Page 117 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

He might not even know he’s soothing her, but he is.

She owes it to him to get them out of this alive. Alive and with one less handler, with one less obstacle in their lives.

“Okay,” she murmurs, letting herself lean back against his hand for one briefest of seconds, before she steps back, facing the guard with the widest smile she has.

The guard startles.

“Hi!” Ambra says, as bright and as cheery as she can, and the guard squints warily. “Can we go by there?”

She keeps Gurlien’s other hand in hers, and it’s nice. She doesn’t need both hands to defend him.

“No,” the guard says, her brow furrowing, glancing between the two of them. “No entry.”

Ambra doesn’t want to break the moment to check Gurlien’s expression, so she attempts a sunny smile up to the guard, who’s about a foot taller than Ambra, and pulls Gurlien forward.

“I said no—”

Ambra strides across the ward, snapping the shield around Gurlien, and magic rips at her, stabbing into her chest and side and throat and—

Black sparking behind her eyes, she grabs the guard by the collar, slamming her into the door, opening it with a twist of magic and yanking the three of them into the staircase beyond it.

The moment her feet carry her outside of the shiningward, the pain crackles away, leaving her breathless. Uninjured, but her chest heaving and her hands shaking.

The guard’s lifting her hands, a strip of magic already in a needle, ready, and Ambra rips it right out of her hand, tossing the gold needle down the stairs.

“No,” Ambra says, matter of factly, then flexes her magic, flooding the air pressure around the guard.

To her credit, the guard struggles against it, stronger than Ambra would’ve thought, before her eyes roll back and she slumps against the wall.

Ambra releases her collar, and she crumbles to the ground, limp.

Gurlien gasps, an aborted small sound, and when she turns to him, his eyes are wide.

“I didn’t kill her,” Ambra preempts. “She’ll wake up with a bad headache in a few hours, and they’ll know a demon did it.”

He swallows, before nodding. “Thank you.” He’s unharmed, not even a streak of his eyeliner, and when she snaps a scan at him, the only thing hurting is the bones in one of his wrists.

Good. Her shields work.

With a nod at him, she starts down the stairs, and there’s only the far-off thumping of the music now, some sort of sound softening spell, and she’s definitely not going to break that one.

Pain still arches through her spine, almost as an afterthought, but she ignores it. She’ll have time later, when Gurlien’s not at risk and Nalissa’s dead, to experience it and curl up on the bed, but not now.

Here, instead of the rough-hewn stone and bone, Nalissa fastened metal to the walls, as if this is a normal laboratory setting.

“It would’ve been easier if I killed her,” Ambra mumbles. “All it will take is someone spotting the empty doorway and this entire place will lock down.”

Gurlien inhales and, carefully, pulls the gun out of the hidden holster underneath his shirt.

“They’ll have protections,” Ambra warns.

“And all it’ll take is you distracting one of them long enough to break those,” he snips back, before the lights over them snap on.

Ambra recoils back, despite the tinted glasses, as the fluorescents hum, high pitched.

He catches her with a hand between her shoulder blades. “We got this,” he murmurs, and there are whites visible around his eyes.

But now, Ambra can feel everything.

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