Page 58 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Ambra hugs her arms, acutely aware of the stark difference between a living and a dead body when presented with it in front of her.

There are only so many things she can say, none of them good, but she weighs them all the same. “Human experimentation.”

His head tilts, halfway between a predator sizing up the prey and a scientist looking beneath a microscope.

“I still mean you no harm, still using this place for safety and not for power,” Ambra says, keeping her voice hushed in case it spreads to the room behind her. Gurlien wouldn’t be able to hear the demon in front of her, but her words would be perfectly audible.

“Of course,” he replies neutrally, then, “can you escape?”

He means the body, the body that breathes and aches and still tastes like sleep.

“No,” she responds.

“Who did it?” he asks, still expressionless. “Who would do this, so I can avoid?”

Because he, like her, is more likely to run than fight. Despite his base of power, despite the ley line coursing through his city like an onslaught, he’d still pick fleeing over whatever happened to her.

It prickles at the edge of her eyes. “The human research College,” she says, and his face twists. “They tried many times to tie demons into human bodies, don’t fall into their traps.”

He nods, frowning, before his eyes flicker to her door. “You have one in there.”

“Oh, he’s harmless,” Ambra forces out, though her heartjumps at his implications. “He’s helping me, he’s under my protection, don’t touch him.”

“Understood.”

They stand there, in the middle of the night, before he glances away. “Looking at you is like a nightmare, don’t draw attention to my city.”

And he disappears, leaving her alone.

Ambra stares out at the hallway, as if she could will her human eyes to see where he teleported to, but there’s nothing.

Just empty air, recirculated from the building.

And she’s the nightmare.

She withdraws back into the apartment, letting the runes and wards wash over her with comfort.

Someone of her own kind can’t bear to look at her.

Whatever was done, whatever part she has yet to uncover, is so monstrous and so unnatural that even someone she considered at least partially an ally is so disgusted by her very existence.

It hurts.

It hurts viscerally, in the way that such slights never would have before. It hurts behind the breastbone, where the heart beats blood up through to the brain and fills the lungs. It hurts in the scar on her gut, in the aches in the back of her legs, in the prickles of her hair growing out.

She backs away from the door, still staring at it, into the inner circle of her wards.

The hurt burrows into her stomach, into her throat, closing it off far more effectively than Johnsin ever could, and her very fingertips tremble with it.

She’s known her own nightmare, she’s known every horrid thing done to her, every small pain and every smallbit of control. But to think, to know, that even looking at her would scare someone like that.

A lump in her throat, she turns on her heel, all but stomping back to the bed, before she climbs back into her side, pulling the blanket up over her head like it could keep out all the thoughts.

It doesn’t.

She curls up on her side, staring out at the door, as if her watch could keep another bludgeon of emotion from hitting her unaware.

Tears prickle at the corners of her eyes, but she keeps them wide open out of some sort of sullen stubbornness. Keeps them open to prove that she has this control over her body, that she is the one in charge. That despite all that had been done to her, despite all the experiments and the surgeries and the fine lines cut into the brain, she could still do this one thing.

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