Page 112 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

It dawns on his face slow, before the intelligence flashes behind his eyes. Faster than she can think, his hands close over her wrists, pinning her to the bed.

She could teleport out, if she needs. Get out before anything happens to her, recover like nothing happened.

She doesn’t want that.

Instead, she grins at him, baring her teeth at him, daring him.

“You’re going to kill me if you look like that all night,” he murmurs, leaning over her, his hair across his forehead.

He’s gonna kill her if he doesn’t do something soon, if he doesn’t work towards that need clawing inside of her.

“I’m going to kill you if you don’t do something,” she challenges right back, and he thrusts into her, hard, drawing another gasp.

Then another, then another.

She awakesto a nervous pound in her heart as the sun sets, and it’s the night of the concert. The night she has to kill Nalissa, the night she has to face Nalissa, the night she has to do whatever she can to make sure Gurlien isn’t harmed.

She pulls herself out from his cuddles, and his hair sticks up on the pillow.

They have a few hours, and Ambra can just tell by the pit of her stomach that she’s going to hate all of them.

Quickly, she changes into the outfit Gurlien bought for her, then grimaces in the bathroom mirror at herself, leaving the door open enough that she can hear everything in the house.

The pants make her legs look like unsteady sticks, and the top, made out of a stretchy and almost transparent black material, gives the impression of the torso being covered in a black mesh net.

It also shows off the scar curving underneath her chest, like it’s something to be proud of. Like she’s trying to show off where they carved her to pieces, show the world where the body cried.

Ambra adjusts the shirt, but any angle she lets it lay reveals the scars. Tempted to chuck the shirt and grab one of her normal ones, she scrolls through the reference photos on her phone, and frowns when she comes across picture after picture of other people, men and women, wearing similar shirts.

So Gurlien knew what he was doing when he bought it.

There’s now a fine layer of reddish hair on the side of the scalp, almost half a centimeter long, and when Ambra swipes her hand over it, it’s softer instead of prickly. Like it might actually grow back and be normal hair.

She can’t feel the skin beneath the hair anymore with such a touch.

“You’re definitely going to look the part,” Gurlien grumbles from right outside the bathroom, and she jumps, startled.

His hair is still a mess, falling over his face, and he’s wearing a plain black t shirt and black jeans and looks incredibly discomforted by it.

“The scar isn’t going to stick out too much?” Ambra asks, tracing it over the shirt, and his eyes trail down.

There’s a moment of silence, where he considers her blankly, before shaking himself out of it.

“Generally speaking, these shows are friendlier to bodily oddities than normal concerts,” he recites, like it’s from a textbook, which is an interesting response. “They won’t be looking at the scar.”

Ambra glances back in the mirror, and it’s the first thing she spots.

“It’ll be dark in there, and they’ll look at everything else before they notice the scar,” he continues, and she raises an eyebrow at him in the mirror. “Jesus Christ, you’re going to have guys hanging off of you.”

“Strangers?” Ambra asks skeptically.

His lips twitch into a smile before he smothers it. “A non-zero amount of people go to these shows just to pick up strangers for sex.”

She makes a face at him through the mirror, and he cackles a bit, before reaching around her and into one of the grocery bags by the sink, pulling out an eyeliner stick.

And they’re so close in the little bathroom, with the rounded mirror and pastel colors.

Without saying anything, he begins to apply the eyeliner on himself with practiced hands, and that's absolutely not a skill she would’ve thought he had, and she watches with fascination.

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