Page 140 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

He startles at her touch, and she knows it’s stupid, knows it’s beyond stupid in this time. She should be healing, she should be preparing, she should be doing anything else but—

With as much passion back, he opens his mouth to hers, his lips moving against hers, settling until he sits next to her on the bed, his clothes creasing in the bedsheets. A hand brushes the side of her scalp, where the hair there is now impossible to ignore, and his other hand circling on the small of her back.

He’s careful, even so, not pressing against her wound and not bearing down against her, his restraint painted in every line of his body, every muscle in his legs and the taut line of his shoulders, but he kisses her greedily, like this too is something he missed.

Making a small noise in the back of his throat, he pulls away, and there’s a flush on top of his cheekbones, but he smiles.

“Is that what humans experience different?” he asks, and his voice is a little lower, a little huskier.

She nods, unable to speak past the beating of her heart.

He must be able to read something in her expression, in the starry awe of her eyes, and he softens, settling back on the bed, until they’re both sitting there, knees touching and heads bent close.

Gentle, he cradles her chin, like she’s the fragile breakable human and he’s the protector.

“I’ve spent the last five days talking about you to anyone who would listen,” he informs her. “About how interesting and unpredictable you are, about how much you’ve shown of me and of demons and about everything else.”

She hopes not everything, thinking of their night in Paris.

“Do you know what Chloe said to me?” he asks, still tilting her chin, his fingers warm. She doesn’t, she doesn’t think she could ever guess, but her heart flutters, completely separate from the injury. “She looked at me and said, ‘I don’t think you’ve ever talked about someone like this, what are you going to do to keep her after this is over?’”

After it is over.

Ambra can’t find the words, instead leaning upwards and kissing him again, this time slow and languorous.

But he wants her to stay after as well. He wants to still know her, when the leash is untied and she is outside of the control. When everything standing in her way of her existence is gone, when she has to answer to no one.

His hand splays on her knee, a firming grip, before he breaks the kiss again. He smiles, actually smiles, genuine and disarming, and she wants to remember that forever. Remember everything about it, every little sensation, every crease of the bedsheets where they touch, every hair out ofplace on his head, every little freckle across his cheekbones. Every nerve tying her into place, every whisper of air across her skin, even the lights in the room and the dim rumble of the outside world as it wakes for the morning.

Leaning her forehead against his, she breathes in, ignoring the pull from the injury, the skin tightening on around the wound.

“I’ll always be broken,” she mumbles, in the mad rush to make sure he understands this, understands what she is no longer capable of. “I don’t know how humans love, I only know how demons do, and I can’t…there’s no way. Not anymore.”

He nods, still keeping the contact. “Melekai explained that to me.”

“I’ll always be weird, I might not adapt well, I’ll be prickly and uncomfortable to be around.”

“I know,” he says, simple, and her heart stutters once more, at the easy acceptance and the knowledge behind it. That someone could look at all the facts of her and be okay with it.

“I—”

And in that moment, in the perfect whisper of air, in the skin touching and the prickle of awareness of her wound, the leash jerks tight, snapping her head back, away from the closeness and the comfort.

She scrabbles back, clawing at the leash, and Gurlien closes his hand over her arm and—

33

Ambra lands, butt against lush carpet, Gurlien fumbling into her, before her body snaps away across the room, breaking the contact between the two of them.

They’re in a…room? In a house? It’s unfamiliar to her, not somewhere she’s gone before, but the carpet is beautiful and gray and the wallpaper is homey, floral. It’s bright outside, almost as if the sun is setting directly out the window, golden light streaming in.

Gurlien recoils, reaching his hand for leash, and between one moment and the next, all sound falls away, all sensation of his fingers against the leash, everything, as the leash around her neck jerks her again.

She teleports, against her will, clawing at every moment, and the control spins her into….

Into a white cell.

Her feet slide beneath her against the tile and her ears pop, and she staggers. All connection to the outside world vanishes, all sensation of magic, of her powers, of anything that ties her into reality.

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