Page 106 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

It’s a mess. It’s a knotted, mortifying mess, and the physical side of it just adds to the confusion.

So she flees, teleporting just to the kitchen, well within their distance restriction but outside of the line of sight.

27

They spend the night walking the cobblestones of Paris, tracing the motions of the next night. Finding the entrances, finding the spots where the magic bleeds to the surface, evidence of the experiments done below.

They don’t talk much, the nerves skittering underneath Ambra’s skin, but she trails as Gurlien buys himself a new outfit to not stand out as much in the concert, and doesn’t protest when he adds a few things for her onto that.

They fall into bed again once the sun rises, and Ambra doesn’t wait for him to fall asleep before turning towards him, burying her face into his shoulder, and he inhales.

“Are you okay?” he murmurs, and there’s sun starting to peek in through the curtains.

“I’m fine,” Ambra declares, slightly muffled and he huffs out a laugh. “Human bodies process things differently than demons.”

It’s a wholly incomplete sentence.

“So you’ve said,” he replies, almost lazily, but his handcurls around the small of her back all the same. “Describe it to me?”

It’s another small, warm comfort. “Every emotion—and I mean every single one—has a physical component,” she grumbles. “And right now, I…”

He doesn’t say anything, but the hand traces a motion across the thin fabric of her sleep shirt.

“I’m having a lot of them,” she finishes, frustrated with the impreciseness of the language. “I can hardly sort through them and pull-out specifics.”

“I’m worried,” he says, and she pulls away enough to look at his face, read his expression. “What, I am!”

“Why?” she asks, instead pillowing her head on her arms, her leg still touching his.

He scowls, before his face softens, his brown eyes staring up at the patterned ceiling. “I keep on trying to predict what their behaviors are going to be, what actions they’re going to take, and they’ve taken none of them.”

She blinks at him, and the morning sun is gentle on the colors of the room, sending pastel pinks and yellows through the window.

“If I were them, I would firstly follow any written containment procedures,” he says, rubbing his nose. “Barring that, I would stop at nothing to get you back in custody. They’ve…they’ve given up too easily. Or there are bigger things they have to deal with, and that frightens me. And Nalissa is still pushing on with her plans…I don’t know what to make of it.”

He frowns up at the ceiling for punctuation.

“I can’t figure out why they wouldn’t wait for you to be asleep and pull you then. Just try every hour or so until they get lucky. But here we are, relatively unharmed, in Paris, and they’ve tried little.”

“I don’t want them to hurt you,” Ambra says, softly into the dawning room, and his eyes flicker over to hers. “Whenever I try to plan, I see them hurting you and all my thoughts crumble away.”

“Not to be glib,” he says dryly, and she arches an eyebrow at him. “If they kill me, you can always teleport my body to Delina and I’m sure she’ll be fine with taking care of that problem.”

“There’s other things they can do to you besides kill you,” Ambra says, and she shivers, even in the warmth next to him. “I would know.”

And even a Necromancer in her prime wouldn’t be able to bring back Misia.

He remains quiet, breathing next to her on the bed, filling the space with his presence as indelibly as if he struck a chord.

“I don’t know if that’s the human brain chemistry or the demon…way of thinking,” Ambra says delicately, not quite able to force her mind to think of it head on. “Or if it’s some leftover trauma from all of this.” She gestures to herself, to the body she’s stuck in all alone, and swallows past the lump in her throat.

“Trauma sounds like a good way of talking about it,” he murmurs, still not looking away. She’s exposed, completely vulnerable. This man in front of her could do anything to her and she wouldn’t stop him, wouldn’t even think of it.

“I think they took away a very part of me.” Ambra says, and he reaches over, touching the exposed skin on her arm, sending goosebumps down to her hand. “I don’t know how to put it in words, and when I think about them harming you, I feel the same way as that fear.”

It washes over his face, brilliant in real time, and he gentles his touch on her arm, a soothing back and forth.

There aren’t tears in Ambra’s eyes, but the pressure’s there, building.

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