace.

She slumps forward, pressing her face into the crook of his shoulder, as if that could stop the tears falling from her.

It doesn’t, and her shoulders shake with the effort.

Almost idle, Gurlien rubs a hand against the middle of her shoulder blades, and it sets off another wave of horrid, gut tightening sobs.

The College couldn’t just let her go. They saw the carnage and wanted her back. They saw the threat she wrote into the very magic of the room and decided that meant she was still theirs. That they had to keep her. That they had topull at her to the point of pain, to the point of cutting into the body, instead of letting her have some peace.

Cutting into the body, the very body they had forced her into and then killed off her only companion. Harming the very place Ambra is forced into, the very vessel she can never leave and the constant reminder of everything she lost.

“It’s okay,” Gurlien says, almost clinically, placing his chin on top of her head, and she clings to him like he’s the only thing keeping her afloat. “You’re okay, you’ll be okay.”

She won’t be, but she lets her hands fist into the back of his shirt, as if the touch could somehow make his words true.

“They didn’t get you, we kept you here, you’re okay,” he repeats, and this close, she feels the rumble in his chest at his words.

He brushes some of her hair back, still in the hug, and she squeezes her eyes shut at the sudden shock of emotion that wells up at that motion.

“Why am I crying,” she mumbles, keeping her face pressed against his shoulder. Her throat is somehow even more raw than with the leash, and her head starts to pound, her pulse loud against her skull. “This is stupid, why am I crying?”

It’s not stupid, she knows that even as she says it, but the lack of control aches at her behind her breastbone.

“Well,” Gurlien drawls, as if this is a normal conversation and she’s not tucked against him. “I’d put my money on an intense situation, physical pain, fear, and still not knowing how to process those in this body. Yet.”

It has the intonation of an insult, but he’s not wrong, so she lets herself be lulled into silence, the exhaustion so heavy that if she releases her grip on Gurlien, she’s certainthe weight of it would press the body into the bed and never let her go.

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